Awareness

One of the great unanswered questions of our time is one that I don’t think anyone really thinks to ask. I’ve found myself asking it a lot lately, though. Why in the world do companies like McDonald’s, Coke, and Budweiser still find it necessary to advertise?

Seriously. Why bother?

I can get advertising a new product. But I want to know who is not aware of the existence of some of these huge consumer giants. I want to meet the guy who walks in to a convenience store and says, “Coca-Cola? Never heard of it.”

I ask because as I write this it’s less than an hour after that orgy of advertising known as the Super Bowl. It’s the last remaining time when people actually watch commercials.*

It can still be an effective time to advertise. Hyundai has done an phenomenal job of advertising during the Super Bowl the last two years. Last year marked the introduction of the Genesis, which was Hyundai’s announcement to the world that it had officially arrived. This year it marketed the hell out of the new Sonata.** Considering that Hyundai has clawed its way from a company that makes cars no one respects to one of the best car companies in the world over the last ten years announcing the next generation of products on the world’s biggest advertising platform is a fantastic strategic plan.

I can’t say the same for, say, Budweiser. As much as I enjoy the Clydesdales, I can’t really say that they serve a purpose in terms of awareness. We all know Budweiser exists. We don’t need to be reminded. I imagine that if they didn’t advertise in the Super Bowl no one would walk in to their local bar next week and say, “Bud Light? Never heard of it.”

In fact, not advertising might well help. Pepsi took that route and all last week the internet was abuzz with the news that Pepsi wasn’t buying ad space. They’d decided instead to use social networking and have the interwebz choose money that Pepsi wasn’t spending at the Super Bowl to engage in philanthropic activities. I thought it was brilliant. It created buzz, positioned Pepsi as a socially responsible company, and actively encouraged their customers to think of them as turning the money spent on that bottle of Diet Pepsi Max in to something to make the world a better place.

And they got free advertising about the fact that they weren’t advertising out of the deal. If I were a cynic I’d say Pepsi was playing us like Charlie Daniels’ fiddle. Oh, wait, I am a cynic. Pepsi played us like a fucking fiddle.

There were two commercials that really didn’t make a damn bit of sense to me, though.

First, for the last couple years Doritos has allowed outside people to compete to write commercials that Doritos then airs during the Super Bowl. This year a church won one of the ad spots. Their goal was to raise awareness for…wait for it…church.

No, really. I’ll let that sink in for a moment.

A church competed to get ad space in the Super Bowl so that the country would say, “Gee, maybe I should go to this church thing next week and see what it’s all about.”

The best thing about it is that if you didn’t know the back story to the commercial itself you would never have known that’s what was going on. It just looked like any other clever commercial. I mean, the thing took place at a fake funeral, so it’s not like it was, “Come to church on Sunday. Jesus would totally hang out and eat Doritos if he was there.” Considering the vast number of commercials that take place in weddings and funerals and the tendency to place weddings and funerals in churches, I don’t see how the spot would actually raise awareness of going to church.

Then, of course, there’s the big, controversial ad. Tim Tebow. Anti-abortion advocacy. It had the internet up in arms.

Now, I get that the problem wasn’t the position of the ad itself. The problem was that CBS aired that ad but didn’t air an ad for a gay dating website and all the while claimed that it had problems with contentious advocacy ads. It’s a double standard by any stretch of the imagination.

Of course the irony is that the ad CBS did air was pretty much one of the most useless commercials I can imagine. The wording was so bland that it couldn’t have been considered advocacy for much of anything beyond motherhood itself. I mean, if you didn’t know the central drive it would have come off as, “If you have a child he could grow up to be Tim Tebow. But make sure to keep an eye on him, because if he gets hit by a car he probably won’t.” I think Donovan McNabb’s mother took a more controversial stance when she tried to tell us that the proper way to raise a son involved Campbell’s Chunky Soup.***

I would hazard a guess that there isn’t a single person on the planet who is old enough to know what abortion is and doesn’t know what the Religious Right’s position on abortion is. And if there is someone out there who doesn’t that person isn’t going to be swayed by an ad in the Super Bowl starring Tim Tebow because that person has been in a hospital in a persistent vegetative state since 1972.

Meanwhile, that’s not the most egregious example of pointless awareness raising in my world. I was driving down 635 yesterday when I noticed one of the I Am Second billboards for the first time. It’s this stupid thing that some Christian groups in Dallas are doing where they find famous Metroplex people like Dirk Nowitzki and have them say things like, “I’m the best at what I do, but I’m still not as good as Jesus,” on video. Then they advertise their website on billboards, so you I can go learn about his Jesus fella that all the coll kids apparently give a shit about and I otherwise would never have noticed, since it’s not like Western civilization isn’t built on a book partially based on his life.

I read an article on the ad campaign right before I moved. And at about the same time I learned that the upcoming implosion of the old Cowboys’ Stadium is being sponsored by Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Talk about finding new and interesting ways to raze awareness. Oh, that was horrible. I really don’t feel good about the fact that I made that pun.

Anyway, in the article on the ever so pointless awareness raising campaign I actually read the words, “We want to make sure that Jesus is as famous in Dallas as Tony Romo.”

