The more I hear about this kind of shit, the more I believe that one of these years, we should lure all these people into these big-box stores, and once they’ve all stampeded inside, we should seal the places up from the outside and cover them in concrete.
We really do condition ourselves to exhibit tremendously sickening behavior, don’t we?
One thing I find amusing in the weeks since the election is the backpedaling of conservative pundits on the definition of a mandate.
If you’ll remember in 2004, when Bush “won” with a whopping 50.7% of the popular vote, you couldn’t turn on a television or radio without hearing the word “mandate” about a hundred billion dozen times per hour, as though the outcome was some sort of epic landslide. Robert Novak crawled out from his coffin in the cellar of a Transylvanian castle long enough to hiss out the following in response to a question on whether Bush’s “win” was really a mandate:
Of course it is. It’s a 3.5 million vote margin. But the people who are saying that it isn’t a mandate are the same people who were predicting that John Kerry would win. … So the people who say there’s not a mandate want the president, now that he’s won, to say, Oh, we’re going to accept the liberalism that the — that the voters rejected. But Mark, this is a conservative country, and it showed it on last Tuesday.
Peggy Noonan warbled out the following on the same topic:
George W. Bush is the first president to win more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988… The president received more than 59 million votes, breaking Ronald Reagan’s old record of 54.5 million…It will be hard for the mainstream media to continue, in the face of these facts, the mantra that we are a deeply and completely divided country. But they’ll try!
And, of course, all you have to do is toss this idea into the echo chamber of conservative commentators, and the message gets spread far and wide as incontrovertible fact: Move over, everyone — the country has spoken, and our Fearless Decider now has a free pass to oppress gays, privatize everything, create even larger gaps between haves and have-nots, and basically do whatever in fuck we damn well please.
Well, jump ahead four years, and what do these same pundits (and likely the myriad others who drink the Kool-Aid they make) think about Obama’s victory with 53% of the vote?
Here’s Robert Novak, just before grumpily slamming his coffin shut:
The first Democratic Electoral College landslide in decades did not result in a tight race for control of Congress.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt won his second term for president in 1936, the defeated Republican candidate, Gov. Alf Landon of Kansas, won only two states, Maine and Vermont, and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress by wide margins.
But Obama’s win was nothing like that. He may have opened the door to enactment of the long-deferred liberal agenda, but he neither received a broad mandate from the public nor the needed large congressional majorities.
[Emphasis mine.]
What did Peggy “our country is united under the banner of conservatism” Noonan have to say about this?
This is already a dramatic time — two wars, economic collapse — and people are rattled. “Moderation in all things.” It should be noted here that the split in the popular vote was 53% to 46%. That is a solid seven-point win for the new president elect, but it also means more than 56 million voters went for John McCain in a year when all the stars were aligned against the Republicans…Mr. Obama has a significant portion of the nation to win over. He acknowledged this in his sterling victory speech, when he spoke of “those whose support I have yet to earn.” He does have yet to earn it.
So 50.7% > 53%, apparently. I mean, that’s grade school math, right there, and they fuck it up so bad it’s pathetic.
Now, it’s true that over 46% of the country voted for John McCain — over 50 million Americans. That’s a lot of people, and an election victory doesn’t mean you get to just ignore that many people just because your side was victorious. Real democracy means considering the wishes of the minority as well. But, see, here’s the difference: Conservative policies tend to be extremely oppressive, or at least facilitating of oppression. Bush had to ignore the wishes and demands of liberals, because implementation of conservative policies is on the whole fundamentally incompatible with freedom.
For instance, it’s impossible to dictate who an adult can and can’t love while also giving that same adult the ability to decide for themselves who they do and do not love. It’s impossible to give religious freedom while denying the right to perform marriage rights to churches and individuals who believe they can’t deny any two consenting adults the ability to marry each other regardless of genitals. It’s impossible to force teachers to propagate the message that science has nothing to do with the scientific method while also allowing them to teach their students what science actually is. It’s impossible to outlaw abortion while still giving a woman the right to her own body. It’s impossible to ban pornography and contraception while at the same time giving individuals the right to sexual freedom.
