Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Puns and Rotters - plus a little something-something from the Hippodrome
The most horrible horrors strike when you least expect them, and then strike again and again until you succumb to their sheer eeevilosity. They hit you when you’re not looking, and then they kick you when you’re down. Thus it is with scientology, re-runs, and bad falafel. You’re not finished with them till they’re finished with you.
In this vein, I had some hideous things come into my brain over the past few weeks. So hideous, I can’t forget them. So hideous, they haunt my days and blacken my nights. So hideous, indeed, that I am going to share them with you. For truly they are among the worst examples of wordplay that ever spawned unbidden in my mind, crippling my thinking and stunting my soul. And if I don’t unload them but quick, I’m never going to get over any of them. Therefore, with not so much an apology as with echoing hysterical laughter that frightens bats, I unleash upon you:
THE BAD, THE BAD, AND THE ALSO BAD
Cartesian poetics: I think, therefore iamb.*
As midnight struck at the Bauhaus residence halls, it was a stark and dormy night.**
The quality of mercy is not strained; however, the quantity of mercy is sifted into an even two-cup container.***
O the humiliation, that these execrations actually originated within my own shattered conk. So ruined I am, that I can’t even effectively deny it. And why should I? I mean, other than that humiliation I mentioned earlier. Oh, yeah, right.
Well, for putting up with that terrible triad of insults to my native tongue, maybe you deserve a little something-something. Click on through to the extended entry, then, and you can check out the first part of my little holiday story. It’s a bit premature, but so am I sometimes. In a good way, I mean. And here I’d almost gotten over the humiliation. But anyway, hope you enjoy the story - let me know if you want any more of it, or if I’m just writing it for myself, m’kay?
*My humiliation is not alleviated in the least by my just now Googling this phrase and discovering that I am far from the first to come up with it. If anything, it’s worse to know that I’m just another vector for this verbal virus, just one of 13,900 plague-carrying rats infesting the sewage system draining the english language. But thanks for asking, anyway. Sheesh. (Actual examples of pre-existing links omitted in misbegotten attempt to salvage some vestige of dignity.)
**This one also. Great. It’s like I thought I invented throwing up and then discovered that some yutz in Australia beat me to it. Maybe I can get a “participant” ribbon or something. Or “blogger,” that’s pretty weak. Or maybe I don’t even qualify for one.
*** This one too, eh? The good link I found last night eludes me this morning, but it was there, I assure you - mocking me. Et three, Brutus. I give up.
(The Hippodrome Story - first portion of a work in progress)
Dov trudged. Even on warm days he moved lugubriously, the effort evinced in his every step, walking as if he were shlepping the world on his shoulders regardless whether he was heading out unladen in the morning or returning after dark bent under a full rick of scraps and firewood. His worn boots slid a little with every shuffling step he took. The downtrodden snow was thick on the footpath, smeared and befouled by countless journeyers gone before him. His breath escaped in pale puffs from under his unkempt beard, hoaring the tips of the greying bristles. His hands, naked to the freezing breeze, tugged the lapels of his buttonless overcoat across his chest. His eyes he kept downcast, scrupulously watching for ice and other hazards of the way. His eyes were the brightest part of him, gleaming blue in the early Silesian dusk. He glanced up, then down again as his bootsoles slid a little - and on Dov trudged.
A shetl was receding behind him, the third through which he’d passed since his breakfast that morning of turnip and toast. He’d brought the rest of the boiled turnip along with him to blunt the evening pangs, holding off on his supper in the hopes of augmenting it or perhaps just finding a cozy place to eat out of the snow. Such luck had not befallen him, though, as the agglomeration of motley sheds and squalid outbuildings slipped way behind him. It had been his last chance to be vouchsafed a little comfort and satiety, as the machers had told him that his destination was not far beyond the village he’d just left, a village wan and exhausted in Kislev’s waning light. None of the few faces he’d seen there had favored him with so much as a smile, much less a plate of soup or a pickled egg. The kids he saw seemed hungry; the women, tired. He saw no men, which confirmed his belief that he was near his journey’s end. The men would be at the Hippodrome, he figured. Entertainment was hard enough to find these days, and they lived too near it to resist its lure.