That’s like saying I want to make sure my laptop is at least as good as a Tandy 1000. I want to make sure my Chevy Cavalier is as good as walking. I want to make sure my Friday night entertainment is at least as much fun as a swift kick in the nuts.

Who doesn’t know who Jesus is? Is there any human being who is driving around Dallas seeing the churches every twenty feet and thinking, “Geez. I wonder what those things are?”

I’ve made up my mind about Coke, McDonald’s, and Bud Light. I’ve sure as hell made up my mind about Jesus and it’s not because I’ve never heard of the guy. I don’t understand why people are wasting their time and money to make me aware of these things.

Actually, I do get it about the whole Jesus thing. If you have a mentality that if people really knew about Jesus then they’d naturally accept Jesus as the end-all-be-all and that would be that then the very existence of people who disagree makes the world a strange and frightening place. So since I exist that means that I’ve either never heard of this Jesus guy or I’m in active rebellion against him.

And it’s much easier to pretend that I’m just misinformed than to have to understand how to engage my disbelief. My disbelief is scary. It also requires more effort.

I mean, if I’ve never been to McDonald’s you can tell me it’s the best ever. If I tell you that I hate everything on the McDonald’s menu and I’d rather go to Burger King you’ve got to sell me on McDonald’s. If I don’t know what beer is I might not know that Bud Light tastes like watered-down piss.

So we have to ask the question: what’s really the purpose of the ads that seem to be a giant waste of time and money? Do they seek converts to their product, or do they just seek to reinforce the brand message for their current customers? By plastering Tim Tebow on the Super Bowl is Focus on the Family trying to turn me pro-life or are they trying to prove to the Religious Right that they’re really doing something to win the fight?

And, on a deeper level, do those questions even matter? We live in a world where sound bytes rule and people pick and choose the data that reinforces their notions of truth and value regardless of its completeness or proximity to reality. Our news often drops to a “he said, she said” format that tries to make sure both sides are heard even if one side is every human being saying, “The sky is blue,” while the other side is a guy who’s never been outside of a windowless room screaming that the sky is beige with pink racing stripes.

During the Super Bowl my awareness of Doritos, Coke, Bud Light, GoDaddy, and Tim Tebow**** was raised. My opinion of Doritos, Coke, Bud Light, and Tim Tebow did not change, although I now hate GoDaddy slightly more than I did before (their entire business plan is based on large-scale cock-teasing and sensationalism. And I totally don’t get the Danica Patrick appeal, so, yeah, basically, being reminded of GoDaddy only serves to remind me that GoDaddy sucks). It all seems like a pointless exercise to me.

I hope I’m not alone in this.

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*True story. I was clearing some stuff off my DVR before the game came on. I switched to live TV and when the first commercial came on I hit the skip button. When the TV didn’t skip forward I got mad until I thought, “Oh, wait, it’s the Super Bowl. The commercials are usually worth watching.” Also, I was watching the Super Bowl alone in my apartment because I’m a loser.

**As someone who is seriously considering purchasing a new Sonata in the next month and a half I’m deeply ambivalent about this. The new Sonata is better than the old in all ways technological. It’s also significantly uglier in my book. I get that the old Sonata is a bit pedestrian in appearance, but I’m not a fan of the current trend in cars to put a giant, chrome grille on the front of the car and call it a good design choice. Also, the tendency to sweep upward from the grille to the back of the trunk is a terrible idea. That screams, “Low visibility and giant blind spots!” to me. As far as I’m concerned the best feature of my 2004 Cavalier is the fact that I have fantastic 360 degree visibility. The bottom of the rear window is roughly at the same level as the bottom of the windshield which means that I can look back and actually see what’s in my blind spot. The old Sonatas are from the same era of design and conform to roughly the same standards. And, really, if we’re talking strictly in terms of ability to see what’s coming the best sedans of all times were the first generation Ford Taurus/Mercury Sable. They had windows where most cars have the rear pillars. That’s brilliant design in my view.

Long story short: I’ll buy a 2010 Sonata long before I buy a 2011 Sonata. And the $2500 “we’re trying to get these things off our lots” rebate only sweetens the deal.

***Yes. I remembered that. That’s some effective advertising. Unless it turns out that I was supposed to buy Progresso or Hungry Man frozen dinners or something.

****The product in the case of the Tim Tebow Focus on the Family commercial was, in fact, Tim Tebow. They were essentially selling him as the product you get if you purchase not getting an abortion. Because every child that’s aborted could have gone on to be a star quarterback. You’ll never see a Focus on the Family commercial where they bring out a would-be father whose wife died bringing a child with severe complications to term. You’ll never see a commercial with a hardened criminal who was left to fend for himself by a poor mother who couldn’t afford to raise him. They want you to see the Tim Tebows so that you’ll think that all potential abortions who were instead brought in to this world will end up successful. Ergo, we were sold Tim Tebow, not a political or religious stance.

A Spark of Intuition Always Keeps You Second Guessing

We beg, we pray
But everything still happens anyway
C’mon now something’s teasing
Your conscience can’t decide
She kept your will from caving
But left you paranoid

You feel the the constant straining
She reappears divine
You know this
You know this
You know this
But I’m just so tired of waking up all alone
--Our Lady Peace, “Potato Girl”

My mother is not a font of sympathy. She sees whining as a sign of weakness. “Life’s not fair,” she’d always tell me when I thought the world wasn’t going my way. “Boo hoo, I’m going to go out in to the garden and eat worms,” would be the next thing. Her answer to all of life’s problems is a swift kick in the ass and a reminder that it could be worse.