Conversely, Obama can for the most part ignore conservatives’ wishes and demands, because conservatives in the end are still free to do as they themselves please (save for oppressing other people, which is a right they should unquestionably and forever be denied). Their churches don’t have to marry gays and they themselves don’t have to have gay relationships just because gay marriage is legalized. They can still send their children to “Sunday School” without worrying that some third party has the right to come into their Bible study classrooms and countermand everything they teach. They have the right not to get abortions or use contraception, and not to look at pornography.
Ultimately, it’s difficult to claim a real electoral mandate in the case of either a 50.7% or a 53% win. Obviously, Obama won by a larger percentage, substantially more electoral votes (which is really meaningful, given that the Electoral College is skewed in favor of more conservative states) and over 7 million more people, but anything in the range of just over 50% isn’t really a mandate. The real mandate comes from the fact that liberal policies give the individual the right to be individual — that they don’t oppress anyone in the same way conservative policies almost always do. The real mandate comes from the fact that oppression is wrong.
Do you enjoy cyberpunk? Are you a fan of Neal Stephenson and/or dystopian alternative presents or futures? Then read my friend John’s newest book already, before he apparently starts shooting people in the face.
From the site:
Vineyard Haven Author Pens Third Novel
Dystopian narrative evokes shock and dread of Orwell’s classic “1984″
VINEYARD HAVEN — John R. Sundman III, a longtime resident of Martha’s Vineyard, has published his third novel. The author is popular among readers of the science fiction genre known as “techno punk,” which grapples with issues such as the role of technology as a destructive force, the devolution of modern civilization, and the threats posed by socio-religious cults in a 21st-century global culture linked by the Internet.
Sundman’s new novel, “The Pains,” is a story of faith in a world that appears to be falling apart. It tells the story of Norman Lux, a 24-year-old novitiate in a religious order, who becomes afflicted with something akin to stigmata.
“I wanted to recapture the sense of shock and dread that George Orwell’s ’1984′ inspired when it was published back in the 20th century,” Sundman said. “Orwell’s masterpiece has become so familiar that its basic message no longer shocks and disturbs us. Time and familiarity have diluted its power. I’m hoping that “The Pains” will rekindle some of the visceral excitement that readers experienced when reading ’1984′ for the first time. That being said, it’s not to everybody’s taste — some people might find it too shocking or too disturbing.”
Adding to the dark aura of the book are a dozen stunning illustrations by Canadian writer and illustrator Cheeseburger Brown. Brown’s artwork has garnered several awards on both sides of the border. His short film “Space Attack!” was awarded a Stanley from the California cable broadcasters’ community in 2007. He won the 2002 Lightwave Animation Award and the 2003 Hewlett-Packard Juried Digital Art Competition in 2003.
Sundman’s first novel, “Acts of the Apostles,” was published in 1999. It was well received by “geeks” worldwide. Slashdot gave it an excellent review, saying it was “what Tom Clancy would write if he were smart.” Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin said it “may well be the ultimate hacker book.” Salon.com also published a highly positive review of “Acts of the Apostles,” which won Writer’s Digest Magazine’s “National Self-Published Book Award” competition in 2000. Sundman’s novel was judged first in a field of 325 other books.
His second book, “Cheap Complex Devices,” was published in 2002. Although purportedly about the “Hofstadter Prize for Machine-Written Narrative,” the book is a meditation on self-awareness (human, machine, or other), and a satire of academic artificial intelligence in the spirit of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire.”
For a limited time, “The Pains” will be available for download at no cost. For additional details, please visit http://www.wetmachine.com/ThePains/index.html
In addition to writing fiction, Sundman has done reporting for Salon.com and other magazines. He is a volunteer at Island Food Pantry and the Serving Hands pantry, and a member of the Tisbury Volunteer Fire Department.
So read it! Read it now! Buy a copy for a friend! (And while you’re at it, check out his first two books as well.)
