Saturday, February 28, 2009
screw it
I don't especially feel like doing an entry today, so I won't. Hey, it's my blog! I probably won't update on Tuesday either because this week will be exceptionally busy for me. Next week's spring break so that's good.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Miscellaneous Jindalia
Um....so, today in Latin at the beginning of class I had the bright idea of doing a post about Horace's Ars Poetica and the oddness of reading it in the 20th century and tying in my music theory class and fun stuff like that. Five hours later as I was leaving Latin I decided I didn't want to talk about the Ars Poetica for a few days. So I'll go to my original idea - Bobby Jindal, because I am a topical person.
So Obama gave his semi-state of the union speech on Tuesday and I watched some of it. You know what to expect - everyone from Congress is there, all the cabinet members and supreme court folks and surprise guests, and they all applaud him every three lines. One girl in my dorm astutely noted that he was actually getting a lot of standing ovations too which didn't happen at the Bush speeches. The upshot is that it was very grand and he came across as an important person and you know Obama's a good speaker and can deliver a good speech.
Anyway, there's always a response to the State of the Union delivered by a member of the opposition party. In 2008 it was Kathleen Sebelius, governor of Kansas. She's a nice lady and good governor, but her response was pretty bland and forgettable as I recall. Even liberals weren't enthusiastic. But like I said, forgettable. No one besides me remembers that she even gave a response. In 2007 it was Jim Webb, senator from Virginia and real hardass, ex military guy, Scots-Irish, born fighting. His address was pretty tough and forthright and aggressively populist, talking about the greed of the rich and the suffering of the middle class. His response was actually good. He also followed George Bush who by that time was about as popular as AIDS in the USA. (Still is.) But...besides Webb, State of the Union (SOTU) responses are generally pretty forgettable and not very good. I mean, part of it is staging. The responder isn't being applauded every three lines by most of Congress. It's hard to rewrite the speech on the fly to actually be a response - I assume they're all written before the president actually gives his speech.
And in 2009 the Republicans selected a young buck named Bobby Jindal (who I like to think of as Robert Jindal - his real name is Piyush) to be the sacrificial responder. Sooo...who is Bobby Jindal? Let's go over this quickly: went to Brown, was a Rhodes Scholar, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, president of the University of Louisiana system, Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Planning and Evaluation, 2003 Republican candidate for governor (he lost), Congressman from LA-01, and finally Governor of Louisiana, elected in 2007. Oh yeah, he's 37 years old. So he's a real prodigy, flitting from one job to the next, and probably angling to be president. He's a rising star of the Republican party.
I mean, who else is there? Sarah Palin, who we all learned about. Forgettable governors like Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Um, Michael Steele? The Republicans want their own Obama. Right now it's audition time. The response was Jindal's audition.
Let's go to the videotape! Text. Starts off by talking about his own story and it's a hopeful story and all of that. It's a good story, too. Then he talks about Katrina - ruh roh. He's saying that the federal government didn't do a good job during Katrina (definitely) and tells a story about charity during that time. His point is that charity is what helps, not government. Now, couple problems here. One, that story is probably a lie. Two, the problem with Katrina was there wasn't enough government. People shouldn't have to give money to charity so New Orleans can recover. Helping New Orleans recover is the government's job. We can't ask charity to take up the slack, because charity is simply not enough. It's not powerful enough.
Jindal talks about the Republican ideas, which as best as I can tell mostly are tax cuts. One, we all know that Republicans stand for tax cuts. That's not a new idea, that's not a bold solution. Two, anyone watching this response after Obama heard Obama talking about how the stimulus bill gives 95% of Americans tax cuts. It's the largest middle class tax cut in history. And where would we be without awful examples of pork! A maglev line from LA to Vegas? Sign me up! (Perhaps some Republicans don't know that maglev trains already exist?) Volcano monitoring? Mt. St. Helens. YELLOWSTONE. Perhaps hurricane monitoring is also an outrageous example of pork...but maybe it's a public good! It is. Anyway blah blah blah, talks briefly about other things. He doesn't really go into specifics, but it's supposed to be a short speech. He talks about how Republicans need to stand for limited government.
Oh yeah, I loved that too. By now I'm convinced that there's only one Republican who as president would fight for limited government, and his name is Ron Paul. Bush greatly expanded the government. The way I see it, government wants to expand and it's hard to stop it from expanding. And plenty of Republicans are comfortable with expanding the government, seeing as how they mostly voted in lockstep for the policies Bush wanted. So yeah, don't ever believe a Republican who says he will work for limited government besides Ron Paul.
He ends on a note of hope and it's over. So let's talk about my favorite part - his speaking mannerisms. He sounded like someone in a video that plays at a museum, or a museum guide, or someone reading to elementary school children, or I dunno what - but he didn't sound like he was talking to America as adults. (Obama did.) His speaking style really was distracting and detracted from his substance (such as it was). I really thought that he would do better - he's a bright guy, a real policy wonk. But...yeah, stylistically he failed. And another thing I loved was the reaction. Fox News panned it, and every other diary on Daily Kos the next day was making fun of him. My point is his speech was bad, but it was NOT forgettable. It was epic fail. People will remember this speech, people besides me. I understand some Republicans have questioned the wisdom of even doing a response to Obama's State of the Union speeches. (Good idea - whenever McCain made a big speech after Obama during the campaign, he seemed dreadful.) I understand Rush Limbaugh praised the speech, but hardly anyone else has. (Have to throw in - I watched a couple of other Jindal interviews and he does act like a normal human in them.)
So, to go back to the rising star thing - I'm liking the theory that this was Jindal's audition to be the Republican Obama. That means the Republicans wanted the equivalent of, perhaps, Obama's 2004 keynote speech or better yet a real asskicking take no prisoners speech. Something a little mean. I don't really think Jindal's capable of doing that. I don't view him as mean, and he's not a real fighter like Jim Webb. So, it wasn't that Jindal was terrible (although I thought he did badly) it's that Jindal wasn't amazing. What does this mean? The auditions for the Republican Obama go on. Perhaps Joe the Plumber will deliver a major policy address. Or, if the Republicans want to move in the direction of sanity - heh, not worried about that yet. By now all that's left in the Republican party are bedrock conservatives. No moderation allowed. Still, though, Charlie Crist (governor of Florida) and Jon Huntsman (governor of Utah) would prove a profitable line of inquiry if Republicans continue to fail to find their Obama.
Oh hey I made it through the whole entry without once mentioning that Jindal was Ind
So Obama gave his semi-state of the union speech on Tuesday and I watched some of it. You know what to expect - everyone from Congress is there, all the cabinet members and supreme court folks and surprise guests, and they all applaud him every three lines. One girl in my dorm astutely noted that he was actually getting a lot of standing ovations too which didn't happen at the Bush speeches. The upshot is that it was very grand and he came across as an important person and you know Obama's a good speaker and can deliver a good speech.
Anyway, there's always a response to the State of the Union delivered by a member of the opposition party. In 2008 it was Kathleen Sebelius, governor of Kansas. She's a nice lady and good governor, but her response was pretty bland and forgettable as I recall. Even liberals weren't enthusiastic. But like I said, forgettable. No one besides me remembers that she even gave a response. In 2007 it was Jim Webb, senator from Virginia and real hardass, ex military guy, Scots-Irish, born fighting. His address was pretty tough and forthright and aggressively populist, talking about the greed of the rich and the suffering of the middle class. His response was actually good. He also followed George Bush who by that time was about as popular as AIDS in the USA. (Still is.) But...besides Webb, State of the Union (SOTU) responses are generally pretty forgettable and not very good. I mean, part of it is staging. The responder isn't being applauded every three lines by most of Congress. It's hard to rewrite the speech on the fly to actually be a response - I assume they're all written before the president actually gives his speech.
And in 2009 the Republicans selected a young buck named Bobby Jindal (who I like to think of as Robert Jindal - his real name is Piyush) to be the sacrificial responder. Sooo...who is Bobby Jindal? Let's go over this quickly: went to Brown, was a Rhodes Scholar, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, president of the University of Louisiana system, Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Planning and Evaluation, 2003 Republican candidate for governor (he lost), Congressman from LA-01, and finally Governor of Louisiana, elected in 2007. Oh yeah, he's 37 years old. So he's a real prodigy, flitting from one job to the next, and probably angling to be president. He's a rising star of the Republican party.
I mean, who else is there? Sarah Palin, who we all learned about. Forgettable governors like Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Um, Michael Steele? The Republicans want their own Obama. Right now it's audition time. The response was Jindal's audition.
Let's go to the videotape! Text. Starts off by talking about his own story and it's a hopeful story and all of that. It's a good story, too. Then he talks about Katrina - ruh roh. He's saying that the federal government didn't do a good job during Katrina (definitely) and tells a story about charity during that time. His point is that charity is what helps, not government. Now, couple problems here. One, that story is probably a lie. Two, the problem with Katrina was there wasn't enough government. People shouldn't have to give money to charity so New Orleans can recover. Helping New Orleans recover is the government's job. We can't ask charity to take up the slack, because charity is simply not enough. It's not powerful enough.
Jindal talks about the Republican ideas, which as best as I can tell mostly are tax cuts. One, we all know that Republicans stand for tax cuts. That's not a new idea, that's not a bold solution. Two, anyone watching this response after Obama heard Obama talking about how the stimulus bill gives 95% of Americans tax cuts. It's the largest middle class tax cut in history. And where would we be without awful examples of pork! A maglev line from LA to Vegas? Sign me up! (Perhaps some Republicans don't know that maglev trains already exist?) Volcano monitoring? Mt. St. Helens. YELLOWSTONE. Perhaps hurricane monitoring is also an outrageous example of pork...but maybe it's a public good! It is. Anyway blah blah blah, talks briefly about other things. He doesn't really go into specifics, but it's supposed to be a short speech. He talks about how Republicans need to stand for limited government.
