The Real Problem With Anti-Vaxxers

Whooping cough under a microscope

Earlier this year, I blogged for Boise Weekly about a whooping cough outbreak in Idaho and eastern Washington. The disease, which is highly contagious and particularly dangerous to infants, had been pretty much cornered in the 20th century by a vaccination campaign. In late 2013, however, it had cropped up near Pullman, Wash., and in Idaho's Marsh Valley. At the time, I wondered why, when we can imprison people for knowingly transmitting HIV, we can't do the same to parents who pose a health risk to their communities by deliberately not vaccinating their children.

Failing to vaccinate disgusts me. We walk past idiots every day—people who deny the authenticity of Barack Obama's birth certificate, who claim the Earth is 5,000 years old, or aren't climate scientists but are pretty sure global warming, er, climate change is a liberal scare tactic—but they pose no immediate threat to anyone. Anti-vaxxers are a different breed of idiot. They're a direct threat to everyone around them. If an anti-vaxxer picks her nose and uses a handrail or a doorknob, that doorknob or handrail becomes a public health hazard. They do this because they mistrust the medical establishment, and couch their ugly gripe with modern medicine in terms of reasonable doubt and "researching both sides of the issue." 

While randomly surfing social media this afternoon, I noticed that a friend had posted a link to an Atlantic article containing an interview with the son of polio vaccine-developer Jonas Salk. According to the article, in 1952, there were 60,000 reported cases of polio in America. 3,000 of those cases were fatal, and another 21,000 left victims paralyzed. In 1955, Salk developed a vaccine for the illness, and less than a decade later, the disease had all but disappeared. Oct. 28 would have been Salk's 100th birthday.

Below my friend's link was a comment that read:

"This is a really heart felt article! I'm researching both sides of the argument currently. Here's an article that talks about the downside of those very same polio vaccinations that were given to children in 1950-1963 that contained SV40 which doctors discovered later on in brain tumors of their patients and which was also linked to cancer of the bones. I'm not entirely against vaccinations, but it seems very hard to know the long term effects of many of the vaccinations that are being rampantly given to people these days [sic]"

It was followed by a second comment made by the same person:

"On the flip side there are other studies that will claim SV40 can't be proven to have ever been linked to cancer. I guess that's the beauty of medicine and science; It's all based on hypotheses! I'd love if more people posted about this argument."

To be completely fair, this person never said she wasn't vaccinated, or hadn't vaccinated any children she might have. But if you feel like banging your head against the wall when people say liberals are intolerant of conservatives' point of view (I personally have this argument frequently w/r/t climate change), try convincing someone that the vaccine movement wasn't a secret vehicle for cancer, autism, or God knows what. Science and medicine aren't based on hypotheses—it's propelled by them. Disciplines like science and medicine are based on facts, and when it comes to vaccines, the proof is in the pudding: Tens of thousands of people contracted polio, smallpox and whooping cough in America every year, and within a few years of a vaccine being developed, those diseases were largely relegated to the history books.

Did a virus sneak its way into polio vaccines? Was the virus used as a vehicle for the vaccine in some way, but was later found to cause dangerous genetic mutations in the vaccine's recipients? These question's don't cast doubt on inoculation; rather, they give us cause to look back and learn from our mistakes. In the mid-1950s, trucks cruised down residential streets spraying pesticides while children, unaware that these chemicals might be toxic to more than insects, ran and rode their bikes in tow, huffing the white fog that billowed out of tanks stored in the trucks' beds. Handling mercury with bare skin, and sometimes even tasting it, was a fairly common practice in high school chemistry classrooms. Today, we're learning that plastics can release bisphenol A (BPA), which can cause genetic mutations that affect fetuses, but only the Michael Jordan of self deception would say, "I'll never touch plastic again."