When things aren’t going well the last place I want to go is home. Sometimes all you need is tea and sympathy and I’ll be lucky to get tea. I’ve developed a tendency to handle problems in solitude. It’s why my first inclination is to write. The blank page offers promise. The blank page offers resolution. Failing that it offers catharsis.

Either way, it creates an interesting dynamic. When things go bad I retreat from the world. Then, when my family finds out about it after the fact they say, “Why didn’t you come to us for help?” The answer is simple: because it wouldn’t have helped. I suppose it doesn’t help that I’m generally somewhat secretive by nature, but when you’ve had enough stuff thrown back in your face then the desire to try again is pretty low.

Especially when everyone hints, or flat-out tells you that it’s your fault that they don’t know anything. The whole, “You never make it better, you only make it worse,” angle runs in to a brick wall. And, really, when the options are, “Say nothing and have everyone be mad at me for a while,” or, “Say something and not get any help, then have everyone get mad at you for not jumping for joy at their ever so useful ass kicking,” well, I’ll take the former, thanks.

I have deep-seated issues, I suppose. It’s a wonder I’m not addicted to anything.

Meanwhile, and this is something I’ll probably get in a lot of trouble for saying, I’ve learned over the past few months that I don’t trust women. Well, women who may or may not end up as some sort of romantic partner. Women as co-workers are fine. Women as completely platonic friends are good, too.

It’s the part where they’re potentially-more-than-friends that I start to get skittish. And don’t even get me started on the women who are probably interested in that whole range of things beyond. It’s why I tend to fall for women who are somehow inaccessible.

See, the thing is that I have terrible taste in women. I also have a bad habit of feeling it’s my job to be the guy who can commit and the guy who can come through. So I pretty much end up with manipulative, selfish, unpleasant girlfriends who would really rather not say that we’re officially dating, remind me that we’re not, but then keep me just close enough to believe something will happen.

Y’know, bitches.

The great thing about inaccessible women is that they’ll never get close enough to prove they’re just another entry in my spreadsheet of bad ideas relating to women. Of course I have a really small sample size, so I can’t say with 100% certainty that this is anything other than statistical bad luck. But, in all honesty, I don’t know that I really want to find out.

Which brings me to the 2010 Hyundai Genesis.

No. Really. This makes perfect sense. Bear with me.

In an ideal world I’m about 98% certain I’d be driving a 2010 Hyundai Genesis right now. I do not live in an ideal world (or, if I do, I sure as shit don’t live in my ideal world). As such, I do not drive one and although I can afford one I cannot justify the purchase. So I live in a world of compromise. Let’s give those compromises names. Call them, say, the 2010 Hyundai Sonata Limited, the 2010 Hyundai Genesis Coupe 2.0T, and the 2004 Chevy Cavalier.

The Hyundai Sonata Limited is the practical choice. The Hyundai Genesis Coupe is the wildly impractical but fun choice. The Chevy Cavalier is the safe choice. So in a world where what you drive says something about who you are, the question is, “What do these things mean? And what does it say about you if you make one choice or another if all choices are equal?”*

Or, in a larger sense, why move to Dallas? Why figure out that your relationship has been, for all intents and purposes, doomed from the start, then try to make it work for another fifteen months?

See, any big decision comes down to a simple question: What do you want?

That question, in turn, comes out of a series of other questions. Who are you? Where are you going? Where have you been? What sacrifices are you comfortable making? Most importantly: are you willing to make a decision based on what you want?

That last question is the hardest. At least it is for me. Some people never consider anything else.

The thing is, if I buy a car most of the people in my life will tell me I did something stupid. Those people are, in some order, my mother, my sister, my brother-in-law, my grandmother, my father, and one of my friends.

“Why would you buy a new car?” they’ll ask. “You had a perfectly fine car without any payments. Don’t you want to buy a house? That’s so irresponsible.”

I can hear it, as clear as I can hear the Mike Doughty playing through my computer speakers. I can hear it even though all those people are a thousand miles away from me right now.

This realization hit in an odd way. I was talking to one of my new co-workers yesterday about the topic of buying cars. After calling my Cavalier a “broke girl’s car”** she said something to the effect of, “You just moved to a new place. You want to get out, get a new car, get a girlfriend.”***

My response was, “Do I?” I mean, not to the idea of getting out and getting a new car. It’s that last part.

I’ve also been told that the Genesis Sedan is a “chick magnet.”

Let’s put aside the, “Do I really want a girlfriend?” question for the moment. Do I really want a girlfriend who would willingly hop in to my Genesis but not give me the time of day if I was driving a 2004 Cavalier?

No. No I don’t. Especially since I could have a hell of a lot more fun with a girlfriend if I wasn’t making massive car payments every month. I mean, seriously, what’s the point of getting a car just to get girls if you can’t, y’know, afford to do anything with them? And, really, the next guy with a nice car who can afford to take her to cool places will probably cause me to get dumped, anyway. If you’re dealing with people who are that superficial is there any other outcome?