Oh yeah, I loved that too. By now I'm convinced that there's only one Republican who as president would fight for limited government, and his name is Ron Paul. Bush greatly expanded the government. The way I see it, government wants to expand and it's hard to stop it from expanding. And plenty of Republicans are comfortable with expanding the government, seeing as how they mostly voted in lockstep for the policies Bush wanted. So yeah, don't ever believe a Republican who says he will work for limited government besides Ron Paul.
He ends on a note of hope and it's over. So let's talk about my favorite part - his speaking mannerisms. He sounded like someone in a video that plays at a museum, or a museum guide, or someone reading to elementary school children, or I dunno what - but he didn't sound like he was talking to America as adults. (Obama did.) His speaking style really was distracting and detracted from his substance (such as it was). I really thought that he would do better - he's a bright guy, a real policy wonk. But...yeah, stylistically he failed. And another thing I loved was the reaction. Fox News panned it, and every other diary on Daily Kos the next day was making fun of him. My point is his speech was bad, but it was NOT forgettable. It was epic fail. People will remember this speech, people besides me. I understand some Republicans have questioned the wisdom of even doing a response to Obama's State of the Union speeches. (Good idea - whenever McCain made a big speech after Obama during the campaign, he seemed dreadful.) I understand Rush Limbaugh praised the speech, but hardly anyone else has. (Have to throw in - I watched a couple of other Jindal interviews and he does act like a normal human in them.)
So, to go back to the rising star thing - I'm liking the theory that this was Jindal's audition to be the Republican Obama. That means the Republicans wanted the equivalent of, perhaps, Obama's 2004 keynote speech or better yet a real asskicking take no prisoners speech. Something a little mean. I don't really think Jindal's capable of doing that. I don't view him as mean, and he's not a real fighter like Jim Webb. So, it wasn't that Jindal was terrible (although I thought he did badly) it's that Jindal wasn't amazing. What does this mean? The auditions for the Republican Obama go on. Perhaps Joe the Plumber will deliver a major policy address. Or, if the Republicans want to move in the direction of sanity - heh, not worried about that yet. By now all that's left in the Republican party are bedrock conservatives. No moderation allowed. Still, though, Charlie Crist (governor of Florida) and Jon Huntsman (governor of Utah) would prove a profitable line of inquiry if Republicans continue to fail to find their Obama.
Oh hey I made it through the whole entry without once mentioning that Jindal was Ind
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Ol' Strom
Today I kick off a 365-day tribute to the life of Strom Thurmond, South Carolina's former very very senior senator. (The closeness in appearance of the two words before this parenthetical is not a coincidence.)
Anyway, where to begin? We all know the highlights of Thurmond's life: his Dixiecrat presidential campaign in 1948, before my parents were born, his election to the Senate as a writein candidate (the only one ever), his party switch in 1964, his 24 hour filibuster in 1957 against a civil rights bill, his extreme longevity.
Boring early life stuff: born on Dec 5, 2004, in Edgefield, SC, also home of Preston Brooks, the man who was a little not fond of Charles Sumner. Attorney, SC Senate member, WWII veteran, governor, progressive for the time, but flaming racist.
He was elected to the Senate in 1954 and resigned in 1956, then won the special election caused by his vacancy. When first elected he pledged to face a contested primary (the one in 1956). He was a Democrat; they all were in the South. Thurmond became a Republican in 1964, one of the first Democrats to switch parties. I view this as an important milestone - he switched and survived. He was not the last to do this, either - this move foreshadowed many similar moves all across the South, until the time came when the white South was mostly Republican. In retrospect, the more interesting course was followed by Fritz Hollings, who remained a Democrat - but that is a topic for another day!
I understand the former Dixiecrat was the first Southern senator to hire black staffers. Not only that - he had an illegitimate child with a black woman as a young man. NB that this was not uncommon in the South (especially antebellum) but it was death to a political career. Anyway, time went on, great gobs of time. Ol' Strom married in 1968 a former South Carolina beauty queen (age 23) and fathered his first (legitimate!) child at age 67. Ol' Strom kept his pecker up.
Strom, if you're wondering, was his mom's maiden name. Anyway, his Senate career is mostly a wasteland after the 60s. What is there to be said? He was chairman of Judiciary in the 80s and of Armed Services in the 90s - now when he was chairman in the 90s he was also in the 90s. The Senate lives and dies by the seniority system, but it's my understanding that even some Republicans were unhappy with his chairmanship because he was so old. He left the chairmanship in 1999. He did not seek reelection in 2002.
What did Thurmond do, exactly? I've come to the conclusion that what he mostly did in the Senate was Constituent Service. His staff was excellent: each morning they would comb the SC newspapers for obituaries, wedding announcements, graduation lists in spring, etc, and Thurmond would call a lot of these people personally. Black, white, it didn't matter. The folks of South Carolina knew that if they needed government help, Strom Thurmond was there. Strom Thurmond got helicopters to fly over town parades and lobbied the Armed Forces to feed the members of the military more South Carolina peaches. There are many stories like those. The upshot of this is that everyone in SC had met or been helped by Thurmond or knew someone who had. That's why he kept winning reelection even when he was decrepit and not all there. By the end of his life, practically everything in the state was named after him. Well - maybe not practically everything, but he has his own lake and high school, various statues, buildings on college campuses.
The end of Thurmond's Senate career brought him back into the spotlight - two events mostly. One was the 50-50 Senate at the time (early 2001) - Thurmond was 98 and ailing and SC had a Democratic governor. There was kind of a Thurmond death watch at the time. A reasonable question might be, how can a 98 year old senator function? His staff: his chief of staff was the one who told him how to vote. No joke. Jim Jeffords switched away from the Republicans in June 2001, so the Senate was 51-49 Democratic after that and the deathwatch ended. The other event was his 100th birthday party, at which Trent Lott declared that if the rest of the nation had voted Dixiecrat in 1948, we wouldn't have had all those problems since. Well bless his heart. Lott was the Republican majority leader in the Senate at the time. He wasn't the majority leader too much longer, although after the 06 election he became minority whip (really!) and resigned in 2007. Thurmond died shortly after he left the Senate, in 2003 at age 100.
Thurmond was also famous for loving the ladies. See his beauty queen marriage. He also always talked about how much he loved ladies, and how it was good for the Senate to have more ladies and so on. He also groped them too, I understand. He kept his pecker up. What I'm getting at is that Thurmond's behavior towards women would be labeled sexual harassment if done by someone who wasn't really old and the very very senior senator of South Carolina. And rightly so, too! It totally was sexual harassment. Don't be in the elevator alone with Strom Thurmond. And yet he totally got away with it. It's reprehensible but a little impressive. Well bless his heart.
An interesting hypothetical: it's 1996, you're living in SC, Thurmond's up for reelection, he's 93, would you vote for him? I have a hard time answering that question. Yes he did all that bad stuff and it sucked. Yes he's senile. But...all that pork. He takes care of SC. He'd probably die if not reelected (not a joke). I know my parents would not vote for him (93???) but I'm a bit undecided. I'd probably vote for him just so I could say I voted for a Republican senator. Thurmond won reelection 53-44%, his narrowest Senate election since...ever, although 1978 was also kinda close. And that reelection margin really is pretty small for a legend like Strom Thurmond. Legend? Yes, absolutely - just because he was so damn old. And let me make this clear - he was around so long that people kinda forgave his sins. Let him be! He's old! You see a bit of this happening now with Ted Kennedy, I think - yeah, he did some bad things, but he's old and will die soon.
Heh, die soon - the graveyards of South Carolina are full of people waiting for the death of Strom Thurmond. Have 365 days elapsed? Yes, good, let us never speak of Thurmond again.
Anyway, where to begin? We all know the highlights of Thurmond's life: his Dixiecrat presidential campaign in 1948, before my parents were born, his election to the Senate as a writein candidate (the only one ever), his party switch in 1964, his 24 hour filibuster in 1957 against a civil rights bill, his extreme longevity.
Boring early life stuff: born on Dec 5, 2004, in Edgefield, SC, also home of Preston Brooks, the man who was a little not fond of Charles Sumner. Attorney, SC Senate member, WWII veteran, governor, progressive for the time, but flaming racist.
He was elected to the Senate in 1954 and resigned in 1956, then won the special election caused by his vacancy. When first elected he pledged to face a contested primary (the one in 1956). He was a Democrat; they all were in the South. Thurmond became a Republican in 1964, one of the first Democrats to switch parties. I view this as an important milestone - he switched and survived. He was not the last to do this, either - this move foreshadowed many similar moves all across the South, until the time came when the white South was mostly Republican. In retrospect, the more interesting course was followed by Fritz Hollings, who remained a Democrat - but that is a topic for another day!
I understand the former Dixiecrat was the first Southern senator to hire black staffers. Not only that - he had an illegitimate child with a black woman as a young man. NB that this was not uncommon in the South (especially antebellum) but it was death to a political career. Anyway, time went on, great gobs of time. Ol' Strom married in 1968 a former South Carolina beauty queen (age 23) and fathered his first (legitimate!) child at age 67. Ol' Strom kept his pecker up.