Science can prove that BPA is bad for our collective health, but it can't give anti-vaxxers proof that vaccines don't cause cancer, or whatever. You can't prove a negative. But logical impossibilities are what they demand because the world must contradict itself in order for them to be right. (How rarely, during these conversations, do we think to ask these people why they insist on disagreeing with scientific consensus?) Every day, science and its children, medicine and technology, become more encompassing; and we shouldn't be surprised that there are a lot of people who resist being enveloped in the modern world, convinced as they are that change brings more harm than good. It's natural for anyone to feel this way sometimes, but like the nasty bug that's going around, some people can't keep that feeling to themselves.

Poor Julia: liberals and conservatives wrangle over the life of a fictional character

The campaign season is officially––finally––underway, and I for one am preparing for the canned barbs, moments of honesty we call "gaffes," and pissy little Facebook arguments the way I would for the fiftieth installment of the American Pie franchise. There's really only one issue worth talking about this election, and that's the economy. And even though the job market has begun to heal after years of stagnation, the most recent employment numbers suggest that the road to recovery may still be long.

Nevertheless, I'm a bit disappointed that the economy is the marquee issue. Surely the president's job is more expansive than the shepherding of economists and businessmen.

Barack Obama's campaign team seems to think so. One of its propaganda tools is The Life of Julia, a story about a woman whose life is enriched by Barack Obama's health care, economic, and education reforms. "Julia joins thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarden ready to learn and succeed," the first slide reads. Like most propaganda, it's short on facts and long on meaningless platitudes.

Hidden beneath the surface of this otherwise Dick-and-Jane-ish tale is the implication that this election, more so than many before it, has long-term consequences. George Bush's eight years in office were defined early on by terrorist attacks and the two wars they spawned, and the political conversation has been a reaction to the Republican party line ever since. This election will decide if Barack Obama was an experiment or a reflection of dissatisfaction with the increasingly erratic and fractured conservative ideology.

Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation have responded by turning––as they are wont to do––towards the strategies that worked in the past. They've united under the anti-Obama banner, and wheeled out the key terms that make up their ideology: Everything Barack Obama does hurts you in the pocketbook and offends your personal dignity.

Enter A Better Life for Julia, in which our heroine's life, as envisioned by Obama's campaign staff, is turned on its head. Obamacare is an insult to her financial and religious freedom. The president's policies have laden her with debt, and her family's wellbeing is hampered by a sputtering health care system, inadequate (but somehow overfunded) schools, and exorbitantly high taxes.

Never mind that, in this alternate universe, the president is somehow to blame for using the same tools a Republican would have used in the same position. And take care to overlook the Heritage Foundation citing itself in its own propaganda. Oh, and forget that Obamacare is modeled after the health care reform program Mitt Romney put into place in Massachusetts. All you have to know is, Obama wants to make the government so big, and the economy so small, that smart, conscientious people like you will be crushed under the weight of the common interest.

This is an election with consequences, and the fate of America can't be trusted in the hands of the man who brought you the corpse of Osama bin Laden, military drawdown, a slowly-but-surely recovering economy, and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Media law wrangling in the New Wild West

The Internet is the new Wild West. Sure, there are huge expanses of uncharted territory left in the real world––Alaska, the deep sea, Antarctica––but charting something isn't the same as taming it, and the West was wild long after we'd mapped and criss-crossed it with railroads. The entrepreneurial spirit has always sought frontiers, and where there are frontiers, is the law ever far behind?

That's why I talked with Lisa McGrath, Boise NM law guru. She sees a lot of people treating new and social media like the traditional rules don't apply. Some of these rules, like copyrights, trademarks, and the general applicability of judiciously-drawn legal documents, seem intuitive; and yet she sees these rules being broken all the time.

But an unforeseen challenge to companies using NM may arise from an unexpected quarter: their own employees. The problem, she says, is pure common sense. Companies working with new media don't invite their legal departments to the table when drafting new and social media policies, or (worse) don't have policies at all.

What is a social media policy, you ask? It's a lot like a sexual misconduct or workplace discrimination policy, insofar as it informs the less-than-totally-formal functions of the workplace––a careful outline of the dos and don'ts for how a company's employees may use social media in their capacity as employees to A) protect that company's brand, and B) provide liability shielding. They also firmly establish access privileges and ownership of social media––something that can affect even small companies.