So the question is, “What do you want?”

But, in good Babylon 5 fashion, that question must be asked in tandem with another question: “Who are you?”

This is where we get to the issue of faith. Not in a god or the divine, but in, well, life. See, there was a time when I got laid off with a $300/month car payment. There was a time when that car broke down and I ended up heading off to college with a brand-new $370/month car payment hanging over my head.

There was a time when I thought my job would keep me around for a while and I could safely look to the future. There was also a time when my job was sent down to Dallas with almost no warning.

I am, at the moment, financially secure. By the end of the month I will have absolutely no debt save my college loan repayments. When that happens I will have fixed monthly costs equal to almost exactly one of my bi-monthly paychecks. I am, in short, financially secure. But I also reflexively look back over my shoulder an awful lot.

The weird thing is that the question here is one of commitment. Or, more accurately, faith.

Do I believe that I can make car payments for the next five years? Do I want a car more than I’m worried about my financial security?

Am I always going to be the guy who worries more what others say about his decisions than what he has to say?

Am I really the guy who always makes the safe choice?

Of course, on the other side, would I just be buying a car for the sake of buying a car?

------------------------

*In this scenario every choice is, fundamentally, equal. The price on the trim level of Sonata I’d buy is about $1200 more than the price on the trim level of the Genesis Coupe, but the Sonata comes with a $2500 rebate at the moment. Meanwhile, both cars would require an insurance payment of exactly $213 more/6 mo than I’m currently paying. I, of course, own the 2004 Cavalier outright, which is what makes it the safe choice. The cost of gas for the Sonata v. the Cavalier would probably be about equal, while the Genesis Coupe would cost a bit more. The choice basically comes down to keep what I have for, essentially, free, or get something shiny and new and fun at the cost of a couple grand right now and somewhere in the neighborhood of $410/month for the next five years.

**Ouch.

***Paraphrased.

You are Listening to Las Colinas

Your Cadillac breathes 400 horses over blue lines
You are going to Recita to make love
To a model from Ohio whose real name you don’t know
You spin
Like your Cadillac was overturning down a cliff
On televison

And the radio is on
And the radio man is speaking
And the radio man says “women were a curse”
So men built Paramount Studios
And men built Columbia Studios
And men built Los Angeles

It is five am and you are listening
To Los Angeles
--Soul Coughing, “Screenwriter’s Blues”

So I’m seriously considering buying a new car.

The funny thing about that isn’t the “considering” part. It’s the “seriously” part. I’m always thinking of buying a new car. There are a lot of cars out there and I’ve never owned the car I really wanted to own.

No, check that. I once owned the car that I really wanted to own. It was a 1996 Chrysler Concorde. The car was beautiful. It was burgundy with gold highlights, aluminum rims, and a tan leather interior. It had an Infinity Premium audio system and all the options you could have hoped for on a car before the advent of built-in nav systems on cars priced for anyone.

But there was one problem with that burgundy 1996 Chrysler Concorde.

It was a pile of shit. Every six months something new would go horribly, horribly wrong and it would cost me a thousand or fifteen hundred to fix. I finally gave up on it after it sucked a rod and needed a new engine. It wasn’t worth it to me to fix the damn thing even though I still had a year’s worth of payments to go.

So I bought a brand-new 2004 Chevy Cavalier. It was a bare bones model with the weirdest quirk I’ve ever seen: remote keyless entry and crank windows. Where else will that combination appear?

When I bought the Cavalier what I really wanted was a Mazda 3. What convinced me to buy the Cavalier instead was the 0% financing. I knew I’d have to roll the cost of the Concorde in to the cost of the Cavalier, so for five years I paid for the Cavalier I was driving and the Concorde I no longer had every month. In all honesty, I’ve come to like that little Cavalier. It’s been a good car.

In the five and a half years I’ve had it it’s been the most reliable car I’ve ever owned. Other than the fact that I had to replace the factory tires at 33,000 miles and the damn thing goes through a set of front brakes every 24,000 miles or so I can’t think of any problems I’ve had. It needs a new front bumper, but that’s not exactly the car’s fault. And even at 113,000 miles the only mechanical repairs it needs are new front sway bar links, a new muffler strap, and a tune-up. Honestly, I couldn’t ask for more and if I needed to I can see driving that car for another two years with minimal problems and two or three years after that with problems that amount to far less than the purchase price of a new car.

That car got me through Western Illinois University. It witnessed countless nights with Her. Last October I put something like thirteen hundred miles on it to see Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, Mike Doughty, and Jessie and Sarah in random places. The first weekend in December when the whole negotiation process was just more than I could handle I got in to that car and drove it to Indianapolis. A month ago I loaded it full of my shit and drove it to Dallas. On some level it’s been the only constant in my life over the past five and a half years. And although I don’t necessarily think I have an emotional attachment to the car itself, I have an attachment to all the things it means to me. It’s a crappy, base model 2004 Chevy Cavalier, but it’s my crappy, base model 2004 Chevy Cavalier. And purchasing it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

The harder I fight the stronger it’s a comin’
I wipe the tears from my eyes and keep on strummin’
Baby I ain’t runnin’ away
I’m tryin’ to find you something better inside me
--RCPM, “Your Name on a Grain of Rice”

I’ve been in Dallas for about a month and on a deeply visceral level I hate this place. It feels like a giant strip mall. I practically have to get on the expressway to buy my groceries. And there’s no such thing as a neighborhood bar. I’d kill to have a Brixie’s or Slager’s down the street.