He smelled it, first - fried potatoes and cholent and brisket wafting across snow-strewn meadows, weaving insidiously between bare birch trunks. He couldn’t see or hear it yet but he knew then he was close, so he paused, pulled the rag-wrapped turnip from his pocket, and consumed it it in a few quick bites washed down with a handful of snow. He decided it was lucky not to have lucked into more sustenance along the way - there was only so much luck in the world, and to each man only his allotted share. It would have been spendthrift, he thought, to waste his allotment on such a triviality as a stoup of pottage.
The turnip gone and his mouth rinsed with frozen dust, Dov resumed his trek. With the speed of approaching nightfall he felt increasingly confident that he was on schedule; the realization buoyed his spirits, which, after a day of walking, after a lifetime of working, after millenia of wandering, needed a boost. It was coming together, he realized as he saw hearthsmoke in a blue break though the trees. It beggared his beggar’s belief: he was nearly there.
In short order the Hippodrome appeared briefly through a forest gap beneath its plume of smoke, and Dov’s heart raced even as his weary, measured tread continued unchanged. The barn reappeared off in the woods, but closer, and yet again, nearer still. Now he could begin to hear the activity inside, voices still indistinguishable, shouts and laughter garbled by distance and slivovitz. This was when he knew he’d start to feel nervous for real, and on cue his belly froze around the turnip and his hands compulsively rechecked the the small sack he’d tied to his belt, groping the few items in it through its rough cloth. So little he carried, and so much he’d sacrificed for it. Now a new reality loomed; the bare wooden barn door seemed to glower down upon him. The future is betrothed to no one man, he reminded himself as he prepared to knock - it is a wanton, free to him who demands her first. And with that, his fist moved of its own accord, and his knock on the raw wood of the door rang hollow though the now-fallen night.
A small window slid open in the worn boards, barely big enough for an eye to see out of it, an eye with a gleam that was jovial, suspicious, and condescending all at once. The vision greeting that eye aroused no concern, though - another shmendrik, holding out the two-part passport for entry - a zloty and a pony. The wooden pane slid back into place; Dov heard a derisive mutter and hard laughter from several throats, like hammers dropped down stairs. The big barn door swung toward him, pushing him away to let him enter. As he stepped over the threshold, a burst of stale air exhaled over him like the breath of a fat drunkard rolling onto him in a crowded common tavern bed. The air was thick with food smells, resonant with laughter and convivial conversation and the sharp clatter of coins and ponies in the chamber beyond. Dov’s heart soared. It was exactly as it had been described to him, exactly as he’d pictured it.
The burly boychik who’d let him into the vestibule still stood in his way, though, beard bristling and forearms bulging as he extended a hand wordlessly. Dov handed over the zloty and his pony, and involuntarily held his breath.
He’d found a heavy scrap of solid mahogany, barely the size of his palm, two years ago on a roadside, and the dreydel inside it had just called out to him. At first, for months, he’d just sat with it and held it in his hands, not yet daring to start to carve it. When he was ready to whittle he carefully sharpened his only knife on a whetstone each evening. He had started by shaping the block, that appeared to him to have come from a heavy table or chest that had fallen off a wagon and then been scavenged to its smallest remainders. The dense fistful of wood evolved in his calloused hands into a regular polyhedron, square on one axis and identically rectangular on the other two.
Lacking an awl, he had painstakingly worked the spindle from one square end, twirling it every few minutes to gauge thickness and length. After months of work on a microcosmic scale he was satisfied - the spindle was perfectly centered, perfectly shaped for his thick clawlike hand, bulging slightly in the center and finally coming to a graceful point at its apex. He then reconfirmed and refreshed all four sides, marking out the letters cleanly and clearly with sinuous hair-breadth grooves, defining the place where the descending faces would fall away to join together in a smooth arc of convergence. The understructure he left for last, shaping it with sand stuck with sap to a scrap of cloth, letting only a flake or two of dust descend from his handiwork at a time. The vortex was unwrought - too garish; too much potential for error. Fretwork would not have been a true expression of his self, as the rest of it was.