The failure to clearly establish ownership and access can play out like it did at The Bench Commission, where the employee responsible for updating the Commission's Facebook page left his job and took the Facebook password with him. Now, that local furniture store can't even update its page, and has to start from scratch––a tough thing to do when there's already a Commission Facebook presence.

I would have liked to include The Bench Commission in my article, but the owner, professing ignorance of social media, didn't feel he would be qualified to discuss the issue on record. This is unfortunate, because the article would have benefitted from the insights of someone licking his wounds over a SM misstep. 

McGrath also encourages social media training for employees, and I'm blown away that major users of social media like hospitals, airlines, and software companies don't train their employees to understand their media policies or how to use media effectively. What good are policies if you don't know they exist, or how they work?

The Idaho Democratic Caucus

I grew up in Portland, and my dad used to joke that Oregon liberals there were so tight-assed that there were permanent finger grooves in the steering wheels of their Volvo station wagons. Other adjectives he could have applied were "square," "ordnung," "straight-laced," "dour," and "prim." None of them are particularly positive adjectives.

For some reason, these Oregon-type liberals seemed to be the only ones in attendance at the Idaho Democratic caucus today at the Morrison Center. And since Boise is a pretty cool town, there were very few of them. I suppose it's the prim, ordnung ones who are procedure-oriented enough to actually vote to get the sitting President back on the ballot for the general election. 

I reported on the caucus for Boise Weekly with a motley crew of other reporters. Our job was to write stories on who was in attendance, and how attendees were keeping busy, since there was really only one candidate on the ballot. What surprised me––and what this blog post is about––is who wasn't there. 

Who wasn't there turned out to be practically everyone I know, even the most dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, from the dreadlocked guy who works at the Co-Op to the bartenders to the "Blue Women living in a Red State." The list of people who should have been at the Morrison Center is quite long, while the list of people who were actually there is quite short.

This isn't a new problem for Democrats. Voter turnout, in fact, is the Democrats' biggest problem. It's the fatal flaw that probably cost Al Gore the 2000 election, and is likely the secret weapon Mitt Romney is hiding under his coat for December, when he hopes to beat Obama in the general election.

I don't think Romney even has a fighting chance. For one thing, the cobwebs he's putting up aren't going to hold back the Sherman tank of Obama's war chest. For another, the two candidates are practically indistinguishable on many issues, and to court the socially conservative fringes of the Republican party, Romney's going to have to break from Obama in ways that are going to make him look utterly insane.

But I digress. The only way I see Romney winning is if, on election day, Democrats simply don't show up to vote. I would be shocked––really, really shocked––if Barack Obama doesn't bury Mitt Romney in a landslide victory later this year. I suppose I'm disappointed that, with so many passionate liberals in Idaho, so few of them thought it was worth their time to at least check the event out.

The problem with Bill Maher

Yesterday, Boise Weekly announced that Bill Maher, a darling among cable television's politically-minded comedians, will be visiting Boise on August 18. This is what Idaho conservatives would call shooting fish in a barrel.

Maher's draw is obvious: His brand of comedy mixes a reasonable outlook on politics with biting scorn for stupidity and counterproductive thinking. Or so his fans think. Other people––the people who leave comments on my Facebook wall, for example––think he's an asshole.

That Maher can be combative and unfair isn't what worries me. What worries me is that so few of his fans see him for the pundit that he is. In a recent episode of The Colbert Report, anchor Stephen Colbert defines, with his usual grinning sarcasm, what that means. Pundits have to have an opinion on everything; they have to be be right, even when they're wrong; they have to be loud and quotable.

The problem is that the man fosters a combative consensus. Where Jon Stewart looks at through the news through a set of values we think of as common to the human race, frequently coming across as more compassionate and even-keel than his audience, and Stephen Colbert satirizes punditry by exaggerating the moves of men less aware of their ridiculousness than himself, Bill Maher casts himself as a smarter, funnier, liberal version of Bill O'Reilly.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if he were put into a room full of people who didn't necessarily agree with him. His show is full of canned, sycophantic laughter, and his guests are hand-picked to either agree with him and laugh at all his jokes, or be dumb enough to lose to him in an argument. He puts on a self-satisfied face after his one-liners, and pauses while his fans shower him with their agreement.