The Americans and Russians crossed the border around 8:30 Eastern European Time, each seeking to establish contact with the lawful government in Minsk. The Belaya Revolutsiya was already in control of most of the corridor between Poland and the capital, but Minsk itself remained a no-man’s-land, too embroiled in chaos to respond militarily to the entry of foreign rapid-insertion forces. Three Spetsnaz and two USMC choppers made their way immediately for the Presidential Palace.
The ad-hoc agreement on Belarus had just been struck in Brussels when it was tested: that military involvement in the explosive conflict – favored by Germany, Greece, Italy, France, and the US but opposed or not actively favored by most of the remainder – would be discretionary until any foreign power made an active effort to militarily expel NATO forces. At 7:48 European time, confirmation arrived that Russian special forces had opened fire on a US task-force sent to secure the President of Belarus.
Lithuania, Norway, and Spain declared neutrality – and were summarily expelled. As of 7:53 EUT, a NATO police action had formally begun in Belarus.
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Kaliningrad had become a paranoiac fortress over the course of a little more than an hour. Official confirmation that war on Belarus had begun meant that the Russian exclave would be the first Russian target for NATO operations against Belarus. Worse, direct communication with Russia had been astoundingly difficult.
Surveillance and recon had yet to reveal any aggressive Polish troop movement toward the border; the sea was a more disquieting possibility, as the conquest or isolation of Kaliningrad meant that naval operations would have greatly extended range.
At 9:25 Eastern European time, reconnaisance and surveillance made their worst fears real: a large fleet moving at more than 20 knots directly towards them had cleared Thiessow. By the time closer recon had revealed submarines, extended radar showed cruise missiles heading in at a glancing trajectory.
Communication with main command could not be established permanently, and reconnaisance had positively identified the Barracuda-class Duquesne as the Triomphant-class Terrible – an error which falsely confirmed the feared presence of nuclear weapons in the NATO sea taskforce.
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Sarah Palin quietly thanked God that France was under nuclear bombardment rather than the United States, and actually had to be talked into getting onto Marine One to the Stockwell Valley Facility under Spruce Knob. She had expected something like War Games; the facility looked like nothing so much as the top floor of an office building, albeit deep underground. There were even taps for Starbucks and Budweiser, and just above the half-filled red curve streaking from Yakutia to the Mat-Su Valley she could make out a Google copyright.
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The President of the United States stumbled arm in arm with Mayo’s best laproscopists; it was as bright as dusk out but not much later than 1 AM. His Secret Service rushed from gurney to gurney rendering assistance as they could, leaving him more helpless than any President in the last century could have been. His head was in the clouds and his chest felt fit to explode, and it seemed the only thing he could do while fully conscious was feel enough searing agony to come close to vomiting. An olive-skinned nurse younger than Bridget passed by, iron-faced, holding a truncheon and pistol. Her scrubs had ‘TRIAGE’ on them in fresh yellow paint. He felt cold, even though it was over a hundred outside and there weren’t enough burn beds on Earth to hold the Phoenix metro’s victims.
People recognized John sitting there in his gown, and eventually they noticed he was crying. There were a thousand reasons they thought of for why. But it was only pain.
It was only pain.
The first man to pick up the phone in Cvetkovich’s office at 6:32 heard a frantic, almost hyperventilating voice running fast in Russian. The callers grew more important and their messages less informative, and the news spread quickly; by 6:35 most of the high officials of Serbia and Russia were now aware that the government of Belarus had come under attack by hard-right insurgents in its largest cities. Lukashenko quickly assumed complete control over the Belarusian army and state and appealed to Russia for military assistance.
It took five more minutes for Medvedev to prepare a state of emergency, and each neighboring government had already begun vigorous debate over taking the same measure.
By 7:50 Eastern European time, Russia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine had already declared states of emergency; the government of Latvia was still debating the issue and Warsaw had decided to wait for word from NATO – in which the panic was only beginning.