Strom, if you're wondering, was his mom's maiden name. Anyway, his Senate career is mostly a wasteland after the 60s. What is there to be said? He was chairman of Judiciary in the 80s and of Armed Services in the 90s - now when he was chairman in the 90s he was also in the 90s. The Senate lives and dies by the seniority system, but it's my understanding that even some Republicans were unhappy with his chairmanship because he was so old. He left the chairmanship in 1999. He did not seek reelection in 2002.
What did Thurmond do, exactly? I've come to the conclusion that what he mostly did in the Senate was Constituent Service. His staff was excellent: each morning they would comb the SC newspapers for obituaries, wedding announcements, graduation lists in spring, etc, and Thurmond would call a lot of these people personally. Black, white, it didn't matter. The folks of South Carolina knew that if they needed government help, Strom Thurmond was there. Strom Thurmond got helicopters to fly over town parades and lobbied the Armed Forces to feed the members of the military more South Carolina peaches. There are many stories like those. The upshot of this is that everyone in SC had met or been helped by Thurmond or knew someone who had. That's why he kept winning reelection even when he was decrepit and not all there. By the end of his life, practically everything in the state was named after him. Well - maybe not practically everything, but he has his own lake and high school, various statues, buildings on college campuses.
The end of Thurmond's Senate career brought him back into the spotlight - two events mostly. One was the 50-50 Senate at the time (early 2001) - Thurmond was 98 and ailing and SC had a Democratic governor. There was kind of a Thurmond death watch at the time. A reasonable question might be, how can a 98 year old senator function? His staff: his chief of staff was the one who told him how to vote. No joke. Jim Jeffords switched away from the Republicans in June 2001, so the Senate was 51-49 Democratic after that and the deathwatch ended. The other event was his 100th birthday party, at which Trent Lott declared that if the rest of the nation had voted Dixiecrat in 1948, we wouldn't have had all those problems since. Well bless his heart. Lott was the Republican majority leader in the Senate at the time. He wasn't the majority leader too much longer, although after the 06 election he became minority whip (really!) and resigned in 2007. Thurmond died shortly after he left the Senate, in 2003 at age 100.
Thurmond was also famous for loving the ladies. See his beauty queen marriage. He also always talked about how much he loved ladies, and how it was good for the Senate to have more ladies and so on. He also groped them too, I understand. He kept his pecker up. What I'm getting at is that Thurmond's behavior towards women would be labeled sexual harassment if done by someone who wasn't really old and the very very senior senator of South Carolina. And rightly so, too! It totally was sexual harassment. Don't be in the elevator alone with Strom Thurmond. And yet he totally got away with it. It's reprehensible but a little impressive. Well bless his heart.
An interesting hypothetical: it's 1996, you're living in SC, Thurmond's up for reelection, he's 93, would you vote for him? I have a hard time answering that question. Yes he did all that bad stuff and it sucked. Yes he's senile. But...all that pork. He takes care of SC. He'd probably die if not reelected (not a joke). I know my parents would not vote for him (93???) but I'm a bit undecided. I'd probably vote for him just so I could say I voted for a Republican senator. Thurmond won reelection 53-44%, his narrowest Senate election since...ever, although 1978 was also kinda close. And that reelection margin really is pretty small for a legend like Strom Thurmond. Legend? Yes, absolutely - just because he was so damn old. And let me make this clear - he was around so long that people kinda forgave his sins. Let him be! He's old! You see a bit of this happening now with Ted Kennedy, I think - yeah, he did some bad things, but he's old and will die soon.
Heh, die soon - the graveyards of South Carolina are full of people waiting for the death of Strom Thurmond. Have 365 days elapsed? Yes, good, let us never speak of Thurmond again.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Urban Prairie
Alright okay yes yes I said I was going to write a post about Fritz Hollings. Let's take a look at his political career:
Born 1922
Elected to SC House of Representatives, 1948
Elected Lieutenant Governor of SC in 1954
Elected Governor in 1958
Governor of South Carolina, 1959-1963
Senator from South Carolina, 1966-2005
Did not seek reelection in 2004
Is not yet dead
He's been around. Unfortunately, he's been around way too long for one entry to be satisfactory! Also I didn't want to write a comprehensive entry on him that badly. All I want to do is throw up some Hollings quotes and talk about his positions on trade and the Pirates of the Intertubes and copyright. Ugh. So screw Fritz Hollings! Let's talk about what I was reading about last night...Detroit.
A couple years ago I read a book called Inside USA by John Gunther. It was written in the late 1940s and describes a vastly different American than ours. Back then, those wonderful Rust Belt cities stood proud and tall. The South was like a third world country in some places. Texas was growing (and Texans were ferociously proud of Texas then, too) but all the major cities were much smaller. Houston had less than 400,000 people. In 1950 the census would record Detroit with 1.8 million people, its most ever then and now.
What happened? The answers are easy and true. Detroit made cars, and cars enabled people to escape past the city limits. (The metro area, unlike Detroit, has not declined in population.) A lot of black folks moved to the city to work at auto factories. Detroit had a lot of racial tension, most dramatically illustrated in the 1967 riot. The 1970s contained oil shocks and the coming of the Japanese auto industry. Ever since the 1970s Detroit's been dying. It's been dying my whole life.
And today! Detroit: where the Detroit Lions became the first NFL team to go 0-16 in a season. The whole Kwame Kilpatrick scandal - a pretty lurid odyssey, full of sex and corruption. Where urban prairie exists. You look at satellite photos: it's not rare to see blocks of Detroit that are mostly green. The buildings are gone, so the grass can grow again. Some buildings aren't gone, they're abandoned.
That's what strikes me: the empty buildings. How proud they once were! What dreams occurred to the people who once lived and worked in them! A lot of these abandoned buildings are heavily graffitied. Sometimes drug dealers live in them, sometimes more harmless squatters, sometimes pigeons, covering the floors with pigeon shit.
Another thing: These abandoned buildings include pretty important and beautiful buildings of the time. There's a lot of grand architecture in Detroit. There are whole skyscrapers abandoned, leaving Detroit at night looking like a gappy smile, or so I have heard. A lot of these buildings are pretty beautiful even today. Houston's a very new city, we know that. And a place like York is a very old city. But by American standards Detroit is pretty old.
I guess the building I want to emphasize the most is the poor Michigan Central Station. It is this building that makes me painfully wish I could travel in time to 1920 or even 1955 when people trod its steps. Look at these photos. It brings to mind the surreal scene from Going Postal when Moist von Lipwig hallucinates the old decrepit post office as a place of bustling activity. Poor Detroit.
I must also mention another piece of beautiful architecture, not in Detroit - the Buffalo City Hall. Buffalo was always smaller than Detroit but similar situation - steel industry collapsed, now there's urban prairie.
The obvious question is: what now for Detroit? It's been dying for so long. It's still dying. The car industry is still dying, and sadly it's still pretty important to Detroit. You all know about their bailouts. Detroit needs new blood, but who wants to relocate there? One thing they tried was casinos. People aren't going to casinos so much these days. (Not to go off on a tangent, but I've heard casinos proposed for Galveston.) Beyond that...I have no answer. None at all. In fact, the only Rust Belt city that I can think of that did make the transition to a different economy is Pittsburgh: formerly a steel town, now a high-tech center. The presence of important universities there helps. Detroit probably has some universities that I can't think of, but Michigan is in Ann Arbor. No, the future should perhaps look more like Eastern Germany after 1989 or Youngstown today: downsizing.
That's a little misleading: Detroit's lost half of its population since 1950. It's involuntarily downsized. Something similar happened with Youngstown, but instead of trying to think up new grand schemes to attract businesses (these don't work well enough) - it has accepted that it will be smaller than it once was. You can read about it here. I understand Youngstown is being closely watched by other old Midwest, Rust Belt cities.
I've gotta say this: reading about Detroit kind of reminds me of watching Michael Moore's Roger & Me. Yeah, I know, Moore is kinda truthy in the film. But he's right about the larger point: Flint was once a nice place to live, and now it's Flint. The film concerns Flint's efforts to diversify beyond the auto industry - some efforts are pretty funny, and they mostly fail. And so with Detroit.
Another thought: Reading about Detroit is like reading some postapocalyptic novel where the unfortunate survivors come across some once great city, and it is in ruins. Detroit's not that far gone in some places. And in other places it is.
The most interesting article I read about Detroit last night is from, oddly enough, the Weekly Standard. That's one of those conservative ideas magazines, small in size and circulation, like the American Spectator or National Review. The liberal analogues would be the Nation or Mother Jones or the Progressive. Anyway, the Weekly Standard published an absolutely top-flight article on Detroit, which I am proud to link to here. But a warning: it's really, really long. It took me 25 or 30 minutes to read. I was reading it slowly to absorb the article, and I succeeded.
Other links:
Can't end this post without mentioning Hudson's Department Store. I really wish I could see that back in the 1950s. It's gone now.
detroitfunk: chronicling the abandoned buildings and decay of Detroit. This blog probably contains pictures of all the old great buildings of Detroit, and I plan to look at every archived post eventually.
The Urbanophile: Discussion of Midwest cities and what is to be done with them.
Born 1922
Elected to SC House of Representatives, 1948
Elected Lieutenant Governor of SC in 1954
Elected Governor in 1958
Governor of South Carolina, 1959-1963
Senator from South Carolina, 1966-2005
Did not seek reelection in 2004
Is not yet dead
He's been around. Unfortunately, he's been around way too long for one entry to be satisfactory! Also I didn't want to write a comprehensive entry on him that badly. All I want to do is throw up some Hollings quotes and talk about his positions on trade and the Pirates of the Intertubes and copyright. Ugh. So screw Fritz Hollings! Let's talk about what I was reading about last night...Detroit.