Just watch to see how insufferable he is.

Real Time with Bill Maher is political humor in a bubble, and I think Maher's smug sense of self-righteousness underscores the thickness and insularity of that bubble. What the man doesn't seem to realize is that good political humor isn't about being right, it's about following the conventional rules of humor, and that means giving the other side (those people he's so good at lampooning) a fairer shake than he does.

Take your smartphone into the bathroom

During an interview I conducted yesterday on the topic of companies using social media to promote branding, a local freelance social media coordinator who will remain nameless told me she takes her smartphone into the bathroom.

"Everybody knows it already," she said, adding that she didn't mind if that information found its way into the article. (It won't.)

What I'm learning is that social media are a lot like a yappy little dog that will literally follow you onto the shitter if you let it, and a lot of people do. It doesn't make for a good Tweet to observe that one's having a particularly satisfying bowel movement, but anymore, information is instantaneous, and passing information and insight along can take seconds. My nameless SM coordinator calls this being "plugged in."

I don't have a smartphone. I have a dumbphone that's mostly good for making phone calls and sending text messages. Doing the journalism thing, I realize that not only does everyone around me have a smartphone––everyone around me is using smartphones to tremendous effect, sending Tweets, updating Facebook, etc. I'm a little jealous, but I think I can hold out a little longer.

That isn't to say that I'm unconnected to SM. If you're reading this, you likely found a link to it on my Facebook page or on Twitter. What amazes me is that so many companies aren't plugged in. One friend called a company's failure to engage Facebook "amateur hour," and since speaking with him, I've been trying to tease out of my interviewees the notion that there's something lazy about not taking advantage of free advertising.

My SM coordinator tells me that's not necessarily the case, that you should engage SM iff you have the time and inclination. She also told me that any business can find some way to make being plugged in a valuable business strategy. For some, that strategy can be public communication, as it is with the Idaho vodka distillery 44 North; other companies use it to advertise, like The Bench Commission. Goody's candy shop "buys" its Facebook fans with the promise of a scoop of ice cream.

Social Media's wide applicability, low cost, and relatively low time investment have made them virtually inescapable. Writing my story, I realize the hard part is going to be finding someone who will argue against them.

Is Erast Fandorin the hero Russians have been waiting for?

If there's a lesson behind the tumultuous prelude and nail-biting conclusion of the Russian presidential elections, it's that Russia yearns for new heroes. The likes of Gorbachev and Yeltsin––reformers with an ear for the democratic values prized so highly here in the West––are remembered as ineffective and disastrous. To educated city dwellers, President Putin is a corrupt oligarch putting on a macho front.

It would seem that Russians are looking for someone to look up to: someone with a strong hand and an easy touch. And with so few real-life role models forthcoming, Russia's literati has had to invent one.

Enter Erast Petrovich Fandorin, protagonist of the riveting and unpredictable The Winter Queen (Azazel in the original Russian). The plot centers around Fandorin's first adventure: Seeing that a Moscow bon vivant's suicide is more than an isolated case, security services greenhorn Fandorin pursues a conspiracy bent on upsetting the global balance of power.

Set in the mid-1870s, the mystery takes place amid a period of rapid technological and political innovation, giving the reader the sense that the best tools for investigating crime in an era of progress––reason, quick wits, and a lot of luck––never change.

The author, Boris Akunin, says he began writing mystery novels in the 1990s, when cheap, gore and sex-filled thrillers achieved extraordinary popularity in Russia. His wife, so embarrassed by the content, would hide the books when reading them in public. Akunin's response was to write detective and spy thrillers that people would be unafraid to pull out of a pocket or purse on a train, highly readable but with artistic merit.