At 1 AM Washington time, a runner for Secretary Petraeus knocked on the Lincoln Bedroom door, and the acting President was informed as of 1:02 AM that the situation in Belarus had come to a head, with Lukaschenko seizing complete power and mobilizing the Army to deal with protestors. The almost instant Russian diplomatic response – compared to the fairly sluggish military reaction – indicated that Lukashenko made prior preparation to violate the Tallinn Framework. Within five minutes, the Tallinn Framework – an agreement under which Lukaschenko would draw his presence in government down to an advisory role and leave pro-US democratic forces to take formal power – had been fully explained to the President.
“Sounds like we’d better call the Russkies’ bluff. What do we have ready to rumble?”
“We’ve got a detachment of the First Airborne ready in Ramstein, Madame President.”
“Keep an eye out on the current situation, and let’s see how far it goes.”
“With respect, the Russians are right on the border. If we wait for them to act, they’ll be in Minsk before we’re in Poland.”
“OK then. Is it them who’re the good guys or am I thinking of someone else?”
“They’re our allies, Madame President.”
“Get ‘em on the phone and put our birds in the air. If nothing happens, they land as close to Belarus as they can. If something does, they keep going.”
“I’ll call the Joint Chiefs. I’d assemble a full Cabinet but they’ve got the Karate Kid squared away for security reasons – we’ll get who we can otherwise.”
As of 9:00 Moscow time, the Army received visual confirmation that communications with the Indian Ocean fleet had gone dead, White infiltrators had destroyed vital apparatus not only in Belarus but in Russia, and contact had yet to be reestablished with the 2nd ObrSpN, the Spetsnaz unit which the Belarus crisis was closest to. Frantic efforts had begun to find replacements, and an ad-hoc team had already been assembled and launched from Kaliningrad. The destruction of Russian property within Russia meant that military action against the White insurgents was now urgent, and also that the Russian expedition would be conducted under the legal aegis of Russia rather than Belarus.
Contact was established by a Spetsnaz officer at 9:15 seeking permission for immediate launch towards Minsk. Permission was granted, and a minute had not passed before their first helicopter made its way out of Pskov.
In the 1950s and 60s, the top marginal tax rates were in the range of 70-90%. During this time, the average executive salary was roughly 50 times that of the average non-executive employee.
Today, the top marginal tax rates are somewhere in the mid-30% range, and the average executive salary is roughly 450 times as much as the average non-executive employee, with some making thousands of times more per year than the minimum wage.
In other words, the wealthiest in this country are making more than they ever have in the history of America, and being taxed less than they’ve been since the early 1900s. Yet they demand even more and to be taxed even less, whining incessantly about it like a bunch of needy crybabies, and somehow it’s the poor who are being unreasonable for wanting to earn a living wage. Somehow the poor are the problem, even though over that same time span from the 1950s, the minimum wage has actually decreased, from, as I’ve mentioned before, an average of around $6.00 in the 50s and 60s to an average of around $4.50 from 2000-2007 (in 1996 dollars).
Here’s a news flash for all you Libertarians and laissez-faire economists: The wealth has already been redistributed — to the people at the top, more and more every year, via the inherent power imbalance of business over employee. The wealth growth that should have benefited every American has been siphoned off by those with the clout to do so, and just because they had the opportunity and the power to leech wealth out of the system, that doesn’t mean they “earned” it, any more than a mugger “earned” the money he or she stole just because they had the right opportunity and were stronger and had better tools at their disposal than the person they robbed.
Financing social programs through taxes is just a way of attempting to remedy this grievous injustice (though, an imperfect solution; much better would be to tie executive salaries to those of the average employee — say, 70x as much — such that if they themselves want to make more money, they have to give everyone else raises as well), and is no more “theft” than returning a stolen car to its rightful owner. Anything less is simply welfare for those who need it the least, at the expense of those who need it the most.
Cities, Politique claimed, were against the Maoist ideal of peasant self-sufficiency, which he took for the purest possible interpretation of communism. They were a legacy of the priests and the French and had to be destroyed.