On some level I wish I’d never come. But I also realize that my hand was forced. It was unemployed in Chicago or well employed in Dallas. I made the choice I had to make. And I think that’s part of the reason I wish I wasn’t here.

Well I been burning up and spinning my wheels
I guess it’s adding up after all these years
There’s gotta be something more for me to find

So I’m laying off the brake and leaning on the gas
There ain’t no way I’m ever gonna go back
I’m too far gone to ever turn around this time
--Jessie Lynn, “Someday Soon”

I’m losing my hair.

I’ve known it for a year and a half, but I haven’t exactly been keen on admitting it. I leave hair everywhere I go these days. There’s a lot less hair on the top of my head then there used to be and that hair is physically thinner than the hair on the sides and back. It’s not as bad as it could be. Hell, one of my friends who’s my age has way less hair than I do.

Still, I got a good look at the back of my head yesterday for the first time in a good long while thanks to a co-worker who was playing with a video camera. Something looked…wrong. I realized I was developing a bald spot. That kind of freaked me out. I realized that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, since my “hairstyle” pretty much guaranteed a bald spot. One of the women I worked with also took the opportunity to point out that it looked like I was going for a comb-over. This is not so much what I was going for.

Both problems were easy enough to fix. I needed a haircut, anyway, so I bit the bullet and found a place and after a short conversation and a little work I no longer had a bald spot and weird, kinda comb-over.

But, in the process, I had to admit that there’s a lot less hair on the top of my head than there used to be. I knew, intellectually, that this would happen. It happens to all guys. My dad has a lot less hair than he used to, but still has a lot more than most men his age, so I’ll probably be in pretty good shape. Still, I’d planned on keeping my hair until I turned thirty. Forty, even. I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’m less than a year and a half from my thirtieth birthday. What I’m not coming to terms with is the idea that I’m not a kid any more.

I’m fine
This time
To me it makes no nevermind
Yearbook
It took
Just one thousand tear stained looks
See you
Bleed through
The gauzy haze I sink in to
Phone call
Fuck all
You’re just one part of my free fall

This part of me will never close
--Local H, “P.J. Soles”

If I could have any car in the world I’d probably pick a Hyundai Genesis Sedan. It’s one of the prettiest damned cars on the planet. And, honestly, I don’t ask for much in a car. I don’t care about badges, I just care about what I want. And there’s a short, short list of cars I really want. The Genesis is at the very top of that list. And the damndest thing about it is that I can totally afford a Genesis Sedan, but I can’t justify it. $38,000 is more than I’m comfortable spending on a car right now. Hell, it might be more than I’m comfortable spending on a car ever.

I had to write a check for $368.22 every month for my Cavalier for five years. I did it when I was barely scraping by in college. I did it when I was making twelve bucks an hour. I did it when I was making pretty damn good money.

Now it’s my baseline. $370/month is affordable. I can manage it without too much difficulty. I know this because I’ve done it before. The evidence is parked outside; the title that represents proof is in a backpack in my closet. That gives me a car worth about $25,000 with a down payment-trade in-rebate combo of about four grand and an APR of about 3%. And, yes, I have good enough credit to manage that last bit. It happens when you spend nearly three decades making the safe choice. Honestly, I think that’s why car insurance rates partially depend on credit scores these days. It’s not about ability to pay so much as it’s about ability to make sensible choices.

Of course, credit scores aren’t just about good choices. There’s a lot of circumstance involved. But, at the very least, I can see a certain justification as long as we work from the assumption that people have complete control over their credit rating. So in a perfect world it’s a useful metric. When we live in a perfect world I’ll make sure to write up a quick post to inform everyone.

$25,000 is an interesting number. For $25,000 you can get a lot of different cars. That’s roughly what it would take for a brand-new Honda Accord, Ford Fusion, Chevy Malibu, Subaru Legacy, or Hyundai Sonata. That’s a brand-new Hyundai Genesis Coupe. It’s also a decent used BMW 3-series, Acura TL, or Cadillac CTS.

There are a lot of options in my price range. For the sake of simplicity let’s say it’s between a new Hyundai Sonata and a new Hyundai Genesis Coupe. The Sonata is a fine car. The Genesis Coupe is a sweet two seat sports car.* I like Hyundais (obviously). I like them a lot.

The problem is that they’re all compromises. I can get new, but not everything I want. I can get luxury and performance, but it’d be a couple years old and have at least 20,000 miles.

In the new car’s there’s a bigger, but sneakier problem. The Hyundai Genesis Coupe is a deeply, deeply impractical car. But the place where it’s the most impractical is probably the place where most people wouldn’t notice: it’s a rear wheel drive sports car. So if I buy one it’s an admission I won’t be going back to Chicago any time soon. The Sonata is a mid-size family sedan. It’s the safe, practical choice. It’s also the choice of a guy who’s expecting to have to haul stuff around. It’s the car you buy when you know you’re too old for that sports car, but too young for that mid-life crisis.