That artistic merit extends beyond passing references to the beloved Russian classics. Akunin shows a knack for creating scenes without detracting from The Winter Queen's ripping pace, painting London gothic and a sticky Moscow spring with equal ease.

What brings the novel to life is its protagonist, who has a preternatural gift for the deductive method. Like any budding genius, he's ingratiatingly naive, and his intellect gets him into more than a little trouble. His unaffected patriotism never wavers despite the corruption and entitlement surrounding him, and his love for truth-with-a-capital-T makes that patriotism more substantial than a pair of rose-tinted glasses. 

Russians love him, and Akunin's Fandorin novels have sold about 18 million copies in Russia so far. 

Perhaps the reason for this love is that Fandorin can be masculine (a la Putin) without being macho, while being dedicated to Russia (a la Gorbachev) without destroying everything he touches. He's effective and smart without being overly clever, and his mild personality makes him an ingratiating analog to Sherlock Holmes. 

Akunin's novels have been received a lukewarm reception here in the States, however, for perhaps this very reason. Fandorin doesn't stand for truth and justice with the same zealotry Lisabeth Salander does in The Millennium Trilogy, nor does he indulge in pulpy conspiracy theories found in the likes of The Da Vinci Code. 

Instead, Fandorin is firmly rooted to his time and place, a bridge between the generations that came of age in the Soviet Union, and the high tide of the Russian Empire. 

An apology

I'd like to apologize to anyone mislead by my earlier comments about Superbowl ads. Enough time has passed that I can swallow my pride and finally give this year's crop of commercials the thrashing they deserve.

I like to think that the Superbowl is when the best minds in the advertising business put their ideas to the test. Advertising doesn't have to detract from the television experience, and I think we should relish the opportunity to see those minds at work.

In that regard, this has been a bad year. From Clint Eastwood riding on Eminem's already ragged Detroit coattails to every Doritos commercial ever, the 2012 batch showed a complete lack of inspiration.

The joke about Hollywood that has been floating around is that there are so few good ideas there, that the film industry doesn't do anything but churn out second-rate sequels. It was––and, in my opinion, remains––the same problem Detroit had. American car design over the last 20 years has been abominable.

Clint Eastwood, a Hollywood staple and spokesperson for Detroit, seems to be suffering from those cities' common flaws: heads full of bad ideas and a soft spot for sequels.

Deja-vu

When I saw this, I knew I'd seen something like it before.

Eminem's inspiring original

I can see Clint and some of his buds sitting down, brainstorming this ad. They were probably thinking, "How can we be inspiring, too? And how can we distinguish ourselves from Eminem's ad?" But if your subject is American recovery through the lens of America's hardest-hit city, distinguishing yourself might just be impossible.

Speaking of Detroit, it has always amazed me that so many downright ugly American cars have made it into production. Take the Ford Taurus: How many gatekeepers––designers, engineers, executives––did that sorry soapbox on wheels make it through before going into production? The Taurus designs must have passed through a hundred people, and not one of them spoke up and said, "This car is awful. Don't make it."

A friend with whom I was watching the game had a similar experience with this gem:

Cars.com has gatekeeping problems

With the cost of a 30-second slot during the big game going for millions of dollars, my friend postulated that someone would have identified this ad as a dud. And maybe someone did: He's probably sharing a cell in smart person's prison with the one guy who tried to nix the Ford Taurus and the other guy who said that the V-22 Osprey was stupid and that we should just abandon it.

I hate Doritos ads. You should, too.

Doritos are the game chip of choice. It could be their simultaneously greasy and powdery texture that makes them so appealing. Maybe it's the fact that they go on sale during the Superbowl, or that they even taste good. It's not because of good marketing. 

Being held hostage by your dog is a cute conceit for a television ad, but somehow this one fell flat. Maybe it's because people are tired of seeing fat, unkempt-at-best-looking men on TV––all too often, they're paired with attractive +1s––or maybe it's because there's something patently ridiculous about ignoring your cat's untimely demise for the sake of a small bag of chips. Whatever the cause, this ad went down in my book as the biggest swing, and biggest miss, of the night.