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At 7:15 local time, a crack squadron of irregular saboteurs closely associated with the Belarus Conservative Christian Party radical group White Revolution rode American-manufactured rail sleds over a disused spur of Soviet industrial track into the Smolensk Oblast, planting a series of synchronized time bombs on military and infrastructure targets and several targets of opportunity and severing, searing with strong acid, and otherwise disabling a wide range of telecom apparatus; they crossed into Belarus again at 6:45 local time, in the process giving an all-clear signal to be relayed to a team around 150 kilometers west in Vileyka; their operations, too, were conducted without incident; the garrison and vital personnel of the long-haul communications base located there – who realized only too late that they were now mute, and lacked the time to reroute signals usefully – were slaughtered to a man, and five minutes before planned Zero Hour (in actuality, fifteen), they had finished rigging charges to implode the facility.
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Phnom Penh had several world-class hospitals, and they were emptied at a moment’s notice. Burn wards, intensive care, even surgical theaters. At gunpoint – at once.
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Calls had just then begun to flood the cellular towers in and around Belarus. In town after town, men and women answered their phones curtly and went to retrieve their jogging outfits from their dressers. Cars, loaded heavy with small arms, rolled out of parking garages and remote facilities. On the other side of the world, a woman woke up Vice-President of the United States and ate breakfast President.
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They’ve yet to fully count the dead.
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The police noticed the occasional circling car, but they did not notice anything else suspicious. They did not have the aerial surveillance necessary to show the large population of joggers making brisk time away from downtown, in the case of Minsk at even greater and more regular speed.
Rudimentary safe areas were established; the ten minutes of delay increased the risk of early exposure but made it easier for every growing cell to find houses, shacks, garages, and makeshift bases.
A bald man told another over the phone in English that the Eagle slumbered and the other man just laughed. His clock said 7:15; it was a minute fast. Sarah Palin, two rooms over, was wondering whether to write a letter to her children or simply spend the evening with Todd; the night had been chosen for this procedure specifically because it was unlikely anything would happen, and nobody outside of the White House knew it was happening – as was normal procedure.
A man in a rented Toyota watched the streets of Minsk roll by. The Serbs, officially, had suggested that the retirement of Lukaschenko would provide a good opportunity to warm up relations with Europe. That was why he was here, or the official reason. The unofficial reason was that he suffered a spreading stomach cancer and the delusion that Lukaschenko was a Jew. His twelve-year-old boy saluted him as he pulled out of the Barysaw alley at 5:45 local time, not a moment late.
It was 7:20 Eastern European Time and the Toyota had caught fire. People stared and ran in each direction. Sasha only realized in his last conscious moment that the police officer at the front of the onrushing throng had his gun holstered, his gloved hand empty.
Ed: This should have gone up before the election, but I didn’t notice it was pending review. In any event, it’s still an awesome and amusing short story written by Alec about what things might have been like for us in the near future had the election gone the other way.
“Mister President, count back from a hundred for me,” said the fat woman. “One hundred,” said the fat man, “ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety.”
John McCain had a number of severe health problems, all aggravated by his experience as a prisoner of war for the bulk of the conflict in Vietnam. Downed after his twenty-third bombardment mission against North Vietnam, he could do little but cheer as Nixon, elected on the promise to end the war honorably, stepped up the bombardment of Vietnam, extending it quietly to Cambodia.
Some wiseass knew they could count on her when the old man went under, and it hadn’t been fifteen minutes before Belya Revolutsiya had sent out texts to all of its members. The leak, who would remain anonymous to history, honestly thought something good would come of this; that freedom would be spread and the Bear’s iron heel caught in a steel trap.
John McCain’s chest had been punctured and trocarred and inflated. He would be unconscious for two and a half hours; the medication was supposed to last eight. It was 10:15 PM in Scottsdale and the weather had been getting balmier by the year, so it was just barely too warm to frost your breath.
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In April 1975, as John McCain was finally recovering from his failed military career and his dreary civilian life and wife, a short man with surreal ideas who called himself Politique Potentielle marched under the blessing of the People’s Republic of China – sworn enemy of the USSR and its client North Vietnam, and sometime bedfellow of the United States – into Phnom Penh, a city of two and a half million souls with a history longer than that of much of Europe. He then ordered every man, woman, and child to leave.