A couple years ago I read a book called Inside USA by John Gunther. It was written in the late 1940s and describes a vastly different American than ours. Back then, those wonderful Rust Belt cities stood proud and tall. The South was like a third world country in some places. Texas was growing (and Texans were ferociously proud of Texas then, too) but all the major cities were much smaller. Houston had less than 400,000 people. In 1950 the census would record Detroit with 1.8 million people, its most ever then and now.
What happened? The answers are easy and true. Detroit made cars, and cars enabled people to escape past the city limits. (The metro area, unlike Detroit, has not declined in population.) A lot of black folks moved to the city to work at auto factories. Detroit had a lot of racial tension, most dramatically illustrated in the 1967 riot. The 1970s contained oil shocks and the coming of the Japanese auto industry. Ever since the 1970s Detroit's been dying. It's been dying my whole life.
And today! Detroit: where the Detroit Lions became the first NFL team to go 0-16 in a season. The whole Kwame Kilpatrick scandal - a pretty lurid odyssey, full of sex and corruption. Where urban prairie exists. You look at satellite photos: it's not rare to see blocks of Detroit that are mostly green. The buildings are gone, so the grass can grow again. Some buildings aren't gone, they're abandoned.
That's what strikes me: the empty buildings. How proud they once were! What dreams occurred to the people who once lived and worked in them! A lot of these abandoned buildings are heavily graffitied. Sometimes drug dealers live in them, sometimes more harmless squatters, sometimes pigeons, covering the floors with pigeon shit.
Another thing: These abandoned buildings include pretty important and beautiful buildings of the time. There's a lot of grand architecture in Detroit. There are whole skyscrapers abandoned, leaving Detroit at night looking like a gappy smile, or so I have heard. A lot of these buildings are pretty beautiful even today. Houston's a very new city, we know that. And a place like York is a very old city. But by American standards Detroit is pretty old.
I guess the building I want to emphasize the most is the poor Michigan Central Station. It is this building that makes me painfully wish I could travel in time to 1920 or even 1955 when people trod its steps. Look at these photos. It brings to mind the surreal scene from Going Postal when Moist von Lipwig hallucinates the old decrepit post office as a place of bustling activity. Poor Detroit.
I must also mention another piece of beautiful architecture, not in Detroit - the Buffalo City Hall. Buffalo was always smaller than Detroit but similar situation - steel industry collapsed, now there's urban prairie.
The obvious question is: what now for Detroit? It's been dying for so long. It's still dying. The car industry is still dying, and sadly it's still pretty important to Detroit. You all know about their bailouts. Detroit needs new blood, but who wants to relocate there? One thing they tried was casinos. People aren't going to casinos so much these days. (Not to go off on a tangent, but I've heard casinos proposed for Galveston.) Beyond that...I have no answer. None at all. In fact, the only Rust Belt city that I can think of that did make the transition to a different economy is Pittsburgh: formerly a steel town, now a high-tech center. The presence of important universities there helps. Detroit probably has some universities that I can't think of, but Michigan is in Ann Arbor. No, the future should perhaps look more like Eastern Germany after 1989 or Youngstown today: downsizing.
That's a little misleading: Detroit's lost half of its population since 1950. It's involuntarily downsized. Something similar happened with Youngstown, but instead of trying to think up new grand schemes to attract businesses (these don't work well enough) - it has accepted that it will be smaller than it once was. You can read about it here. I understand Youngstown is being closely watched by other old Midwest, Rust Belt cities.
I've gotta say this: reading about Detroit kind of reminds me of watching Michael Moore's Roger & Me. Yeah, I know, Moore is kinda truthy in the film. But he's right about the larger point: Flint was once a nice place to live, and now it's Flint. The film concerns Flint's efforts to diversify beyond the auto industry - some efforts are pretty funny, and they mostly fail. And so with Detroit.
Another thought: Reading about Detroit is like reading some postapocalyptic novel where the unfortunate survivors come across some once great city, and it is in ruins. Detroit's not that far gone in some places. And in other places it is.
The most interesting article I read about Detroit last night is from, oddly enough, the Weekly Standard. That's one of those conservative ideas magazines, small in size and circulation, like the American Spectator or National Review. The liberal analogues would be the Nation or Mother Jones or the Progressive. Anyway, the Weekly Standard published an absolutely top-flight article on Detroit, which I am proud to link to here. But a warning: it's really, really long. It took me 25 or 30 minutes to read. I was reading it slowly to absorb the article, and I succeeded.
Other links:
Can't end this post without mentioning Hudson's Department Store. I really wish I could see that back in the 1950s. It's gone now.
detroitfunk: chronicling the abandoned buildings and decay of Detroit. This blog probably contains pictures of all the old great buildings of Detroit, and I plan to look at every archived post eventually.
The Urbanophile: Discussion of Midwest cities and what is to be done with them.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Progressive divides and all that
I don't feel nearly as agitated on this subject as I did several days ago, but Nate Silver had a good post up on the two types of progressives: the rational and radical. What's the difference? Perhaps a good illustration was in the Democratic primary process: Obama the rational and Edwards the radical. That's John not Chet. Obama's rhetoric is pretty progressive, but he couches it in bipartisan terms. Edwards - I followed his campaign back in Iowa, and his rhetoric was Fight Fight Fight. Fight what? Corporate power in particular. The Republicans. Iraq. (Hillary's a stranger case - she sort of ended up with fighting rhetoric, but I'd put her in the rational progressive camp. She can be pretty anti-progressive too. But let's ignore her for now and...) So Iowa provided a pretty clear-cut test of whose rhetoric was more appealing. Seems people weren't hungering for the fighting rhetoric. Now, the Edwards supporters will tell you that Edwards didn't get nearly as much media attention as Obama and Clinton. That's probably true on a nationwide level, although he got more attention than say Dodd Biden Richardson. I don't really buy that argument in Iowa though, because Edwards, like the other contenders, spent quite a lot of time in Iowa. Iowans could have seen him no problem. A lot did. Many liked him! But more liked Obama.
Anyway, we sure found out quite a bit about John Edwards as time went on. That was pretty crazy. Found out quite a bit about Obama too - cool under fire, that's for sure. But I'm ignoring my chosen topic to recount old battles. Now Obama's president and there are new battles to be fought!
The real reason I chose this topic is because I'm a bit unsure of what camp I fall into. By temperament, by instinct, I'm in the Rational camp. But, yanno, I hear all these outrageous stories about the stupidity of the economy. And I grow convinced that Obama needs to listen more to folks who were right, and less to folks like Summers and Geithner. More Roubini, more Krugman. I doubt you can call them radical progressives, but the radical progressives praise them. Rational progressives tend to favor incremental change. That's usually fine, but these are unusual times, and we need big changes. Can Obama deliver?
The stimulus was a good start, I think. I'm happy that it passed. The bailouts of the banking and auto industries - I think we need to be very careful with those. There's a pretty clearcut difference here: radical progressives oppose the bailouts, rational progressives support them. I support them too - whatever preserves jobs - but I don't want the money to go to those executives who got us in the mess. The people whining about how $500,000 isn't nearly a large enough salary. wtf wtf wtf, I was under the impression that was a really great salary. So I get angry when I hear about things like that, and I get radical.
Radical progressives do have the strange tendency of pissing me off though. They tend to be ideologues, and I'm uncomfortable with ideologues. Dick Cheney's an ideologue, and look how awful he was. Why? No retreat, no surrender. Ideologues never retreat, they never surrender, and that's just silly sometimes. Again, I turn to Frank Church and am reminded that compromise is not a dirty word. You just have to be very careful in your compromise and make sure that you wind up with as good a deal as you can. Politics is the art of the possible.
And as for Church, he started off as a pretty moderate Democrat, but his record grew increasingly liberal. He staunchly supported McGovern in 1972 for instance, and McGovern was about as popular as AIDS in Idaho. My point is that I think Church became more radical as time went on. And that's not popular in a state that became more reactionary as time went on.
So yeah, summary: Radicals, rationals, I'm a rational progressive, but the deeds of rational progressives piss me off and the rhetoric of radical progressives pisses me off. As for the deeds of radical progressives - who knows, there aren't many in power. Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold maybe. The rhetoric of rational progressives pleases me, but this entry doesn't. I was too incoherent. Also not in the mood for writing a blog entry: music theory was long today, I did a lot of work (but not nearly enough) for the Horace seminar today, and I also performed in an octet.
Coming up on Saturday: A tribute to Foghorn "Fritz Hollings" Leghorn.
Anyway, we sure found out quite a bit about John Edwards as time went on. That was pretty crazy. Found out quite a bit about Obama too - cool under fire, that's for sure. But I'm ignoring my chosen topic to recount old battles. Now Obama's president and there are new battles to be fought!
The real reason I chose this topic is because I'm a bit unsure of what camp I fall into. By temperament, by instinct, I'm in the Rational camp. But, yanno, I hear all these outrageous stories about the stupidity of the economy. And I grow convinced that Obama needs to listen more to folks who were right, and less to folks like Summers and Geithner. More Roubini, more Krugman. I doubt you can call them radical progressives, but the radical progressives praise them. Rational progressives tend to favor incremental change. That's usually fine, but these are unusual times, and we need big changes. Can Obama deliver?
The stimulus was a good start, I think. I'm happy that it passed. The bailouts of the banking and auto industries - I think we need to be very careful with those. There's a pretty clearcut difference here: radical progressives oppose the bailouts, rational progressives support them. I support them too - whatever preserves jobs - but I don't want the money to go to those executives who got us in the mess. The people whining about how $500,000 isn't nearly a large enough salary. wtf wtf wtf, I was under the impression that was a really great salary. So I get angry when I hear about things like that, and I get radical.