As he worked his way down to the (need to find the right word here!), the distinctions between himself and his task, the creator and the creation, grew indistinct for him. When, after more than a year of work, he realized his dreydel was finally, truly finished, he took it out into the woods and just sat with it by himself, basking in its simple geometric perfection and sheen burnished by countless hours in his hands. It seemed to him to be an object of inexpressible beauty.
But beauty is subjective, and this pony needed to run a true course. Testing would be necessary. Dov had procured for this purpose a nugget of marble, perfectly smooth, a remnant of some ruined tabletop. Out there in the woods he pulled it out and set in the soft earth, pressing it down gently and carefully until a drop of his sweat rested still on it, hemispherical and quiescent, belled at its center like a crystal globe emerging from marmoreal blackness. The surface was as level as he’d be able to make it. He had no excuse to put off the trial.
He hesitated nonetheless. Till that moment the carving had been a perfect objectification of his will, but if it failed upon testing, it would henceforth be nothing more than a waste, a frivolity, an indictment of the compulsion that had driven him to squander his essence upon it - or worse, an indictment of that essence itself. A weak, wobbling trial might betoken a weakness in his spirit, a wobble in his very spark. He therefore sat quietly, afraid to do more as the sunlight slowly drained out of the sky and dusk crept down. Soon there were no more shadows; the woods themselves were drifting into evenshade and the moment of truth could be no further postponed. With a deep inhalation he hovered the top above the marble; with a steadiness that surprised him he spun it out, landing it square on his target. And there it spun, straight as an arrow and true as torah, till the shadows overtook everything and the dreydel faded from view in the murk of dark earth and black stone. When he put forth his hand to retrieve it, it seemed to cast vibrations and radiances from its honed edges as it whirled in place. Dov felt them penetrate his palm, a sensation akin to how light feels. The feeling filled him with power and peace. This was one powerful pony, and was furthermore unequivocally true. He had known it all along, in the marrow of his bones - but it was nice to have been proven so right.
Dov stood in the small vestibule of the cavernous barn, and handed over a piece of his soul to be weighed and measured and found sufficient. Though he knew well enough the protocol, it felt wrong to relinquish possession. He was encouraged, though, by what he thought was a glimmer in the doorkeeper’s eye as he took the pony, a recognition that this was an exceptional piece of work. With a practiced eye he surveyed its gross dimensions, tracing the thin outlines of the thickly-drawn letters at a glance, measuring with a fingertip the contours of the spindle and the voluptuous curve of the convergence. He took his time looking it over. It was his job to guard the doors of the hippodrome, after all, and to protect the courses from weak or weighted ponies, designed to drop on Gimmel or not designed at all. His duty was fell and he took it seriously. He knew quality when he saw it, and Dov saw him see it here.
“Make it y’rself?” the doorkeeper asked; “All myself,” Dov replied. The doorkeeper looked him over one more time, grunted ambiguously, and spun the pony onto the testing table. The dreydel’s edges blurred, forming a vague cylinder that evaporated at its edges into thin air. It seemed to hum and the spindle stood proudly at attention, glinting in the dust-filtered lanternlight as if perfectly motionless.
Dov was paternally proud but hardly surprised by its performance; the doorkeepeer, on the other hand, watched with wide eyes, his professional reserve gone in the presence of the little top’s unerring performance. After a few minutes he took it back from the table with apparent reluctance and succinctly pronounced, “True” - but then added in a quiet voice, barely to be heard over the din seeping in from the main chamber, “Gevalt, chaver - that’s a strong pony.” Dov smiled in return as he retrieved his dreydel, and stepped aside to let the door to the Hippodrome itself swing open for him.
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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The GooBUgly
I have a record album, Ennio Morricone’s Colonia Sonopa Originale del Film “Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (which you would know if you were reading carefully), which is just the fancy euro way of saying “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” It’s an album, a soundtrack, a movie, and a way of life. You know what I mean. Let’s be honest, we all have our Clint Eastwood (early phase) days, our Lee Van Cleef days, and even our Eli Wallach days, god save us. Well, I’m having them all at once. I’ve had some good things happen, some bad ones, and some ugly ones. This is my golden opportunity to foist a sample of each of these on you, and I bet you don’t even have your anti-foisting aprons on so now it’s gonna be your problem too.
