Misanthropic Californian

For the past couple of years I’ve tried really hard to give George W. Bush a fair shake, but he keeps saying things that make my brain hurt. At this point it’s very hard to feel guilty about criticizing him; I think I can see his basic methodology, and I find it to be completely wrongheaded. He appears to pick out a position based on whatever he feels like, and then ignores any evidence to the contrary. He also seems to select people for important government positions based on their loyalty to him and agreement with his ideas rather than their actual competence and how well they’ll serve the country. The business with allegedly firing competent attorneys on the basis of failing to serve a Republican agenda is just the latest example to come out in the media. There was also the whole Katrina/FEMA thing, John Bolton, and entirely too much stuff about Iraq and 9/11.

Not everyone who works for him is incompetent, of course, but I think it’s safe to say that everyone who works for him agrees with his ideas, or else they wouldn’t be working for him for very long. When John Bolton was on the Daily Show he said that the President should serve the people who voted for him, and bring his own views to the fore. Does that mean he doesn’t need to serve me or the majority (about 70%) of Californians? I want a President who serves America, not just the bits of it that agree with him. Respecting and considering other people’s opinions is an important part of, you know, being a functional adult.

It won’t be too much longer before the presidential election season starts up again, this time without Bush campaigning. I know Cheney isn’t running — apparently he’s too mean and scary or something — so I’m hoping the GOP puts forth a candidate I’ll at least feel is worth giving some consideration to. (And while I suspect a lot of Hillary Clinton’s negative press was manufactured by her conservative opponents, I’d still rather see someone less divisive on the Democratic side). In 2000 and 2004, I wanted a president who:

1. Was smart. Bush’s GPA was supposedly 2.0, and that was with intensive tutoring. Granted he went to Harvard and Yale, but you’d think we could find someone better to be the leader of a world superpower.
2. Wasn’t a total ass. When I watched the debate between Bush and Gore, I hated both of them. When I hear about what Bush was like in college, it seems like we have a frat boy in the White House, and I don’t really like frat boys.
3. Was a good speaker. Gore and Kerry were just boring, and when criticized Bush gets this whiny, flailing demeanor going that I can’t stand. If Colbert’s Better Know A District is any indication politicians who are good speakers are surprisingly rare, but again, leader of the free world and all that. We should demand the best.
4. Likes to read. A president has a lot of stuff to keep up with.

Admittedly, I’m just going with my impressions from the news, and not doing a whole lot of research, but plenty of people who are smarter than me have already said their piece on the subject. What I’m really hoping is that for 2008 both parties can put forward better candidates than they have been, people who are intelligent and non-divisive. Granted, politics seems to push candidates towards being negative towards each other, even if it is all in veiled political-style speech. Still, although I tend to hold liberal views I don’t think Republicans are evil or anything, and I really think they can come up with someone better than George W. Bush if they try. With McCain and Giuliani among the front-runners, and guys like Ron Paul (who I might be willing to vote for, though he probably has no chance) also in the running, I’m a lot more confident of that than I have been in a long time.

Religious people worry me sometimes. Not all religious people of course, but there are a lot of scary ones out there. From my parents I got the idea that respecting other people’s religions is a moral imperative, but some people make that really, really hard. Like when I go to a rock concert and there’s those guys with signs, and when you get close one of them is saying things like, “You know there’s a barbeque! And you’re gonna be there! Cuz you’re going to hell! Cuz you’re a sinner! And you don’t love Jesus!” And everyone who’s just there to hear some music either avoids making eye contact or mocks him (“Ha ha! He called me vile!“), and Christianity seems just a little more retarded each time it happens.

Which is stupid. The basic idea of Christianity, as I understand it, is that there’s a benevolent, omnipotent creator who loves everyone. I really wish I could bring myself to believe that, because it would be really, really comforting, and it would make me that much more inclined to be nice to everyone. That’s why when guys like Pat Roberts and Jerry Falwell say things like, “Well, that liberal supreme court justice is getting kinda’ old, so let’s all pray that he has a heart attack!” I really wonder, if there is a god, what he thinks of that. My Christian friends say they’re reasonably sure that god is not anyone’s hitman.