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It was fifteen minutes past midnight in Washington and Sarah Palin was wide awake, later than she liked to be but today she had to sit in the hot seat. Of course, her official duties were ostensibly very important, but Dave and Condi were probably going to be calling any shots that needed to be called.
The President, who was in the process of making a booty-call to the Marriott in which Todd Palin was sleeping, only half-noticed the phone ringing in the other room. It rang three times before being picked up.
It was 7:20 AM in Minsk, too early in the year for that to mean daylight, and a car had just exploded in front of the Serbian embassy, killing two dozen people and injuring scores more. The land-lines were buzzing in every direction; the mobile phones were even more wildly active. At 8:40 local time, orders from Moscow had every cellular tower and satellite under its control shut down as an emergency measure.
The Prime Minister’s intern was finishing the Serbian government’s mourning expression of sorrow and vow to spare no effort with the Belarussian government to bring the perpetrators to justice when, at around 6:32 AM local time, a commotion broke out in the phone room.
For the first time in a long, long while, I’m feeling proud to be an American. I know Obama isn’t going to fix every problem in the world, and that having a rather immense majority in Congress, while nice, isn’t necessarily going to bring about all the necessary reforms and things that we so desperately need, but it’s finally — at long last — a step in the right direction, an indication that there is still hope for us and that we are capable of learning from our experiences. So thank you, America, for not completely fucking things up.
In Michigan, a medical marijuana initiative passed by a landslide, surprisingly, and restrictions on stem cell research were loosened.
There is, however, some bad news out in California, where cruel, bigoted morons managed to triumph over morality and decency and Civil Rights and human kindness by passing Proposition 8. I’m feeling such a profound hatred for so many people right now in an Ahab-style “chest/cannon heart-fire” way that if my wrath could somehow manifest itself, millions of humanity’s most bigoted members would suddenly find themselves immortal with instant regenerative capabilities, roasting ceaselessly and inescapably on the surface of the sun. It really is a shame that we have so little protection against the use of democracy as a tool of oppression.
If these people, these immoral cretins, are going to piss-parade around the ever-increasingly-laughable idea of the “sanctity of marriage”, then I’m going to have to demand that they outlaw divorce, and, further, that people (with much overlap with those who voted “yes”, here, I’m sure) stop dressing up their hideous little inbred monstrosities of pets in tuxedos and dresses and giggling in embarrassing, anthropomorphizing glee about how Pongo and Perdita are getting “married”.
Shame on you, California. Words cannot possibly express the profundity of my disappointment in so, so many of you. To every one of you who voted “yes” on Proposition 8: May every misfortune and tragedy that has the opportunity to befall you succeed in doing so, so that you may yourselves sample the misery you’ve inflicted (and will likely continue to inflict) on so many of your fellow human beings — people who have done you no wrong, yet you persist in your baseless sadism and cruelty.
Let the outcome of Proposition 8 serve as a reminder that we cannot ease up after this one victory, however major — as meaningful and amazing this election may have been, it’s only one battle in what will assuredly be a long, difficult struggle to drag the ignorant kicking and screaming (and perhaps kicking them and screaming at them) into enlightenment.
This election will be an illustration of how America deals with having taken a wrong turn: We’re seeing signs ahead saying “ASS RAPE: 2 MILES” and “PRIVATE ROAD: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT”, and so the question is, do we turn around and try to get back onto a road that might actually take us somewhere, or do we just speed up and wrap our car around a tree? It’s alarming that we actually have to wrestle over the steering wheel with the other passengers in order to keep the car on the road.
Which is why I’m probably going to be depressed even if Obama wins, because I’ll still have to come to terms with the fact that the 40%+ of American voters who’ll be casting their ballot for McCain/Palin are gleefully voting for one of the worst tickets in history after eight years of one of the worst administrations in history. Granted, I don’t think Obama is going to revolutionize the world the way many people think he is, but it’s at least a step in the right direction after years of plodding ever deeper into a bog of radioactive, tar-like shit.