The Good: For several years now I’ve been sleeping on a bed that’s had a memory-foam mattress topper. At first it was a wonderful supplement to our pillowtop mattress, all warm and pliant and memoriously foamy. Unfortunately, I sleep so heavily that, in the years it’s been in use, we wound up putting permanent divots in the damn thing. It’s become, if you will, repressed memory foam - it knows where we were even when we wish it would forget already. As a result, we’d wind up crawling into a big king-sized bed just to find ourselves hemmed into a little body-sized rut that kept us in place if we tried to roll about over-freely. I’ve been whining about it for so long that Kel finally got us a new one, and we installed it last weekend. Can I tell you? It’s AWESOME. It’s done off-gassing (anyway that’s the story I told Kel) and it’s all puffed up and responsive, and we sleep with the freedom of gazelles, were gazelles to lie stationary on a foam pad for several hours at a time. It feels good on my back and in my brain, since I’m no longer dreaming of trenches, ravines, and flumes from which my insensate self cannot escape. Yay foam! Bonus: When Zach comes into our room to sleep with us, which means, really, to sleep between us while keeping us both awake on either side of him, we can put him in a comfy bedroll at the foot of our bed, comprised of a warm comforter atop the old mattress topper, now folded in two. He seems fine with it and so am I. What the old mattress topper has to say about this arrangement is of no concern to me. It had its chance.
The Bad: I’ve been writing a short story for a few months now - the idea actually occurred to me about a year ago but I put off the actual writing for a long time because it sounded like a lot more work than most of the spindrift I usually propound here. But the damn thing got stuck in my head and would not go away, so I figured I’d try to write it up and see how long it turned out to be. Once I’d written about ten pages or so, I transcribed them to a text file but kept working along in my notebook, really starting to revel in the experience of delving into character and exposition and pacing and arc and all that writerly stuff I hear them writerly-types talk about. The story was coming along surprisingly well and I was growing increasingly happy with it and fulfilled by the process of writing it. I’d ground out another ten or so pages of handwritten text as of last week. That’s when I lost the damn notebook and half the story I’d written, just as it was reaching a climactic point. It took me several days even to confront this reality, believing that it would still turn up someday, that someone would call the number I’d written clearly on the cover, that hope had been kept alive, that the terrorists had not already won. Now I know better. The notebook - which also included numerous ideas for other posts, notes on cute things my kids do that I needed to put in their memory books, photos, receipts, recipes, medical records, and possibly a supermodel - is irretrievably gone. It’s been a week without word one about the words. I finally bought a new notebook yesterday but have yet to write in it. I have a few ideas, but I think I want to finish that blasted story first. It’s bad, but it’d be worse if the damn thing started haunting me.