You don’t feel you could love me
But I feel you could
--Paul Simon, “Gumboots”

Last Saturday marked the first ever meeting of the Accidental Historian Appreciation Society: Dallas Area Chapter. At one point I made a reference to Her, but I used her real name. Big A found it necessary to point out that I was referring to Her.

Mr. Michael Mock had a response to the mention that I would have never expected. “She seems like a really unpleasant person,” he told me. And, as it turns out, Fake Al Gore agreed. Hell, I agreed. She is an unpleasant person. I honestly never thought I was painting her as such. For that matter, I thought I was being overly generous when I referred to Her. At the very least, I realize that I was trying to make it seem like I hadn’t wasted my time in sticking around even though I really, really had.

This brings up an interesting question. Why the hell did I bother spending over a year attempting to figure out how to make things work between us? What insanity drove me?

The answer is simple: I lacked faith.

And I’ll take this wheel at ten and two
And grip it with all my might
And on the dash a picture of you
And I’ll drive you out of my life
I’ll take you to the end with me
And leave you in the dust
Drive you out until I free this old heart
Of memories and rust
--Lost Immigrant, “Memories and Rust”

I’ve made a life based on the safe choices. The Cavalier was the safe choice after the Concorde finally broke down beyond what I could afford. She was the safe choice in that I never really had to commit but I never really had to admit that I needed to find someone else. Dallas was the safe choice in that it was a guaranteed job with a good company and it cost me nothing to move.

I cannot tell you how fucking tired I am of the safe choice. It’s left me single in a city that resembles nothing so much as the world’s biggest strip mall while I’m losing my hair and wondering what the fuck is really justifying my existence.

There are a thousand ways that making the impractical decision can come back and bite me in the ass. Hell, there are a thousand ways that making the practical decision can do that, too.

Honestly, at times like this the old “pray and let god tell you what to do” approach seems pretty good. Isn’t that what religion is all about, anyway? Who doesn’t want the consequences of the tough decisions filled with uncertainty taken out of their hands?

It beats the shit out of angst, that’s for damn sure…

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*Technically it has a back seat. Technically.

Since I'm Far, Far Too Lazy to Offer Original Content...

This. Just this. Go. Read.

For me it was 1*,2,3, and to a lesser extent 6.

Although I notice BeamStalk has already found an approved, so good on you...

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*With the addition of "history."

What Progressives Can Learn at Their Local Tea Party

Say what you will about the Tea Partiers, and believe you me, I’ve said plenty. They’re often incoherent, positionless, allied with racists and religious zealots, and terrible spellers. They’re more likely to pull a Teddy Roosevelt and open the door for future conservative losses than to actually make gains. They care far more about the purity of the party than the actual activities of governance.

But this isn’t surprising. Their heroes are television pundits. Their queen is a substanceless cheerleader who thinks that quitting her current government job is the ticket to getting a job with far greater responsibilities.[1] More importantly, they’re composed mostly of the sort of people who see their sojurn on Earth as an extended visit in the waiting room and believe their time is best spent twiddling their thumbs and awaiting the glorious appearing of their ever-so-tardy lord and savior.

This leaves very little room for policy wonks, point-headed intellectuals[2], or anyone who is actually interested in governance. The only sort of politics or rhetoric that matter in the movement are the emotional appeals. The reason the Tea Partiers don’t seem to have any coherent platform is because we keep looking for the sort of platform that’s traditionally won races. Theirs isn’t a platform built of carefully considered positions and policies. Theirs is a platform built of one statement: “I’m mad as hell.”

The thing they’re mad at seemingly changes with the wind. This can be chalked up to the simple explanation that we’re talking about people conditioned to the extremely short attention span of the sound byte. They are, in short, easily swayed, especially because the vetting process for the voices the average Tea Partier trusts does not consist of rigorous fact-checking, but constant purity checking.

Things are right because a particular authority said them, not because they’re a part of objective reality. And those authorities know how to play it. They start with the sound byte. It’s usually something that’s sort of true, or at least buffed up to a fine sheen of truthiness. The sound byte is then supported with quotes taken out of context and assertions to the effect that “history teaches us [this].” If challenged, the authority (or, more likely, the person parroting the authority’s argument) will ignore challenges or outright assert that the person challenging them does not understand history, politics, or the meaning of specific loaded terms. This is often made far more frustrating by the fact that the person making those assertions is the one who doesn’t have a fucking clue what those words mean, but is only saying what someone else says they mean.[3]

The rise of the Tea Party movement is, on some level, completely predictable. Its seemingly spectacular and precipitous implosion is just as predictable. Hell, I’m pretty sure that I called it back during the NY-23 election. I didn’t quite go the full monty and say the Tea Partiers would self-destruct, but in explaining how the they were going to pull the Republicans apart I also pretty much explained how they’d pull themselves apart. I suppose if I’d bothered taking them seriously I might have taken the next step, but I never saw the possibility of a National Tea Party. It just doesn’t make sense.

Again, you have to have a perspective of the world that your average Tea Partier comes from. So you have to understand how they arrange their churches. They’re not usually parishioners at your basic Catholic or Presbyterian Church, where there’s an overall corporate structure. They go their local non-denominational, independent church where there is no oversight. Even being in a Southern Baptist or General Association of Regular Baptists church isn’t a sign that there’s oversight. Those organizations are closer to fraternal organizations or confederations than corporate structures.