Just say, "Fuck it."

Have you ever held something in your hand that seemed very important, and suddenly felt that the best thing to do at that moment was to destroy it?

Last September or so, I received a thick off-white envelope stuffed with a survey on my career post-graduation. Dutifully filling out the form, I lamented that I'd had several good leads on journalism work but remained unemployed. Then I put it in the mail. At the University of Georgia, someone would tabulate my results and help direct some future journalism school graduate towards a region where work can be found.

My good deed was done for, like, my whole life. Or so I thought.

Yesterday an off-white envelope, again stuffed with the same survey of my post-graduate career, came for me in the mail. There was also a note explaining that my response to the first survey hadn't been received, and if at all possible, I should fill out the questionnaire and submit it to the University of Georgia by post the very next day.

For the last few months, incompetence has hung in the air around me. I had what seemed like a solid job offer from the Idaho State Journal covering the state legislature, only to hear back from my would-be editor that there was no funding available for my position. I very nearly wasn't paid for a feature article I wrote for Business Insider because an invoice for my work was lost in the shuffle and never made it to the payroll office.

You would think that someone else's incompetence would feel like getting a flat tire, and the only appropriate response would be to replace the flat and go on your merry way. Instead it feels like being unfulfilled. Everything is going swimmingly until some little post-related accident or miscommunication chips away at the wholesomeness of whatever it is you're going.

The survey felt almost totemic in my hand: I couldn't give up on the University of Georgia now. My information was desperately needed to help ensure other journalism graduates received training that would serve them in the field, etc.! And that's when the feeling hit me. The right thing to do was to just say, "Fuck it."

To say I tore up that survey would be an understatement. These three stapled sheets of paper were all that stood between me and a clear conscience: Forensic scientists could spend years putting that document back together.

As I've gotten older I've gotten better at discriminating between high priority tasks like paying off my student loans, and low priority tasks like filling out questionnaires. Sometimes, though, stress has caused the line between those things to blur. When I received that survey yesterday I felt like I had a responsibility to follow through. I didn't.

What the deaths of Steves Jobs and Appleton tell us

How we worship our heroes tells us everything we need to know about ourselves.

Heroes ought to reflect what we value most in ourselves. In the deep past we favored momentously strong heroes like Hercules and Samson. Later heroes embodied virtues like honesty and loyalty, particularly in the face of great danger.

If the obituaries of Steves Jobs and Appleton (of Apple and Micron, respectively) tell us anything, it's that today's heroes are market forces––men who seemed to commune with the invisible hand of the marketplace. 

Just look: Jobs "was seen as inseparable from his company's success." Appleton was "a self-made man, very competitive, incredible integrity" who "chose to keep his family and company in Boise––and did it without fanfare."

Jobs was the patron saint of innovation and relevance, and Appleton was a paragon of community-mindedness. What they have in common is that they're both popularly understood through the lens of their business accomplishments. 

This makes a lot of sense––at a glance. Why shouldn't the media zero in on their most significant contributions, especially if the deceased is a person of widespread interest? Steve Jobs brought us the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Appleton was one of Boise's most powerful and energetic business leaders. 

That said, I for one wouldn't want to be remembered the way Stephen W. will remember Appleton:

"RIP Steve Appleton. One of the true great Idaho business leaders. Not only helped Boise State, but the rest of the state through job creation and philanthropy."

The Steves are everything political conservatives can dream of: Here are heroes who embody success through intelligence, innovation, and business acumen––and are nice guys who give their money away.

It isn't enough that the obituary is about a person of interest, providing a sketch biography and list of significant accomplishments. When it comes to great entrepreneurs, a man is measured on how good he made it look to be a business man.

People being dicks

You can't open a newspaper anymore without being bombarded by people being dicks. You name the vice; it's rampant. From cowardice (see the Komen Foundation) to blatant backpedaling in the face of public outcry (see the Komen Foundation), to lumping the impoverished with the ultra rich into a single group that doesn't merit our scrutiny/attention, douchebaggery is on the rise.