Your average Christians, I can deal with just fine. But there are some that scare the absolute crap out of me. On Penn & Teller, they did a show about the existence of God, and there was a Christian anti-evolution guy who was saying that, without a God to provide moral guidance, he had no reason not to kill people. The expression on my face is hard to convey, but this emoticon captures a little bit of it:

:-O

Even Christians are supposed to have a concept of virtuous behavior that springs from within, not from a fear of punishment, but some preachers are evidently not competent enough to instill morals into their flock without resorting to hellfire. I’m agnostic and I have lots of friends who are agnostic and atheist, and we don’t go around killing people at all. This is because (1) spending the rest of my natural life behind bars just doesn’t fit in with my long-term goals, and (2) if enough people don’t go around killing people, then no one has to worry about random people coming to kill them, and you can relax and actually, you know, live.

Of course, you’d be surprised how many Christians don’t know all that much about Christianity. Getting people to recite the Ten Commandments is a lot like asking them to name presidents or state capitals, only with more guilt. (I would post a YouTube link for that Stephen Colbert clip, but Viacom’s lawyers went rabid) People are being selective about what they take from the Bible anyway. There are very few Christians who think that people who work on Sundays should be put to death, but it’s in there. There are also very few Christians who even know what it means when the Bible says (I swear I am not making this up) “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.” Apparently, if you take a baby goat and boil it in it’s mother’s milk, you’re doing something Bad, and at that something bad that goes beyond getting PETA weirdos mad at you. This was most likely meant to prohibit come kind of pagan magic ritual; in any case Wikipedia tells me it’s from a part of Exodus that people call the “Ritual Decalogue,” what might be called “the other Ten Commandments.”

There are still a lot of philosophical issues I need to work out for myself (like a deep, awful dread of death), but I’m still a big fan of science. I don’t really have the talents or discipline necessary to be a scientist, but the bits of it that I understand are by and large beautiful and consistent. That’s why I get annoyed when some Christians try to pit their religion against science. Since the theory of evolution conflicts with a literal interpretation of Genesis, there are entirely too many people who resort to any spurious logic they can lay their hands on in order to “prove” that the theory of evolution is wrong. This includes conflating the scientific and everyday meaning of the word “theory,” very basic misinformation about geology, and even making up stories about Darwin converting/repenting on his deathbed. I’ll leave the debunking of religious pseudoscience to the experts (i.e., scientists), but it doesn’t take much effort to see that stuff like the “young earth” idea is patently, obviously wrong. If you look at the layers of sedimentary rock in the Grand Canyon, and realize that each layer takes X amount of time to accumulate, then multiply by the number of layers, you get a figure in the millions of years.

Karen Armstrong contends that religion is normally divided into mythos and logos; stuff like the mythical story of how the world was made in seven days (or from the thunder god’s testicles or whatever) was meant to be separate from the practical details of life, even when a holy book would contain elements of both. Fundamentalism, according to her, effectively collapses the distinction between the two, folding the mythos into the logos. Believing that the world was made in seven days becomes as much of a moral imperative as not committing murder, and pragmatic rules like not eating pork obtain divine significance. This is an issue for Christianity not only because it has created a powerful anti-intellectual thread in Christian society, but because both halves of the Bible are fundamentally tied to when they were created. The Old Testament/Torah was the holy book of the Hebrews, a nomadic people who lived in rather harsh conditions, and for whom the book provided origin myths, history, and moral and practical guidance. The New Testament was supposedly put together by Jesus’ apostles and other very early Christians, conveying their new outgrowth of Judaism at a time when they were at once being oppressed by the Roman Empire and gaining many new converts, and Jerusalem itself was under Roman rule. Divorced from context, there’s some good stuff in the Bible, but also things that have little or no relevance to a post-industrial society. Prohibiting homosexuality makes sense in a nomadic society where maintaining a certain birthrate is an absolute necessity for survival. Today, it’s just the latest thing that people think it’s okay to be bigoted about.

The thing that makes all of this twice as annoying is that there are plenty of sane, reasonable Christians out there, whoare being drowned out by the din of the fundamentalists and apocalyptics in public discourse. Part of the problem is that, just like with political affiliations, the sane, moderate people really need to speak out against the loonies who shout so loudly under the same banners. The fact that most of the people speaking out against Islam are conservative pundits makes me inclined to give it a fair shake, but when peaceful Muslims who speak out against terrorism are threatened, it doesn’t speak well of the religion. (Whatever happened to “The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr”?) No faith practiced by functional human beings deserves to have the likes of Pat Roberts and Fred Phelps be its public face, and no one who practices such a faith should stand for their beliefs being made to look like a source of mindless bigotry and an enemy of reason.