The Ugly: Enchondroma. It’s a benign cartilagenous cyst, not actually that uncommon, that forms in bones - typically bones of the arms, hands, legs and feet. I learned about it as the result of a series of events going back five months, when I was chasing down Jesse (aka “the rocket-powered bowling ball") and I slipped on the carpet and I fell down hard on my own foot. The pain was unexpectedly sharp and intense; I figured I’d broken something internally but after a few minutes of labored breathing and directed visualization it actually started feeling sort of normal again. Within a few weeks it really only hurt if I messed with my toe, bending it backwards. No problem. Except over time, that symptom did not get better and actually started getting worse. I wasn’t even able to do some basic yoga anymore. Still, it was such a little thing to complain about - I felt like a drama queen, but of course a manly one. Finally I resorted to seeking professional assistance. “No problem,” the podiatrist said, “probably a bone chip in the joint capsule. We can just pluck it out with crochet needles and a dirt devil.” To allay my concerns further he had me take an exrai, which produced a clear image of a 9x13mm cyst growing inside the bone of the lower part of my big toe. “Oh!” said my DPM. “You need a second opinion.” That took another month, by which time the toe was pretty damn sensitive to any back-bending or downward pressure. I learned at the new DPM’s office that my cyst was the sort that grew inside the bone, slowly swelling it up as if a balloon were being inflated, stretching the outer bone wall till it was so weak that it could fracture if I just looked directly at it too forcefully. However, he seemed to have a firm grip on how to fix me up: he’s got me on the board for surgery sometime in December, probably, when he’ll just open up the toe, cut a window in the bone, scoop out the cystic matter, drill a hole into the lump of tibia that forms the inner part of my ankle, dig out a bunch of little “morselized croutons” (his words) of bone, cram them into the vacancy left by the cyst, close my bonewindow, sew me all back up again, and leave me on my ass for three weeks and on crutches for two months. Then I’ll be ALL BETTER. I am emphatically not looking forward to any of this but it is better than letting the situation deteriorate till my toe falls off and then attacks me in my sleep. And all that time I was thinking it wasn’t worth bothering medical professionals about an ache in my metatarsals, when it turns out I was just being a (very manly) enchondroma queen. SEE? UGLY!
But no, I really need the surgery and my toe is all achy. And my notebook is gone but I’ll rewrite the story. Plus at least I have a nice new mattress topper that barely even smells weird anymore. Ugly, Bad, and Good. I’m ending with Eastwood. It makes me feel tougher.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Opinion Leadership
As a life-long unaffiliated voter who regrettably missed the most recent election here in San Fran, I was naturally honored and flummoxed in equal measure to have received an official-looking missive from Mike Steele’s office in today’s mail. It’s got a four-page cover letter in which he notes that I am an “identified opinion leader” in this town, thereby putting me in line to receive a registered and numbered survey; “with our limited resources we could only afford to contact citizens in San Francisco who have demonstrated a high level of political involvement and commitment to the Republican Party.” (This must have been the result of my repeated replayings of King Crimson’s 1981 classic, “Elephant Talk.") They urge me to complete and return an enclosed “California Public Policy Survey on the Obama Agenda for America,” and lord help me I’m gonna do it.
The letter is a regurgitation of all the soiled, tawdry talking points I’ve grown sick of refuting over the past year or decade or however long it’s been, citing how Americans are waking up to how much the Obama agenda is going to cost us and that Obama has “greatly overstepped in trying to ram through radical, far reaching schemes that will have enormous consequences for our nation” (as if that’s a bad thing!). They even offer up once again, right on page 1, that Obama and the “Democrat-controlled Congress” have proposed an “energy tax that will cost each household an estimated $1,761 per year”. Oh, the whole thing is golden, but pales to pyrite next to the survey itself. I can’t keep from sharing it. Remember, this isn’t a Fox News survey - it’s actually supposed to inform the Elephantines about how “real Murkans” feel about - oh, forget it, I’ll just type it in. Hope you enjoy:
DOMESTIC ISSUES:
1. Do you think the Obama Administration is over exaggerating the problems facing our country and labeling everything a “crisis” in order to get more government control over the private sector? (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: I think they’re finally dentifying the actual crises we are facing, and not mouthing off about leaders who can’t possibly harm us or the threat posed by the disenfranchised who seek the same civil rights as we claim to enjoy ourselves. I’m frankly relieved that the status of Christmas and marriage are no longer official “crises.” Did you forget what that word even means?
2. Are you concerned that the federal government’s investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in auto companies and other industries poses a long term threat to our free market and economic freedom? (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: Absolutely - get Halliburton and the oil companies out of the - oh damn, sorry, I mean no.
3. Do you worry that the Obama Administration’s excessive multi-trillion dollar spending will bury America in unsustainable debt that will seriously hurt our nation’s future economic security? (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: You have got to be kidding me. The problem is the debt Obama inherited from, who, Coolidge? What’s more significant, Mike, if you have any actual interest in gauging American sentiment, is that you need to write a question that doesn’t contain its own (inaccurate and loaded) answer.