Radical progressives do have the strange tendency of pissing me off though. They tend to be ideologues, and I'm uncomfortable with ideologues. Dick Cheney's an ideologue, and look how awful he was. Why? No retreat, no surrender. Ideologues never retreat, they never surrender, and that's just silly sometimes. Again, I turn to Frank Church and am reminded that compromise is not a dirty word. You just have to be very careful in your compromise and make sure that you wind up with as good a deal as you can. Politics is the art of the possible.
And as for Church, he started off as a pretty moderate Democrat, but his record grew increasingly liberal. He staunchly supported McGovern in 1972 for instance, and McGovern was about as popular as AIDS in Idaho. My point is that I think Church became more radical as time went on. And that's not popular in a state that became more reactionary as time went on.
So yeah, summary: Radicals, rationals, I'm a rational progressive, but the deeds of rational progressives piss me off and the rhetoric of radical progressives pisses me off. As for the deeds of radical progressives - who knows, there aren't many in power. Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold maybe. The rhetoric of rational progressives pleases me, but this entry doesn't. I was too incoherent. Also not in the mood for writing a blog entry: music theory was long today, I did a lot of work (but not nearly enough) for the Horace seminar today, and I also performed in an octet.
Coming up on Saturday: A tribute to Foghorn "Fritz Hollings" Leghorn.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
blah blah blah
I was meaning to update yesterday, then today, but I haven't felt like finishing the post that I started yesterday - or doing much of anything, really. I can be good at avoiding homework sometimes. :(
Oh yeah, this ad made me laugh. Enjoi.
Oh yeah, this ad made me laugh. Enjoi.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
The Curious Case of Chet Edwards
I don't really have a terribly profound topic in mind for today, so perhaps it would be fun to recount the (ongoing) story of Chet Edwards, Texas Democrat. So, Texas used to be a really Democratic state, like the rest of the Solid South. I've been looking into party changes, and it seems like states change their presidential voting patterns before senators and representatives, and those before state-level, and once you go further down politics becomes increasingly nonpartisan. The point being that Texas voted Republican on the presidential level as far back as 1952. It elected its first Republican senator, John Tower, back in 1961. It elected its first Republican representatives around the same time. First Republican governor was Bill Clements, elected in 1978. The Republicans captured the state Senate in I believe 1998, and the state House in 2002.
You get the idea. The take-home point is that Democrats in the legislature controlled redistricting for a while, until the really crazy 2003 middecade redistricting. But before then, they carefully gerrymandered the seats so that most representatives would be Democrats. That grew harder and harder as time went by, and the Texas Democrats won their elections by increasingly narrow margins.
Chet Edwards was a state senator first elected to the House in 1990, from a district that I believe was centered on Waco - ancestrally Democratic territory, but who thinks of Waco as Democratic now? He won an open seat with 53%. Now, his district also contained Fort Hood, and he became a member of the Armed Services committee, and later Appropriations and Budget. An important reason he kept on winning, as the 90s went on and we met George W. Bush, was his attention to his district - his work for veterans and funding of other local projects. He gained seniority.
But back in Texas, Republicans grew steadily more powerful. The Democrats kept hold of the state House, though. Redistricting is generally done every 10 years, between the -00 and -02 elections (after the census). So in 2001-02, the Democrats drew their map, which (naturally) preserved all those Democratic incumbents. Their map won out in the inevitable court battle. But in 2002, with a Texas President in the White House and his approval ratings naturally very high in his home state, the Democrats lost control of the state House. Tom Craddick became the new Speaker, and Tom DeLay wanted to see more Republicans from Texas in Congress. So they decided to draw up a new map ---
now of course the Democrats in the legislature hadn't lost their balls or anything like that. So they decamped to Oklahoma, depriving the legislature of a quorum. But, yeah, the new redistricting map passed eventually. I think police were involved with the rounding up of the Democrats. Pretty wild stuff. So, new map: what DeLay and Craddick wanted to do was eliminate the white Democrats in particular. How? Slicing up their old districts. Make them run in a district that contained 30% of the old district. Pack the minorities more tightly into minority districts. This plan targeted nine Democrats: Max Sandlin, Jim Turner, Ralph Hall, Nick Lampson, Chet Edwards, Charlie Stenholm, Martin Frost, Lloyd Doggett, Chris Bell.
Sandlin lost in 2004. Turner retired. Hall converted into a Republican - not much of a stretch, he was pretty conservative and an outlier in the House. He's still in the House today. Lampson used to represent Beaumont, and we know what happened to him. Stenholm and Frost, both first elected in 1978, lost in 2004 as well. Doggett is a real ballsy Democrat, a real kickass Texas liberal, who represented an Austin district. You know Austin, and you understand that DeLay and Craddick split Austin into 3 districts to dilute its Democratic power. Two districts were designed to be Republican (and they are), the third was Democratic - and stretched all the way to McAllen. The point was that the district was supposed to elect a Hispanic. But Doggett fought, dammit, and he won the primary and the general. The district was changed in court, and is now more compact, and Doggett still represents it. Chris Bell - something similar, his old district was torn up and he decided to run in a majority black district. He lost the primary. Oh yeah, and Gene Green - not targeted by DeLay, he's white but represents a Hispanic majority district.
But, yeah, Doggett won reelection in a Democratic district. For him, the hard part was winning the primary. For Chet Edwards, this wasn't so true. Now Chet's margins were kind of small by now. In 2000 he won with 55%, in 2002 he won with 52%. He chose to run in the new District 17, which contains Waco (the nucleus of his old district), but new territory as well: Fort Worth exurbs, Bryan and College Station. It also contained the town of Crawford, which sounds familiar for some reason. These aren't exactly Democratic strongholds, to put it mildly.
Now, y'all know (or can guess) what happened to Edwards: He WON! Bush also won the district, 70-30. So the question naturally arises: How in the holy hell did Edwards hold on? Here's why, best as I can tell: Attention to the district, like I said. Now, DeLay knew Edwards was popular with veterans, so he removed Fort Hood from the district, but the district still contained people who worked there. Waco - Edwards was from there. The pork - Edwards funded lots of projects in the district. A&M - Edwards is an Aggie and unfailingly mentioned that on his television ads. The opponent - a pretty mean person, extreme for a Republican, a real partisan. Edwards won 51-47.
2006, Edwards wins by 18 points or so. Strong Democratic year, too - that helped. 2008 was a more interesting year: Edwards did something pretty significant in the Texas Democratic primary. He endorsed Barack Obama before the primary. And something even more interesting happened in the coming months - Nancy Pelosi said Chet Edwards was her choice for Obama's vice president.
This is pretty funny, because the liberal netroots strongly supported an Obama/Edwards ticket. It's just that Chet was the wrong Edwards. Seems there was another prominent politician by the last name Edwards. Whatever happened to him, anyway? Would Chet Edwards have been a good VP for Obama? It would have been interesting - I really like the guy (as you can tell from the existence of this entry), but he is pretty moderate. Yanno, voted for the Iraq war. Now, yeah, he's in a very Republican district, so I forgive him for his votes. I want him in Congress. But Obama probably should have picked someone with a more progressive record than Chet Edwards, and so he did. I understand that Obama's VP choosing team vetted Chet, but I'm not so sure how serious the vetting was. They probably did any vetting out of courtesy to Pelosi.
Of course, that other Edwards kinda killed any chance of Chet Edwards being the VP nominee. You can imagine the undecided voter: "Why is that nice Muslim man running with that $400 haircut bastard who cheated on his cancerwife?" After the 2008 election (Edwards won reelection by 8 points or so) apparently Edwards was a contender to become secretary of veterans' affairs. He would have been damn good. (Obama chose Eric Shinseki instead.)
I was thinking about the Texas governor and senate races recently, and Chet Edwards is probably the best candidate possible. He fights and he wins. He won't run for governor or senate in 2010, I think, but maybe he'll run someday.
Anyway, that's a lot of rambling. I'm probably going to do an entry on another odd politician who I've been reading up on - Fritz Hollings. Chet Edwards - I admire him. Hollings - he can make me go "hell yeah" or "fuck you" - he's an odd one. He also has an accent remarkably like (but thicker than) Foghorn Leghorn. Also, I've gotta write an entry on the two types of progressives. If I had posted this on Sunday, I would have wrote that entry today.
You get the idea. The take-home point is that Democrats in the legislature controlled redistricting for a while, until the really crazy 2003 middecade redistricting. But before then, they carefully gerrymandered the seats so that most representatives would be Democrats. That grew harder and harder as time went by, and the Texas Democrats won their elections by increasingly narrow margins.
Chet Edwards was a state senator first elected to the House in 1990, from a district that I believe was centered on Waco - ancestrally Democratic territory, but who thinks of Waco as Democratic now? He won an open seat with 53%. Now, his district also contained Fort Hood, and he became a member of the Armed Services committee, and later Appropriations and Budget. An important reason he kept on winning, as the 90s went on and we met George W. Bush, was his attention to his district - his work for veterans and funding of other local projects. He gained seniority.