I hate pundits. I fucking despise them. I’m not usually all that much into hating things (“hate” is a very strong word when you have a flattened affect like me), but this is one of the very few things where I make an exception. I’m not sure what the proper dictionary definition is, but they seem to be irrational blowhards, who pick a side first and then vigorously defend it and trash the opposition, facts and logic be damned. Talk radio is infested with them, as is Fox News (I don’t have cable anymore, so I can’t speak for CNN, MSNBC, etc., but I suspect they have some too). They are a class of people who get undeserved media attention by being loud jerks and demonizing both any actual opponents and whatever imagined or exaggerated opposition they can come up with.

Conservatives seem to have a larger, more prominent selection of pundits, but the liberals aren’t lacking per se. While Limbaugh incorrectly thinks he’s clever for calling Al Franken’s network “Dead Air America Radio,” I’d like to think that their financial troubles are an encouraging indication that whatever other virtues or faults or derangements they might have, liberals by and large aren’t interested in listening to pundits spoon-feed them one-sided garbage. I’d like to think that, but it may just be that more liberals have iPods. I know I gave up on radio years ago, and not just because of talk radio.

So, if you really want to listen to pundits on the radio or watch them on TV, I can’t and won’t stop you. But the more you listen, the less I respect you. Seriously. I can’t help it.

When I go to the bookstore and make the mistake of looking at the current affairs section (and these days it is a mistake to do so) and I see a book like Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism, I really worry about the state of the nation. Hannity is apparently describing other Americans who he disagrees with politically as “evil.” The word “evil” worked well in Lord of the Rings when talking about the red eye of Sauron and his orcish armies intent on destroying the world of Men, but it’s really, really hard to use it in real life without sounding insane. That’s before we mention Anne Coulter. Even other conservatives tend to try to distance themselves from her, although in spite of her apparently being either completely insane or very good at acting as such, her vitriolic books sell distressingly well. That a book about liberals called “Treason” can become a bestseller does not speak well of the health of American democracy and discourse. I’m not about to defend liberals’ own pundits and their own insanity; the best I can say about Al Franken and his ilk seem to lack some of the vitriol and vicious edge of their conservative counterparts. The truth is much more complicated than they would have us believe.

Pundits are not funny people either. They ones who used to be funny (if you liked Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo back in their SNL days) aren’t, and the ones who never were funny are painfully unfunny. Mostly they’re angry and the entertainment value they offer is the heady, uncomfortable rush of watching someone else getting really angry. No wonder so many people listen to that format alone in their cars.

I hope I’m not acting like a pundit on this blog. For one thing, I have to get very, very worked up (which doesn’t happen all that often) to start insulting people, and I really don’t think I have all the answers. At best I know what helps me stay sane and lets me make sense of the world, which admittedly isn’t a great metric for determining truth. I’m writing this stuff mainly for myself — both to practice writing stuff in general and to get my thoughts out and in a written form — and not particularly to try to influence others.

Incidentally, it’s St. Patrick’s day. My rant on why I don’t drink alcohol (or coffee, or smoke cigarettes or do any other drugs) isn’t ready yet. Irish people living in American supposedly call March 17th “Amateur’s Night,” for all the people who don’t know their own limitations when it comes to alcohol. Stop it. Our slightly schizophrenic internet oracle, Wikipedia, tells me that St. Patrick is remembered for taking the lead in converting the people of his native Ireland to Christianity in the fourth century. I have mixed feelings about Christianity, but I’m not sure that the guy would’ve wanted to be remembered through binge drinking.

Sex is a very strange and touchy subject for Americans. We have puritanical fuckwits saying that if you’re having sex that’s not in the missionary position and not between one man and one woman who are married, you’re doing something wrong and you’ll go to hell for it. On the other hand American pop culture says, in effect, if you’re not getting laid all the time, you’re a loser and you don’t count as a human being. Caught between the two are actual human beings with real needs and wants.