The people who attend, say, First Baptist Church of Bumfuck, Alabama are probably going to believe that the Catholics down the street aren’t real Christians and those Lutherans probably aren’t, either. Hell, there’s a reasonably good chance they’ll have questions about the Baptists in the church down the street. There’s a very insular mentality to the whole thing. And since these are the driving personality types behind the Tea Party movement, it’s not surprising to see that they are incapable of organizing at a national level.

Now all we need to do is drum up a Sarah Palin/Michelle Bachmann lesbian sex scandal and somehow have Mike Huckabee and Glenn Bek[4] caught snorting coke off Bill O’Reilly’s ass during the ensuing investigation and we’re golden. Remember, it’s the leaders, stupid. That’s actually one of the things that the right simply does not understand about the left. Obama came on as a charismatic, articulate intellectual who instilled hope in his party and his followers. There was the brief “he can do no wrong” period, but by the time the ballots were counting the only people making the Obama = Jesus claims were people attempting to belittle the right and keep a sound byte alive for the purposes of derision. When it turned out Barack Obama didn’t walk on water and couldn’t create change just by snapping his fingers and sending his army of unicorn riding leprechauns forth to do his bidding the people who piled all their hopes and dreams of a post-Bush world of rainbows and lollipops grew disappointed. It happens.

It is, in fact, the simplest thing in the fucking world to understand. It’s just that no one in the media seems to understand the implications. Charitably I’d say they’re…okay, I can’t figure out any way to say anything charitable about this. The media is either stupid or dishonest.

Remember the last two years of the Bush presidency? Remember how the only people in the world with a lower approval rating the Gee Dubs himself were Dick Cheney and the Democratic majority Congress? Then what happened with the 2008 election? The Republicans lost ground EVERYWHERE. That strongly disliked Democratic Congress actually got bigger. And it wasn’t just because of the Presidential election coattails phenomenon. The majority of the country wanted the Republicans completely out of power. They wanted some of that hope and change stuff they were promised.

Right now the Democrats are not delivering on their promises. It’s not all bad. They’re doing a few things. But they’re failing miserably on the big stuff. And don’t even get me started on the way Obama is perpetuating some of the most odious of the Bush policies in terms of things like state secrets.

Look at the numbers. Between three-fifths and three-quarters of the country is in favor of some form of health care reform. They know the system is broken, it’s driving them to the poor house, and something has to be done. Yet wanting to bring about reform is being painted as “radical.” And so we get the dumbest fucking possible sound bytes. After the Massachusetts special election the media hype machine called it a “referendum on Obama’s Presidency.” And then several Democrats (Blue Dogs, all, as I recall) had the nerve to say that it meant the American people wanted Obama to move farther to the Right. Because Massachusetts voted for Scott Brown over Martha Coakley, who, as far as I can tell, was the least appealing candidate since…well, since at least that boring, personality-less weirdo who ran for the Tea Partiers in NY-23.

Politics. We’re setting the bar real low…

Let’s go back a bit historically. And I don’t mean, like, 1066 and all that. I mean “the last fifteen months.” People strongly disapproved of the Democratic Congress, then voted to make it bigger. Why were they disappointed? Because they wanted it to get something accomplished, grow a fucking spine, and stand up to Bush. Possibly not in that order. People are now disappointed with Congress and President Obama. I’ll hazard a guess and say it’s because they were expecting the Democrats to actually do that “grow a spine” and “get something accomplished” bit when all they had to stand up to was a Republican superminority in the Senate.

Why is this so complicated?

My theory is pretty simple: it’s because America is a politically stunted nation. The winner-take-all approach to the voting system encourages a stunted, two party system that was fine when the big debate was “states’ rights” or “federal power” but is real tough when there are about a million political issues to throw around. The Electoral College discourages focusing on the will of the people and instead encourages focusing on the will of specific people in strategic locations. This further cements the two-party system.

The two party system, in turn, encourages binary thinking. If a voter doesn’t like the candidate of one party, their only real options (outside of just voting the party line) are to not vote, throw their vote away on someone who can’t win, or vote for the opposite party. This, in turn, encourages the dipshits on the news to declare things like, “The Massachusetts special election was a referendum on the Obama Presidency. Guess what? He’s a lame duck and no one loves him any more.”

It doesn’t have to be that way. And you know who’s showing that it’s possible to change? The Tea Partiers.

Yeah, you heard me.

Look, they’re incoherent and often moronic. They don’t have any real political savvy. They don’t understand or care about policy. But they do wholeheartedly believe one thing: the Republican Party does not represent them and they don’t have to put up with just choosing between the Republicans and the Democrats.

And this is the one place in politics where the zealot can make a huge difference. Because they don’t believe in compromise the politicians who want to stay in power have to figure out how to stop them or join them. So the Tea Partiers have managed to drag most of the major players in the Republican Party even farther in to the crazy conservative Christian camp.

So the Overton Window has shifted a bit to the right. The news media has gone right along with it. The Democrats sure as shit have gone with it, too.