But back in Texas, Republicans grew steadily more powerful. The Democrats kept hold of the state House, though. Redistricting is generally done every 10 years, between the -00 and -02 elections (after the census). So in 2001-02, the Democrats drew their map, which (naturally) preserved all those Democratic incumbents. Their map won out in the inevitable court battle. But in 2002, with a Texas President in the White House and his approval ratings naturally very high in his home state, the Democrats lost control of the state House. Tom Craddick became the new Speaker, and Tom DeLay wanted to see more Republicans from Texas in Congress. So they decided to draw up a new map ---
now of course the Democrats in the legislature hadn't lost their balls or anything like that. So they decamped to Oklahoma, depriving the legislature of a quorum. But, yeah, the new redistricting map passed eventually. I think police were involved with the rounding up of the Democrats. Pretty wild stuff. So, new map: what DeLay and Craddick wanted to do was eliminate the white Democrats in particular. How? Slicing up their old districts. Make them run in a district that contained 30% of the old district. Pack the minorities more tightly into minority districts. This plan targeted nine Democrats: Max Sandlin, Jim Turner, Ralph Hall, Nick Lampson, Chet Edwards, Charlie Stenholm, Martin Frost, Lloyd Doggett, Chris Bell.
Sandlin lost in 2004. Turner retired. Hall converted into a Republican - not much of a stretch, he was pretty conservative and an outlier in the House. He's still in the House today. Lampson used to represent Beaumont, and we know what happened to him. Stenholm and Frost, both first elected in 1978, lost in 2004 as well. Doggett is a real ballsy Democrat, a real kickass Texas liberal, who represented an Austin district. You know Austin, and you understand that DeLay and Craddick split Austin into 3 districts to dilute its Democratic power. Two districts were designed to be Republican (and they are), the third was Democratic - and stretched all the way to McAllen. The point was that the district was supposed to elect a Hispanic. But Doggett fought, dammit, and he won the primary and the general. The district was changed in court, and is now more compact, and Doggett still represents it. Chris Bell - something similar, his old district was torn up and he decided to run in a majority black district. He lost the primary. Oh yeah, and Gene Green - not targeted by DeLay, he's white but represents a Hispanic majority district.
But, yeah, Doggett won reelection in a Democratic district. For him, the hard part was winning the primary. For Chet Edwards, this wasn't so true. Now Chet's margins were kind of small by now. In 2000 he won with 55%, in 2002 he won with 52%. He chose to run in the new District 17, which contains Waco (the nucleus of his old district), but new territory as well: Fort Worth exurbs, Bryan and College Station. It also contained the town of Crawford, which sounds familiar for some reason. These aren't exactly Democratic strongholds, to put it mildly.
Now, y'all know (or can guess) what happened to Edwards: He WON! Bush also won the district, 70-30. So the question naturally arises: How in the holy hell did Edwards hold on? Here's why, best as I can tell: Attention to the district, like I said. Now, DeLay knew Edwards was popular with veterans, so he removed Fort Hood from the district, but the district still contained people who worked there. Waco - Edwards was from there. The pork - Edwards funded lots of projects in the district. A&M - Edwards is an Aggie and unfailingly mentioned that on his television ads. The opponent - a pretty mean person, extreme for a Republican, a real partisan. Edwards won 51-47.
2006, Edwards wins by 18 points or so. Strong Democratic year, too - that helped. 2008 was a more interesting year: Edwards did something pretty significant in the Texas Democratic primary. He endorsed Barack Obama before the primary. And something even more interesting happened in the coming months - Nancy Pelosi said Chet Edwards was her choice for Obama's vice president.
This is pretty funny, because the liberal netroots strongly supported an Obama/Edwards ticket. It's just that Chet was the wrong Edwards. Seems there was another prominent politician by the last name Edwards. Whatever happened to him, anyway? Would Chet Edwards have been a good VP for Obama? It would have been interesting - I really like the guy (as you can tell from the existence of this entry), but he is pretty moderate. Yanno, voted for the Iraq war. Now, yeah, he's in a very Republican district, so I forgive him for his votes. I want him in Congress. But Obama probably should have picked someone with a more progressive record than Chet Edwards, and so he did. I understand that Obama's VP choosing team vetted Chet, but I'm not so sure how serious the vetting was. They probably did any vetting out of courtesy to Pelosi.
Of course, that other Edwards kinda killed any chance of Chet Edwards being the VP nominee. You can imagine the undecided voter: "Why is that nice Muslim man running with that $400 haircut bastard who cheated on his cancerwife?" After the 2008 election (Edwards won reelection by 8 points or so) apparently Edwards was a contender to become secretary of veterans' affairs. He would have been damn good. (Obama chose Eric Shinseki instead.)
I was thinking about the Texas governor and senate races recently, and Chet Edwards is probably the best candidate possible. He fights and he wins. He won't run for governor or senate in 2010, I think, but maybe he'll run someday.
Anyway, that's a lot of rambling. I'm probably going to do an entry on another odd politician who I've been reading up on - Fritz Hollings. Chet Edwards - I admire him. Hollings - he can make me go "hell yeah" or "fuck you" - he's an odd one. He also has an accent remarkably like (but thicker than) Foghorn Leghorn. Also, I've gotta write an entry on the two types of progressives. If I had posted this on Sunday, I would have wrote that entry today.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
weirdness
That was a pretty intense post I wrote on Tuesday, and I stand by every single word of it. What perhaps I should have made clearer was my moods oscillate. Wednesday I had to do a lot of work for the Horace seminar, and today I had the Horace seminar for 4 hours, and I got out an hour ago, and I'm too tired to be angsty. Make no mistake, though: The US is in really deep doo-doo, and I'm not sure we've stopped digging.
(My metaphors suck.)
Anyway, when I got out of Latin I was quite astonished to learn that my main man Judd Gregg (R-NH) had withdrawn his nomination as commerce secretary. He's going to stay in the Senate and will retire in 2010. Now, the obvious question is: why? Seems to be two reasons: 1. Pressure from other Republican senators and angry constituents. 2. Disagreement with Obama on such things as the stimulus package (Republicans are lockstep against it, or nearly so) and the amount of power in the position of commerce secretary.1
I tend to side with reason 2, which seems more compelling to me, I guess because I don't see why Gregg would be cowed by dittoheads or Republican senators. Accepting reason 2, why did Gregg take the Commerce position at first? NB that Gregg actively lobbied to be named commerce secretary. He wanted that job. No doubt about that. The answer is that he had two years left as senator, probably. New Hampshire has been trending hard Democratic. 2004: Kerry narrowly wins NH, John Lynch (D) narrowly defeats an incumbent Republican governor. Judd Gregg wins reelection to a 3rd term over a Democrat, Granny D - seems like a good person, but not someone who I would vote for. 2006: Democrats take over the state legislature and capture both House seats from the incumbent Republicans. 2008: John Sununu, the junior senator, is defeated by former Democratic governor Jeanne Shaheen. 2010: Judd Gregg comes up for reelection. You see the trend. I figure he wanted to end his career in an honorable way, a way that would look good, rather than face a humiliating defeat.
And here we are: withdrawing his nomination wasn't so honorable or good-looking. Ideology trumped the idea of a nice end to his career. Republicans put their ideology first. And we come back to the question: How do you compromise with people who refuse to compromise?
I wish I had a good answer. (I do have answers, but they all boil down to Fuck them.)
1. Commerce traditionally handles the census. It was moved (by who?) out of Commerce's jurisdiction around the time Gregg was nominated by Obama. Democrats want to count everyone, Republicans don't care so much. Generally it's poor people/minorities who are undercounted, and they prefer to vote Democratic. The census determines redistricting, and the Republicans would prefer to have fewer Democratic districts. This is analogous to the whole vote suppression and voter fraud debate, which I heard too much about in the last election and refuse to recount.
(My metaphors suck.)
Anyway, when I got out of Latin I was quite astonished to learn that my main man Judd Gregg (R-NH) had withdrawn his nomination as commerce secretary. He's going to stay in the Senate and will retire in 2010. Now, the obvious question is: why? Seems to be two reasons: 1. Pressure from other Republican senators and angry constituents. 2. Disagreement with Obama on such things as the stimulus package (Republicans are lockstep against it, or nearly so) and the amount of power in the position of commerce secretary.1
I tend to side with reason 2, which seems more compelling to me, I guess because I don't see why Gregg would be cowed by dittoheads or Republican senators. Accepting reason 2, why did Gregg take the Commerce position at first? NB that Gregg actively lobbied to be named commerce secretary. He wanted that job. No doubt about that. The answer is that he had two years left as senator, probably. New Hampshire has been trending hard Democratic. 2004: Kerry narrowly wins NH, John Lynch (D) narrowly defeats an incumbent Republican governor. Judd Gregg wins reelection to a 3rd term over a Democrat, Granny D - seems like a good person, but not someone who I would vote for. 2006: Democrats take over the state legislature and capture both House seats from the incumbent Republicans. 2008: John Sununu, the junior senator, is defeated by former Democratic governor Jeanne Shaheen. 2010: Judd Gregg comes up for reelection. You see the trend. I figure he wanted to end his career in an honorable way, a way that would look good, rather than face a humiliating defeat.
And here we are: withdrawing his nomination wasn't so honorable or good-looking. Ideology trumped the idea of a nice end to his career. Republicans put their ideology first. And we come back to the question: How do you compromise with people who refuse to compromise?
I wish I had a good answer. (I do have answers, but they all boil down to Fuck them.)
1. Commerce traditionally handles the census. It was moved (by who?) out of Commerce's jurisdiction around the time Gregg was nominated by Obama. Democrats want to count everyone, Republicans don't care so much. Generally it's poor people/minorities who are undercounted, and they prefer to vote Democratic. The census determines redistricting, and the Republicans would prefer to have fewer Democratic districts. This is analogous to the whole vote suppression and voter fraud debate, which I heard too much about in the last election and refuse to recount.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
FEAR
It seems I live in two worlds right now. One world consists of the mundane and everyday. The classes, the homework, the seminar breaks, the GRE practice tests. A world that appears constant even now. The other world is the world that encompasses everyone, the one we are all part of. And in that world, I feel like I've journeyed down the long river of awakening down to a sunless sea.