I find the extreme Christian approach just plain stupid, and very far removed from human nature in the first place. I’m agnostic, and to the extent that I believe there is a divine, supreme being, I have a really, really hard time with the idea that a being capable of creating such a vast, complex, and beautiful universe would actually care one way or the other about how any given human being gets their rocks off, whether it’s by themselves or with more than one person, or with people of the same gender, or whatever. Sexual behavior clearly arose in the evolutionary process well before any notions of marriage, monogamy, or sexual ethics. Men’s brains are wired to adjust their preferences over time depending on what they’re exposed to, and women’s instincts are to allow for multiple mates. While the main purpose of sex is of course reproduction, it has long been used for other purposes, even among animals. Moreover, it’s a psychological/biological need, and individuals need to come to terms with their own sexuality in some fashion in order to maintain mental stability.

Some people could stand to be more responsible about how they approach sex, but when people say that all masturbation is bad, they’re just not right in the head. It actually has health benefits, and for men it supposedly can help prevent prostate cancer. I’d rather not get cancer at all if I can help it, but I especially don’t want to get cancer in my prostate. It also undoubtedly keeps quite a few people from having meltdowns, and while I think Christianity has done some positive things for mankind, the demonization of masturbation seems one of its worst negative effects.

Likewise, there are people out there who have unconventional tastes, but short of criminal, abusive kinds of sex (pedophilia, rape, etc.), this stuff is mostly harmless. Religion doesn’t particularly have any objections to raise about fetishistic sex, so instead it’s more a fear of things that are different — and fear of being different — that drives people to regard alternative approaches to sexuality with fear and revulsion. Once you get past the initial shock, fetishists tend to be really hilarious, actually, though as I understand it there are a lot of amateurs who need to think more about taking proper safety precautions.

The pop culture view of sex just pisses me off, but then pop culture in general tends to piss me off. Different people have different needs and wants when it comes to sex, so couples get the unenviable task of trying to find some kind of middle ground that makes both partners happy. Except for nymphomania that disrupts one’s ability to function in society, there’s not really any such thing as too much or too little sex. This latter is important for me, because my antisocial tendencies make me more or less asexual. What I mean is, while on a theoretical basis I’d be interested in partners of the female persuasion, in reality I don’t think I like human beings enough to want to have sex with one, and the practical details of intercourse seem kind of nauseating to me if I think about them too much. American pop culture tells me that I’m a waste of skin for being this way.

I used to be generally uncomfortable about sex, basically on account of the guilt and misinformation that was dumped into my head by American society. When I finally did come to terms with the whole thing, I realized that while I had become very open-minded, almost blase, about sex, I hadn’t actually become more interested in doing it myself. Since I’m so open-minded about the whole issue, I have a hard time feeling bad about it, especially since my unusualness is such that it makes me utterly harmless to others. If I were to somehow wind up in a relationship again, this would legitimately be a problem within that context, but otherwise it’s just yet another of my eccenticities. I haven’t really told anyone about this, and I think being gay or bisexual would be easier to explain to people (there are two bisexuals in my immediate family after all). It’s sort of like how coming out as Mormon, even as a follower of Thor or the SubGenius or whatever would be much easier for narrow-minded people to swallow than atheism. It’s a very strange feeling, the certainty that something about you is beyond the pale for most people. Granted, it’s not exactly a challenge for me to avoid having sex, but bery, very few people refrain from sexual activity by choice, and even fewer don’t plan on it being a temporary arrangement.

I don’t like guns. I don’t even like the idea of guns. I know they’re an underpinning of the modern world, but so are sewer systems, and I don’t feel any need to take a tour of the local sewage farm. I know there are people in the world who legitimately need them for self-defense, but living in Northern California, I can’t say I’ve met any that I know of.

Gun control is, ironically, one of those political issues that makes me want to go out and shoot people. Gun control advocates are convinced that banning guns will make us safer, and they have statistics to prove their point. The NRA and other pro-firearms advocates are convinced that if enough upstanding citizens have guns, we’ll be safer because criminals will be afraid to try anything, and they also have statistics to prove their point. Both are also trying to convince us that if they don’t get their way, violent crime will vastly increase. So, it’s another debate where both sides have “facts” that completely contradict each other, and no one has ever shown me anything in between.

It’s also one of those debates where people keep trying to do necro-telepathy on the founding fathers. While I share Penn & Teller’s sentiment that the Constitution is just plain awesome, we live in a very different place from the 13-state nation that narrowly avoided collapse 200-some years ago. This country was always meant to be a work in progress; it belongs to us, not those dead guys. Their sentiment that governments aren’t to be trusted and citizens need to be vigilant in case the British come back isn’t quite as pertinent anymore. We’re now a heck of a lot more powerful than the British, and for better or for worse no group of citizens can hope to overcome the power of the U.S. military. I strongly suspect that if there’s ever another real revolution on American soil, it won’t be fought with guns at all. If I could figure out how to write it, I’d do a story about militia weirdos storming the White House only to find that for the rest of the nation the guns they’ve been stockpiling are obsolete because they have no power to influence information.