4. Do you feel that President Obama and the Democrats are wrong to raise taxes on successful Americans who already pay the highest tax rates in order to “redistribute wealth?” (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: I think it’s wrong that the richest among us glean by far the greatest benefits in our society but bear a radically disproportionately small share of the burden of sustaining this nation. And anyone who thinks they don’t “benefit” from government action hasn’t read Howard Zinn.
5. Many Democrats have recently been suggesting that we need a second “economic stimulus bill.” Given that the first stimulus bill is not working, would you support another economic stimulus bill? (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: Given that you clearly have no grasp of current events, economic trends, or Keynsian economics, why do you consider yourself qualified even to ask this question?
6. Do you fear that a government-run health insurance progam will eventually force other insurance companies out of business and evolve into a federal bureaucracy whose size, cost and intrusion into Americans’ daily lives will spin out of control? (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: I fear being denied health insurance, having to go into debt to pay for surgery, and living in a nation where being poor or unemployed means I’m at risk of serious but preventable infirmity. And if private enterprise is so all-fired awesome those insurers will just knuckle down and kick the govt out of the insurance business, right? And if they can’t, well, go back and familiarize yourself with Social Darwinism.
7. Is the Obama Administration wrong to create new multi-billion dollar federal programs while our current Social Security and Medicare systems are not financially stable enough to fulfill their future obligations? (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: Multi-billion dollar programs like the Iraq War and the “I’m Reading Your Email” program? Like “No Child Left Untested” and “Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder?” If we can’t fulfill our obligations to the elderly and poor to help them not die unless practically unavoidable, our priorities are pretty messed up. And the new programs I think you’re asking me about look like a good way to help undo some of the damage this nation has endured at the hands of the oligarchy and zealots.
8. Is the Obama Administration being too alarmist about global warming? (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: Not alarmist enough, Mike. I think they could pick up the pace on weaning us off the petrocarbon teat. However, they are letting scientific findings speak for themselves, and you can ask Christie Whitman how that worked under B-43.
9. Should the Obama Administration step back from their rush to create “cap and trade” energy legislation that will cost jobs, harm future economic growth and impose an estimated $1,761 new energy tax on America’s families? (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: Nearly a year into the Administration a lot of big legislation has been proposed but cap and trade is still in the “drawing table” phase - so maybe “rush” is a bit of an overstatement. However, I suggest you “step back” from that ridiculous $1761 figure that’s been so thoroughly and repeatedly disproven and disavowed. The only people likely to lose from C&T are those who make their living off oil revenues, and even then, only the ones at the very top. The rest of us will profit from new efficiencies, new industries, and a healthier and more sustainable environment. Given that, maybe we’re not rushing quite enough.
NATIONAL SECURITY AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS
10. Are you comfortable with the “hands-off” diplomatic policies the Obama Administration is pursuing in relation to Iran, or should America be more forward in working to promote democracy in that country? (OK with “hands off” policy, Should promote democracy, NO OPINION)
Rejoinder: Telling Iran how to improve democracy is a sure way of consolidating them against us. Restraint, dialogue, and the searing light of public exposure seem to be having a greater impact on the people of that nation than anything either Bush ever tried. When is the last time they had mass protests in Iran that were not about kicking us out of their country, before this year? Or do you think we did such a great job fixing up Iraq that it’s time for a reprise?
11. Should the Obama Administration do more to ensure that Iran and North Korea do not further pursue building an arsenal of nuclear weapons? (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: Exactly what do you have in mind? Exacerbating the paranoia of unbalanced dictators, or just bombing them and confirming that paranoia?
12. Do you agree or disagree with those who say that President Obama hurts America by criticizing our nation when he travels to other countries and speaks to foreign audiences? (Agree, Disagree, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: I agree with those who appreciate his frankness and honesty. I disagree with those who think he should mindlessly parrot the claims of an administration that was soundly defeated after lying to us for eight years. I’m sorry, which answer does that go under?