That means that if Progressives want to continue to have a voice they need to do something crazy. They need to learn from the Tea Partiers. Sitting around hoping that this time the Democrats won’t fold to the craziest of the Right won’t do a damn thing.

Progressives need to send a simple message: legislate according to the will of the people or you’ll be gone. But they need to go one step further than the Tea Partiers. They need to figure out how to put someone to the left of the local Democrat in to Congress. It probably won’t be hard, at least for people who can’t vote for Barney Frank or Dennis Kucinich.

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[1]And don’t even get me started on Sarah Palin…

[2]I really, really want someone to explain to me the etymology of the concept of the “pointy-headed intellectual.” I would think that “pointy-headed” would imply “brainless.”

[3]As evidenced by the fact that Barack Obama is somehow simultaneously a socialist, Communist, Nazi, Muslim terrorist. You can be one of those things. You can be some combination of parts of those things, but you cannot be all of those things at once. The two that are most easily conflated are socialist and Nazi, and not because someone noticed that the Nazis were actually the National Socialist Party. There’s a reason for the use of the word “Socialist” in there, and that’s because Nazism did contain parts of socialism. Basically, the idea of the state taking some control over the means of production and having a hand in the day-to-day welfare of its people is a really good first step in creating a totalitarian dictatorship. However, the key point of divergence is this: socialism, in theory, is about the workers taking control for the purposes of leveling the playing field and making things better for everyone. Fascism, in theory, is about the state taking control for the purposes, well, being in control and that whole boot stamping on face thing.

So while Fascism and Communism may well look similar at their early stages, they are very, very different beasts. And the varieties of “socialism” from which they spring are very, very different. There is a reason Hitler and Stalin didn’t get along while Hitler and Mussolini did.

Oh, and also, you can’t be a Muslim Communist. You sure as shit can’t be a Muslim Communist who goes to a friggin’ Christian church. Also, Barack Obama was born in the United States of America and is a citizen, just in case the words in this post attract the three or four Birthers out there who are capable of typing properly spelled words in to an internet search bar.

[4] He put the “” in “oligarhy.” Sorry, just remembered saying that and it amused the hell out of me.

It is Finished

The planning for the first ever meeting of the Accidental Historian Appreciation Society: Dallas Area Chapter, that is.

This coming Saturday, January 30th, at noon we'll convocate at The Londoner, Addison. All truths will be revealed, including:

• My real name.
• My real occupation.
• Where I really was when JFK was shot.*
• The location of the secret backups to the Nixon Tapes.
• What Saddam Hussein really did with the WMDs.
• What I ate for breakfast this morning.

Everyone's invited, whether you're a regular, a lurker who's worried that your friends and family will stop loving you if they ever find out you posted on a blog (which is true, by the way, you'll be disowned, someone who would post, except you destroyed your keyboard with Diet Cola and got lost in the Fry's that one time you tried to replace it, or a really attractive single girl without weekend plans who accidentally stumbled across this blog and wants to meet a guy who looks like this:



Oh, wait, that's Clooney. I'm this guy:



And since I know you're wondering, no, that's not a prop beard. Lorna's the real deal.

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*Let's just say that until I moved here I spent almost one entire day in Dallas...

And Yet Another Quick Update...

Okay, so we seem to have the idea of January 30th at the Londoner nailed down.

I have now, however, received a request from one Big A to move it to lunch time due to a "scheduling conflict" because he "has to work." I mean, I totally don't buy it, since I know that all he ever does is hang out in his room alone and imagine various Disney characters naked,* but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.

So, um, anyone object to a noon-ish time slot? Or should we start looking at the wonderful, funderful month of February?

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*He doesn't actually do this.**

**Or does he?

Although, for the record, the addition of a live-action Amy Adams in, um, that one Disney movie that happened recently...I want to say Enchanted -- Yeah, that sounds right*** -- does mean that it's possible to imagine Disney characters naked in a totally non-creepifying way. I suppose that works if you're a woman or a non-heterosexual male and go for the McDreamy types, too. Also, you know who's totally hot? Ariel. I'm just sayin' is all.****

***Also, I might have seen it in the theaters. I might also have been in an actual relationship at the time. I mean, it was a terrible relationship and a bad idea, but I was definitely in it. I got a participant ribbon and everything.

****Although that opens up a whole 'nother can of worms. I mean, pretty much all the Disney characters are completely stock in the traditional physical sense. The good women are all potential Tiger Woods mistresses (yeah, I went there. I figure Leno's still doing Tiger jokes, so I'm safe to, too. And I'll have a good seven years to work on new material. It's important to choose a humor yardstick that doesn't require me to keep up with the times. Oh, on another note, I'll have special guest commentary from the Dancing Itos next week). The good men are all handsome prince types (except in the cases they're not so that we can learn important lessons about inner beauty and how it's wrong to love someone that isn't conventionally attractive as long as you're one of those dumb, superficial women). The bad men have goatees, the bad women are wicked witch types or the "beautiful in a way that's not actually meant to be beautiful because of the smoldering red eyes and creepiness" sorts. Although I think I venture in to this topic every single time I mention Disney, so I'll just stop now.

Also, isn't it funny how I can take a single, simple request and turn it in to a bizarre collection of strange footnotes that really have nothing to do with the original purpose of the post? This is how my brain works.