I suppose what prompted this gloomy frame of mind was this story I read when I woke up. Now, now, I know Daily Kos definitely is heavy on fearmongering. And the story isn't quite as scary as it might appear - the $550 billion probably wasn't drawn out just by a few actors (like big banks or Saudi Arabia) but rather by lots of people automatically (because of computers) - but the story is still pretty damn scary. What would have happened if the drawdown was not stopped? Did the Treasury's action halt the drawdown or just delay it?
First - now, what that story reminds me of is the story of Stanislav Petrov. I wonder what my parents think of that story. If nuclear war had happened, naturally I would not be alive today.
Second, and related to my first point - my thoughts keep returning to Lewis Thomas's essay Late Night Thoughts on Mahler's Ninth Symphony, which was about growing up young in the age of nuclear war. How do the young handle this threat that their entire life could end tomorrow?, he asked. Perhaps I should be asking the same question. Of course, some catastrophic failure of the world economy might not be imminent, very fast and very stubborn. It might be very slow, drawn-out and painful.
Third, my thoughts keep returning as well to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. The key to the work is that the first movement is important. But its antipole is not the fourth, but the THIRD. And, as we recall, the third movement is astonishingly bleak. When I'm in the mundane world of school, I hear the second movement. It's not cheerful exactly, but it's mostly major and has some nice parts. But looking at the wider world, all I see is the Third. Are we inexorably hurtling to that movement's close?
Now, I would be remiss in not mentioning a key fact: My two worlds have yet to intersect in a particularly meaningful way. As I noticed during winter break, the lines at Texas Roadhouse are still long and I-45 is still crowded. Houston's not doing too terribly yet. And perhaps the world will weather this downturn as well, and I'll reach that fourth movement after all.
But I'm not sure the world will weather this downturn. I read about Obama's stimulus package and fear it's not large enough. I read about bank bailouts and fear that we're privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. I read about how the Republicans are going to obstruct Obama at every turn (so they can blame the economy on Obama in 2010, 2012) and fear that Republicans care less about the country than about power - that they want the economy to keep failing. I fear, I fear, I fear.
(Didn't FDR say something about that?)
But for now, I see a sunless sea and hear the third movement of Mahler's Ninth and its awful momentum hurtling me around faster and faster, louder and louder, until the final blaring evil full stop.
I suppose what prompted this gloomy frame of mind was this story I read when I woke up. Now, now, I know Daily Kos definitely is heavy on fearmongering. And the story isn't quite as scary as it might appear - the $550 billion probably wasn't drawn out just by a few actors (like big banks or Saudi Arabia) but rather by lots of people automatically (because of computers) - but the story is still pretty damn scary. What would have happened if the drawdown was not stopped? Did the Treasury's action halt the drawdown or just delay it?
First - now, what that story reminds me of is the story of Stanislav Petrov. I wonder what my parents think of that story. If nuclear war had happened, naturally I would not be alive today.
Second, and related to my first point - my thoughts keep returning to Lewis Thomas's essay Late Night Thoughts on Mahler's Ninth Symphony, which was about growing up young in the age of nuclear war. How do the young handle this threat that their entire life could end tomorrow?, he asked. Perhaps I should be asking the same question. Of course, some catastrophic failure of the world economy might not be imminent, very fast and very stubborn. It might be very slow, drawn-out and painful.
Third, my thoughts keep returning as well to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. The key to the work is that the first movement is important. But its antipole is not the fourth, but the THIRD. And, as we recall, the third movement is astonishingly bleak. When I'm in the mundane world of school, I hear the second movement. It's not cheerful exactly, but it's mostly major and has some nice parts. But looking at the wider world, all I see is the Third. Are we inexorably hurtling to that movement's close?
Now, I would be remiss in not mentioning a key fact: My two worlds have yet to intersect in a particularly meaningful way. As I noticed during winter break, the lines at Texas Roadhouse are still long and I-45 is still crowded. Houston's not doing too terribly yet. And perhaps the world will weather this downturn as well, and I'll reach that fourth movement after all.
But I'm not sure the world will weather this downturn. I read about Obama's stimulus package and fear it's not large enough. I read about bank bailouts and fear that we're privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. I read about how the Republicans are going to obstruct Obama at every turn (so they can blame the economy on Obama in 2010, 2012) and fear that Republicans care less about the country than about power - that they want the economy to keep failing. I fear, I fear, I fear.
(Didn't FDR say something about that?)
But for now, I see a sunless sea and hear the third movement of Mahler's Ninth and its awful momentum hurtling me around faster and faster, louder and louder, until the final blaring evil full stop.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
GREat job!
This morning I took a GRE practice test and it made me feel old. It was a pretty interesting experience. We (=10 people or so) took it in a computer lab. I understand it's always taken on computers. The test has six sections.
1. Essay: You're given a choice of two prompts on hot-button, emotional issues. I did my essay on prisoners' rights - not something I get real worked up about, but I understand why some people do. Time: 45 minutes. Essay is graded on a scale of 0-6.
2. Second essay: You are given an argument and asked to deconstruct it, since it contains faulty assumptions. Here I had a problem: I'm fine with pointing out the flaws in arguments, but I don't require many words to do that. Time: 30 minutes. As before, essay is graded on a scale of 1-6.
3. Quantitative (=verbal) section: 30 multiple choice questions in 30 minutes. Antonyms, analogies, sentence completion, reading comp. Mostly pretty easy, although the analogies were pretty annoying. Analogies were the most difficult questions for me. Also, they don't give you directions for the antonym questions, so on the first one I put down the closest synonym to the word given. But I figured out the questions were asking for antonyms later on.
4. Qualitative (=math) section: 28 multiple choice questions in 45 minutes. This is pretty much the same as the SAT math section. I got some questions wrong because I didn't read the instructions carefully enough, so read those instructions!
5. Experimental section: We didn't do this, but it is on the real exam. Apparently it's another of sections 3 or 4, but you don't know which one is experimental and which one is not. Or something.
6. Research section: We didn't do this. Optional, doesn't count toward your score.
After the test there was a study session which I attended. Here's what I took away: The importance of the GRE varies from school to school, and it's not as important as the SAT. (latter = my inference) Some schools have minimum scores for acceptance or scholarship. A bit of talk about applying to grad school: requires personal statement (=essay), recommendation letters, and everything else you'd expect. As for taking grad school, what I've been hearing more and more is if you want to go to grad school, you should know why you want to go. You should be able to state it easily. This is especially true for Ph.D programs.
Maybe there will be a practice LSAT offered sometime. As for law school, I think I would like to go there, but there's one thing that concerns me...I thought of another career goal. I don't want to be evil. I don't want to be defending shitty corporate practices. I could, and maybe I could do it well, but I would not feel very happy with myself. And unfortunately, defending shitty corporate practices is probably the best way to make a fair amount of money. So who knows.
1. Essay: You're given a choice of two prompts on hot-button, emotional issues. I did my essay on prisoners' rights - not something I get real worked up about, but I understand why some people do. Time: 45 minutes. Essay is graded on a scale of 0-6.
2. Second essay: You are given an argument and asked to deconstruct it, since it contains faulty assumptions. Here I had a problem: I'm fine with pointing out the flaws in arguments, but I don't require many words to do that. Time: 30 minutes. As before, essay is graded on a scale of 1-6.
3. Quantitative (=verbal) section: 30 multiple choice questions in 30 minutes. Antonyms, analogies, sentence completion, reading comp. Mostly pretty easy, although the analogies were pretty annoying. Analogies were the most difficult questions for me. Also, they don't give you directions for the antonym questions, so on the first one I put down the closest synonym to the word given. But I figured out the questions were asking for antonyms later on.
4. Qualitative (=math) section: 28 multiple choice questions in 45 minutes. This is pretty much the same as the SAT math section. I got some questions wrong because I didn't read the instructions carefully enough, so read those instructions!
5. Experimental section: We didn't do this, but it is on the real exam. Apparently it's another of sections 3 or 4, but you don't know which one is experimental and which one is not. Or something.
6. Research section: We didn't do this. Optional, doesn't count toward your score.
After the test there was a study session which I attended. Here's what I took away: The importance of the GRE varies from school to school, and it's not as important as the SAT. (latter = my inference) Some schools have minimum scores for acceptance or scholarship. A bit of talk about applying to grad school: requires personal statement (=essay), recommendation letters, and everything else you'd expect. As for taking grad school, what I've been hearing more and more is if you want to go to grad school, you should know why you want to go. You should be able to state it easily. This is especially true for Ph.D programs.
Maybe there will be a practice LSAT offered sometime. As for law school, I think I would like to go there, but there's one thing that concerns me...I thought of another career goal. I don't want to be evil. I don't want to be defending shitty corporate practices. I could, and maybe I could do it well, but I would not feel very happy with myself. And unfortunately, defending shitty corporate practices is probably the best way to make a fair amount of money. So who knows.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Shrine of the Silver Monkey
Alright ok but seriously you don't know Dick.
So he sez that he thinks the US will suffer a terrorist attack under Obama, because the Obama administration is too soft on terrorists. There's a whole lot of bullshit embedded in that statement, so let's dissect it.
Will the US suffer a terrorist attack under Obama? Well, maybe, who knows! It depends on who you define as terrorists, too. They're not necessarily Muslim - see McVeigh, Tim. I'd argue that serial killers are definitely terrorists. The job of a terrorist is to get people frightened.