13. How would you rate the Obama Administration’s efforts thus far in fighting the war on terrorism? (You can check more than one answer.) (They are pursuing responsible policies; They are too obsessed with being politically correct; They should not shut down Guantanamo and bring terrorists to the U.S.; NO OPINION)
Rejoinder: The “WOT” was a talking point that even B-43 rejected by the end of his administration - it’s not that we lost it but that we gave up fighting it before it really started. If you want to talk about obsessions, you’re talking about the wrong administration. And if you don’t think our supermax prisons are capable of securing a handful of terrorists thousands of miles from their homes, you don’t have the faith in American know-how that you ought to have. But really, most of those at Gitmo are far less of a threat to our national security than the fearmongers on my television every night and the self-righteous native-born nutjobs who bring guns to political rallies or who threaten violence against elected officals over matters of political disagreement.
14. How would you rate the Obama Administration thus far? (Positive, Fair, Negative, Not Sure)
Rejoinder: How’d you let any question this objective or well-constructed through? Somebody’s asleep at the switch!
15. Do you think special interest groups who embrace a leftist political philosophy have too much influence in the Obama Administration? (Yes, No, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: Considering how little they’ve done to end DADT, to change our energy infrastructure, to silence conservative voices from the media, to restrict the rights of those with whom they disagree, or to dismantle the hegemony of subsidies and cronyism that still seems to govern so much of government, um, I’m going with “no.”
16. Are you worried that the Obama Administration will follow through on their threats to rein-in talk radio via strict enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine and thus limit criticism of their activities?
Rejoinder: Is somebody delivering your RSS feed six months late or something? This was a non-issue the day it was foisted upon us. There is no effort to impose fairness on the media. Though some days I think we’d be better off if there were at least a Truth-o-meter at the bottom of our teevee screens to let us know when somebody was flat-out lying to us, as, for example, by intimating that there is any threat to “rein-in” the xenophobic, mysogynistic, reactionary, anti-democratic tripe that passes for “conservative talk radio” these days.
17. Do you oppose so-called “card check” legislation, which eliminates secret ballot elections during unionization drives and puts workers at risk of intimidation by labor bosses? (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: This question is excessively redolent of the ignorance of those who have never had to fight for represenation or a fair shake from an employer. The level of stupidty here renders any answer other than “no opinion” inherently inaccurate.
18. Do you think the national media is too pro-Obama or do you feel they present voters with balanced news that will enable voters to cast informed ballots in the 2010 elections? (Too Pro-Obama; They present balanced news; NO OPINION)
Rejoinder: Well, we got rid of Lou D. That’s a good start.
19. Are you concerned that the White House is conducting a “witch hunt” to gather names and information about citizens who disagree with their “plans” for America? (Y, N, No Opinion)
Rejoinder: Okay, wrong president again. The Enemies List was about talking to suspected potentially terroristic foreign unAmerican types. I’m not concerned that Obama is going to ram through legislation to listen to my phone calls if I hit the wrong area code. And what’s your problem with Wiccans, anyway?
20. What worries you most about the Democrats having control of the White House and Congress? (You can check more than one answer.) (Massive government spending; Tax increases; Ever expanding government; More regulations that strangle opportunites to create more jobs; Backing down in the War on Terrorism; Federal courts packed with liberal judges; Too much power for unions and other liberal special interests; Unrealistic energy policies; More government intrusion in our personal lives; Futher breakdown of traditional values.)
Rejoinder: None possible. Words fail me. Oh, no, wait: you left out “Rabid Wookie attack” and “Illegal aliens stealing my 401(k) to buy drugs.” Which I also wouldn’t choose as answers here.
The survey concludes with a warm and heartfelt plea for my financial support. The “yes” box ("YES I stand with you. To help ensure that the RNC has the financial resorces to distribute 10 million [of these crappy] surveys in the next three months and challenge the Democrats in the upcoming elections to stop their liberal socialist policies....) offers me options of donating from a high of $500 to a low of $25 or just “other: ____”. The “no” box still obliges me to enclose $15 “to help process, tabulate and distribute the results of my Survey answers.” Dude, really, $15 to tabulate this crap? Hire a brasero, already!
So that’s pretty much all Mikey had to tell me today. I wonder if he’ll write back after he gets my responses?
