recent tracks:
2.11.2005
A Culture of Poison
I've been working on comps. I keep adding to and fleshing out my outline more and more; I'm worried I'm going to end up with more of a 20 page paper than the prescribed limit, and that that means I'll spend more time writing than I'd like. It might be a challenge to pare my talk down to 15 minutes, too.
That is inconsequential information.
I also fear that the election of Howard Dean as chairman of the DNC will be inconsequential. On the one hand, he brings some sorely needed energy to the party. On the other hand, he averaged a finish of about 3rd in the primaries last year, winning only his own state. This brings his basic political skill somewhat into question. I'll reserve judgment for now. Also I suppose a significant portion of readers would prefer he and the party falter.
This evening as a means of procrastinating on comps, I have spent some time organizing my computer again, as OurTunes has been significantly cluttering my D drive. I reinstalled iTunes and that took care of some of the organization for me; I am undecided as to whether I will attempt to make iTunes my main player as I did once before, or instead try to deal with the much smaller and seemingly more facile (though more demanding of technical understanding) foobar2000. Foobar2000 is supposed to allow for the conversion of .m4a files into .mp3 files, which would be useful for cd-creating purposes. I offer links, however, to none of the above; if you're interested, google should suffice.
As for social life, I got to watch Wife Swap (a particularly painful one this week, I'd say, and one that heartily reinforced my political views) last night with Summer and Anna, then attended a panel on eating disorders this evening with Lauren before taking a snack bar break with Summer. This weekend looks now to be a solid mix of fun and work, with an unfortunate track meet tossed in as well. I had a terrible practice today and am not looking forward to displaying my lack of skill.
Busyness detracts too much from fun. Luckily there will be more fun in the near future, as comps get done and the weather gets nicer and perhaps days of tumbling in the grass can be relived. Tonight the sky is clear and beautiful but that's not quite as good as spring handstands and somersaults.
That is inconsequential information.
I also fear that the election of Howard Dean as chairman of the DNC will be inconsequential. On the one hand, he brings some sorely needed energy to the party. On the other hand, he averaged a finish of about 3rd in the primaries last year, winning only his own state. This brings his basic political skill somewhat into question. I'll reserve judgment for now. Also I suppose a significant portion of readers would prefer he and the party falter.
This evening as a means of procrastinating on comps, I have spent some time organizing my computer again, as OurTunes has been significantly cluttering my D drive. I reinstalled iTunes and that took care of some of the organization for me; I am undecided as to whether I will attempt to make iTunes my main player as I did once before, or instead try to deal with the much smaller and seemingly more facile (though more demanding of technical understanding) foobar2000. Foobar2000 is supposed to allow for the conversion of .m4a files into .mp3 files, which would be useful for cd-creating purposes. I offer links, however, to none of the above; if you're interested, google should suffice.
As for social life, I got to watch Wife Swap (a particularly painful one this week, I'd say, and one that heartily reinforced my political views) last night with Summer and Anna, then attended a panel on eating disorders this evening with Lauren before taking a snack bar break with Summer. This weekend looks now to be a solid mix of fun and work, with an unfortunate track meet tossed in as well. I had a terrible practice today and am not looking forward to displaying my lack of skill.
Busyness detracts too much from fun. Luckily there will be more fun in the near future, as comps get done and the weather gets nicer and perhaps days of tumbling in the grass can be relived. Tonight the sky is clear and beautiful but that's not quite as good as spring handstands and somersaults.
posted by Max Greene at 2:17 AM
COMMENTARY & NEWS:
FRIEND:
NEWS & COMMENTARY:
PLACES
REFERENCE:
VANITY:
4 Comments:
By the way, here are our playlists from Monday...enjoy!
Maybe Howard Dean shouldn't be the leader of the DNC, and maybe he lost his primaries, because he is a RAVING LUNATIC!
Just a thought.
Here is an article from December '03 providing some basis for Andy's assertion. One might do well just to go to his Web Archive and find all occurrences of the term "Howard Dean" for further support for his argument. That's where I got that Times link in the first place.
Or, to save you the trouble, here's the text of the article:
The Mysterious Stranger
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 9, 2003
My moment of illumination about Howard Dean came one day in Iowa when I saw him lean into a crowd and begin a sentence with, "Us rural people. . . ."
Dean grew up on Park Avenue and in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of Sheba. Yet he said it with conviction. He said it uninhibited by any fear that someone might laugh at or contradict him.
It was then that I saw how Dean had liberated himself from his past, liberated himself from his record and liberated himself from the restraints that bind conventional politicians. He has freed himself to say anything, to be anybody.
Other candidates run on their biographies or their records. They keep policy staff from their former lives, and they try to keep their policy positions reasonably consistent.
But Dean runs less on biography than any other candidate in recent years. When he began running for president, he left his past behind, along with the encumbrances that go with it. As governor of Vermont, he was a centrist Democrat. But the new Dean who appeared on the campaign trail — a jarring sight for the Vermonters who knew his previous self — is an angry maverick.
The old Dean was a free trader. The new Dean is not. The old Dean was open to Medicare reform. The new Dean says Medicare is off the table. The old Dean courted the N.R.A.; the new Dean has swung in favor of gun control. The old Dean was a pro-business fiscal moderate; the new Dean, sounding like Ralph Nader, declares, "We've allowed our lives to become slaves to the bottom line of multinational corporations all over the world."
The philosopher George Santayana once observed that Americans don't bother to refute ideas — they just leave them behind. Dean shed his upper-crust WASP self, then his centrist governor self, bursting onto the national scene as a mysterious stranger who comes out of nowhere to battle corruption.
The newly liberated Dean is uninhibited. A normal person with no defense policy experience would not have the chutzpah to say, "Mr. President, if you'll pardon me, I'll teach you a little about defense." But Dean says it. A normal person, with an eye to past or future relationships, wouldn't compare Congress to "a bunch of cockroaches." Dean did it.
The newly liberated Dean doesn't worry about having a coherent political philosophy. There is a parlor game among Washington pundits called How Liberal Is Howard Dean? One group pores over his speeches, picks out the things no liberal could say and argues that he's actually a centrist. Another group picks out the things no centrist could say and argues that he's quite liberal.
But the liberated Dean is beyond categories like liberal and centrist because he is beyond coherence. He'll make a string of outspoken comments over a period of weeks — on "re-regulating" the economy or gay marriage — but none of them have any relation to the others. When you actually try to pin him down on a policy, you often find there is nothing there.
For example, asked how we should proceed in Iraq, he says hawkishly, "We can't pull out responsibly." Then on another occasion he says dovishly, "Our troops need to come home," and explains, fantastically, that we need to recruit 110,000 foreign troops to take the place of our reserves. Then he says we should not be spending billions more dollars there. Then he says again that we have to stay and finish the job.
At each moment, he appears outspoken, blunt and honest. But over time he is incoherent and contradictory.
He is, in short, a man unrooted. This gives him an amazing freshness and an exhilarating freedom.
Everybody talks about how the Internet has been key to his fund-raising and organization. Nobody talks about how it has shaped his persona. On the Internet, the long term doesn't matter, as long as you are blunt and forceful at that moment. On the Internet, a new persona is just a click away. On the Internet, everyone is loosely tethered, careless and free. Dean is the Internet man, a string of exhilarating moments and daring accusations.
The only problem is that us rural folk distrust people who reinvent themselves. Many of us rural folk are nervous about putting the power of the presidency in the hands of a man who could be anyone.
Post a Comment
<< Home