So, one major assumption in Cheney's statement is that terrorists are to be feared. That's absolutely correct, but you don't want to overdo it. Look at what I said above - people need to not be frightened. I think of the Londoners during the Blitz, or on a smaller scale, folks in Spain dealing with the ETA. Stuff like that. I guess what I'm trying to say is: you should be a lot more frightened of car accidents (cancer, lightning) than terrorists. But I definitely don't think you should accept terrorist attacks passively. So what do you do?
Another major assumption from Cheney: What the Bush administration did worked. I'm partly thinking of the omnipresent surveillance, but perhaps a more concrete example is torture. The US tortured folks in Gitmo. Now, does that make people more sympathetic or less sympathetic to the US? The way I see it, there's a hardcore group - your Al-Qaeda regulars - who really can't be dealed with. You've gotta kill them. But there aren't that many hardcore terrorists. What worries me is the sympathizers. The people who wouldn't sympathize with the terrorists if their lives were better. People who are more inclined to help the hardcore group and join them because of the policies of the US. Another question: did the war in Iraq make people more sympathetic or less sympathetic to the US? It's only with things like the "Sunni awakening" that the hardcore group is being contained, but Iraq is still a hellhole. (The I/P conflict should also be mentioned here.) My point is: 9/11 was actually a fantastic success for the hardcore group of terrorists, because of the reaction of the US. Perhaps their influence is waning now, but there's still Yemen and Somalia for them.
So how do you prevent terrorist attacks anyway? Well, one way is through a good foreign policy (at least when dealing with foreign terrorists), the other way is through security. This is something I'm totally unqualified to talk about (even more so than foreign policy) - but I will note that taking shoes off at the airport probably ain't the best way. Yeah, yeah, Richard Reid. If we really want to be serious about airport security, we need to look to El Al. That's an airline that knows how to prevent terrorism. Also, seaport security is something worth talking about.
As for ideals, freedom, liberty, the Bill of Rights, etc. Jon Stewart said that if you abandon your ideals when you're scared, they're not ideals! Can't add to that.
Not to belabor the obvious, but I can't end without mentioning how utterly shitty it is to wish for a terrorist attack on the US. No one wants that, except for Republicans! They will blame it on Obama. So seriously, go fuck yourself, Dick Cheney. You know how mean and evil it is to wish for that. You're seeking confirmation for your evil policies through the lives of thousands.
Deep thought: anyone remember the anthrax attacks? Never solved by the Bush folks.
Deep thought: Watch out for giant Olmec stone heads.
So he sez that he thinks the US will suffer a terrorist attack under Obama, because the Obama administration is too soft on terrorists. There's a whole lot of bullshit embedded in that statement, so let's dissect it.
Will the US suffer a terrorist attack under Obama? Well, maybe, who knows! It depends on who you define as terrorists, too. They're not necessarily Muslim - see McVeigh, Tim. I'd argue that serial killers are definitely terrorists. The job of a terrorist is to get people frightened.
So, one major assumption in Cheney's statement is that terrorists are to be feared. That's absolutely correct, but you don't want to overdo it. Look at what I said above - people need to not be frightened. I think of the Londoners during the Blitz, or on a smaller scale, folks in Spain dealing with the ETA. Stuff like that. I guess what I'm trying to say is: you should be a lot more frightened of car accidents (cancer, lightning) than terrorists. But I definitely don't think you should accept terrorist attacks passively. So what do you do?
Another major assumption from Cheney: What the Bush administration did worked. I'm partly thinking of the omnipresent surveillance, but perhaps a more concrete example is torture. The US tortured folks in Gitmo. Now, does that make people more sympathetic or less sympathetic to the US? The way I see it, there's a hardcore group - your Al-Qaeda regulars - who really can't be dealed with. You've gotta kill them. But there aren't that many hardcore terrorists. What worries me is the sympathizers. The people who wouldn't sympathize with the terrorists if their lives were better. People who are more inclined to help the hardcore group and join them because of the policies of the US. Another question: did the war in Iraq make people more sympathetic or less sympathetic to the US? It's only with things like the "Sunni awakening" that the hardcore group is being contained, but Iraq is still a hellhole. (The I/P conflict should also be mentioned here.) My point is: 9/11 was actually a fantastic success for the hardcore group of terrorists, because of the reaction of the US. Perhaps their influence is waning now, but there's still Yemen and Somalia for them.
So how do you prevent terrorist attacks anyway? Well, one way is through a good foreign policy (at least when dealing with foreign terrorists), the other way is through security. This is something I'm totally unqualified to talk about (even more so than foreign policy) - but I will note that taking shoes off at the airport probably ain't the best way. Yeah, yeah, Richard Reid. If we really want to be serious about airport security, we need to look to El Al. That's an airline that knows how to prevent terrorism. Also, seaport security is something worth talking about.
As for ideals, freedom, liberty, the Bill of Rights, etc. Jon Stewart said that if you abandon your ideals when you're scared, they're not ideals! Can't add to that.
Not to belabor the obvious, but I can't end without mentioning how utterly shitty it is to wish for a terrorist attack on the US. No one wants that, except for Republicans! They will blame it on Obama. So seriously, go fuck yourself, Dick Cheney. You know how mean and evil it is to wish for that. You're seeking confirmation for your evil policies through the lives of thousands.
Deep thought: anyone remember the anthrax attacks? Never solved by the Bush folks.
Deep thought: Watch out for giant Olmec stone heads.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Slumdoggin'
Yep, I watched - along with my dorm basement - Slumdog Millionaire on Sunday night. Since I have nothing better to write about, here we are.
I guess I have to write about the poverty first - being poor is a shitty experience, clearly. The young kids (not actors, they were genuine poor kids) were absolutely brilliant at portraying Jamal, Salim, and Latika. Images make poverty seem much more real. You can read about poverty, and you know intellectually it sucks, but the images are the gut-punch. And from what I hear, the poverty situation is actually worse than depicted. Yes, gangsters really do blind beggars and all of that.
My parents watched Who Wants to be a Millionaire quite a bit back in the day. The host of Who Wants to be a Crorepati sure was an asshole. Regis never was an asshole. He always made the contestant feel good. And he didn't know the answers either. (Also, the show was taped.)
What pissed me off the most was the camera work. Everything was so ADD. Whatever happened to nice long leisurely scenes where nothing much happens, like the UK Office? I hate all these rapid jump cuts. Sadly, no one will ever realize that I am always right about movies. Oh well, the story sure was good, and quite original, I think. For instance - on the penultimate question, Jamal got it right because he learned how to read people as a slumdog. Not sure if that was ever made explicit, but that's how I read the scene.
Oh yeah, complaints - love story! I dislike love stories where the lovers are always apart. On the Office, Jim and Pam had the amazing chemistry and tension because we saw them together a great deal. And so we felt (or I felt, anyway) strongly about them. Never could muster up too much feeling for the twu wuv of Jamal and Latika.
Something else that bugged me - Mumbai's pretty big. Just saying. Sure, chance meetings can happen there. But it's a big city.
Might as well mention the best part: A good Indian movie needs two things: a big dance number and Shahrukh Khan. And this film had one of 'em! I wonder if Sir SRK will ever appear in an American film - he totally should.
Oh yeah, random other tangential Office connection: Jamal stole sandals from the Taj Mahal, and that kinda reminded me of the scene in Diwali where Angela watched over the footwear to make sure no one stole any. I assume the real Taj Mahal employs Angela or her Indian equivalent.
I see I've spent most of this entry complaining - I actually really enjoyed the movie. It's just easier to complain. :) I would recommend it to anyone.
I guess I have to write about the poverty first - being poor is a shitty experience, clearly. The young kids (not actors, they were genuine poor kids) were absolutely brilliant at portraying Jamal, Salim, and Latika. Images make poverty seem much more real. You can read about poverty, and you know intellectually it sucks, but the images are the gut-punch. And from what I hear, the poverty situation is actually worse than depicted. Yes, gangsters really do blind beggars and all of that.
My parents watched Who Wants to be a Millionaire quite a bit back in the day. The host of Who Wants to be a Crorepati sure was an asshole. Regis never was an asshole. He always made the contestant feel good. And he didn't know the answers either. (Also, the show was taped.)
What pissed me off the most was the camera work. Everything was so ADD. Whatever happened to nice long leisurely scenes where nothing much happens, like the UK Office? I hate all these rapid jump cuts. Sadly, no one will ever realize that I am always right about movies. Oh well, the story sure was good, and quite original, I think. For instance - on the penultimate question, Jamal got it right because he learned how to read people as a slumdog. Not sure if that was ever made explicit, but that's how I read the scene.
Oh yeah, complaints - love story! I dislike love stories where the lovers are always apart. On the Office, Jim and Pam had the amazing chemistry and tension because we saw them together a great deal. And so we felt (or I felt, anyway) strongly about them. Never could muster up too much feeling for the twu wuv of Jamal and Latika.
Something else that bugged me - Mumbai's pretty big. Just saying. Sure, chance meetings can happen there. But it's a big city.
Might as well mention the best part: A good Indian movie needs two things: a big dance number and Shahrukh Khan. And this film had one of 'em! I wonder if Sir SRK will ever appear in an American film - he totally should.
Oh yeah, random other tangential Office connection: Jamal stole sandals from the Taj Mahal, and that kinda reminded me of the scene in Diwali where Angela watched over the footwear to make sure no one stole any. I assume the real Taj Mahal employs Angela or her Indian equivalent.
I see I've spent most of this entry complaining - I actually really enjoyed the movie. It's just easier to complain. :) I would recommend it to anyone.
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