Anyway, I’m in favor of the NRA insofar as they advocate safe and sane use of guns, but both they and their opponents seem to be missing something very important:

Gun ownership is cultural. Most Texans believe gun ownership is a right, and that it makes them safer. Most Californians believe guns are dangerous and best avoided. (The Supreme Court sees more shades of gray there, which to me suggests sanity). If there were suddenly California-style gun control laws in Texas, you’d end up with lots of otherwise upstanding citizens with illegal firearms. If there were suddenly Texas-style legalization of concealed carry and such in California, there probably wouldn’t be a noticeable increase in gun ownership. True safety from firearm-based violence requires basically removing them from the equation entirely — like in the UK and Japan — and that isn’t an option for the U.S., any more than it would be practical to require adults to own and train in the use of firearms.

You can tell I’m Californian by how guns make me uneasy. Everyone makes mistakes, and mistakes made with guns tend to be permanent. To me, life is too precious for that. If it reaches the point where I can’t feel safe in my own home without a deadly weapon, it’s time to move. Period. Not everyone has that luxury, sure, but I never said I was advocating that everyone take my approach. With the typically flawed, black and white (or red and blue) debate strategy that passes for discourse in this country, there’s a vacuum of hard facts that leaves a wholly emotional, personal opinion my only recourse.

The Show with ZeFrank is just about over. I kind of missed the boat on that once, getting into it just in time to realize it would end in less than a month. I want to do something creative on a regular basis, but I’m not in any sense a performer, so I won’t be doing any kind of podcast thing, audio or video. Instead, I’ll go with writing, which I can do competently. I decided to write an anonymous (pseudonymous) blog, where I can rant about whatever I feel like. I’m not totally sure why I’m putting this out on the internet, except that I believe that if something’s worth making, it’s (usually) worth sharing with others. People very close to me in real life might be able to figure out that I’m the one writing this, but I highly doubt it’ll get read by much of anyone in the first place. Still, I’m not going to make it easy by including incriminating details or links.

Anyway. I decided to call this blog “Misanthropic Californian.” The Californian part is easy, since I live in Northern California, though insofar as I have an identity, being “Californian” isn’t really that strong a part of it, at least not when I’m surrounded by California on all sides. The “Misanthropic” part requires a little more explanation.

I don’t like people. There, I said it. I’ve always been a little strange, literally from day one, when a kink in the umbilical cord made me come out colored blue (I got better). In some ways I’m better than I used to be (I have friends, and I’m not totally incapable of human emotion), and in other ways I’ve gotten worse (I’ve nearly given up on romantic relationships). I don’t have or particularly need a logical explanation for my behavior. If you’re one of those insane people who dislikes mushrooms, you don’t need a logical reason why. I could talk about how horrible people are — it’s gotten pretty easy these days — but when it comes down to it, I just genuinely dislike most human contact. If someone is shy, they want to interact with people, but something is holding them back. Sometimes I can be shy, but more often than not it’s this distaste coming to the fore.

It’s surprisingly easy to function in society this way, I’ve found. My first ever job was in retail, and I hated it. Of course, this had a lot to do with working for a shitty company that wants employees to be pushy salesmen to make up for their inability to put appealing products on shelves at reasonable prices (and these days, there’s a whole hell of a lot of companies like that, including pretty much every dedicated video game retailer). I’ve also worked in an office, which was more bearable to me than you might think, since people aren’t usually completely stupid about whether or not you’re a conversationalist. Security is a really easy job, and with the right post you can spend an entire day without seeing a soul. I don’t really talk to people at school either outside of class. High school was a different matter, but now I don’t really bother. Not that people are falling over themselves to talk to me in the first place, but it’s very, very easy to pull off during a day at college. I’m not saying everyone should live like I do. I’m not sure I should be living like I do, but changing is really fucking hard.

My goal, which may or may not work out, is to write at least five mini-rants per week, for a long time. I’ll start with generic stuff that’s been on my mind, and I’ll probably be be forced to start looking for news and such to comment on (which I should be doing anyway).