I chalk this up to the media's treatment of the news event. Rick Perry holding a press conference or town hall meeting isn't a front page article, but Rick Perry saying something insensitive or stupid at a press conference––that's gold.

Below are three of the best and most recent instances of people being bad, chosen not because they're the douchiest bits of douchebaggery, but because they speak volumes about the perpetrator's lack of moral and personal fiber.

Mitt Romney doesn't care about the poor.


This clip has been online for a few days now, and has been the source of unending misunderstanding. It's pretty evident that what he was trying to say is that we need to direct our collective attention to the plight of the embattled middle class; he just said it in a way that marginalized the poor and lumped them with the rich into a group that we should just ignore.

Mitt Romney is in this race because RoboPrez cares

It's the kind of gaffe sensible people would otherwise ignore. Mitt Romney, like all the other presidential hopefuls, is at the center of panoptic media attention. He was bound to slip up sooner or later and say something vaguely ugly.

As Slate.com pointed out, if Romney scores the nomination, the presidential contest will be between two men who are ignorant of huge swaths of contemporary American life. No person aware of poverty would say the safety net is adequate.

But factor in dickitude when you take into account what Romney pays in taxes. Here's a man who has paid the best accountants money can buy to engineer his finances so that he'll be able to pay as little in taxes as humanly possible. What's more, his political platform seems tailored to perpetuate his ability to do this, while non-zillionaire working Americans pay roughly twice that percentage. 

I've heard it said that Romney is generous for giving large sums to Mormon charities in the form of tithing, but is charity the same as paying taxes? It's our privilege to give our money away, but our responsibility to pay into the trust that gives us national and social security, industry regulation, and diplomacy.

Raul Labrador bitches at Eric Holder to predictable Republican applause

On the surface, Raul Labrador stands for all the staunch, austere virtues a social and political conservative should. In the halls of power he projects the kind of steely-eyed pragmatism that comes from keeping your own counsel and a lifetime of experience dealing with other people.

Like most people who project this kind of pragmatism, there's nothing behind it. Raul Labrador is one of Idaho's most prolific buffoons, as he demonstrated yesterday during a hearing about the "Fast and Furious" weapons trafficking scandal.

"Because you have been grossly incompetent in the way that you have prepared before coming to Congress, I think you should resign," Labrador said to Eric Holder.

Holder's response: "Maybe this is the way you do things in Idaho, or wherever you're from."

Eric Holder had already been lambasted over this issue during his confirmation hearing in 2009. Labrador is that idiot at a party who whispers something witty, and if he hears someone chuckle, he repeats himself a little louder so everyone can hear. 

Komen Foundation de-funds Planned Parenthood in a fit of cowardice, then bows to e-Pressure

I wasn't aware that the Komen Foundation even existed until about yesterday, when Facebook shuddered under the weight of liberal indignation over its move to defund Planned Parenthood. 

My first thought was that as a foundation, it's well within its rights to spend its money however it pleases. I still think that. Whatever its stated reasons, Komen Foundation doesn't need to justify itself to the public.

Then, in a bold (or, depending on how you look at it, not-so-bold) reversal, it canceled its plans to discontinue funding Planned Parenthood. 

In a statement released by Planned Parenthood (linked to above), spokesman Cecile Richards claims that "Planned Parenthood has been a trusted partner with the Komen Foundation in early cancer detection and prevention services."

And that's fantastic. If only Komen Foundation could be a trusted partner as well.

Rebuttal: Commercials

Commercials can lead to deafness. Have you ever been watching your favorite show, only to have it abruptly cut to an incredibly loud ad for, say, laundry detergent? My mom goes so far as to preemptively mute the television when she suspects a commercial coming on the same way you or I might stifle a sneeze. (Ironically, neither of my parents ever stifle the sound of their sneezes.)

There's another kind of hearing impairment I associate with commercials, and that's tone-deafness. Take this excerpt from a letter to the editor by Kelly Temple I read in today's Idaho Statesman: 

"The truth is, [Super Bowl commercials are] the same annoying drivel we barely tolerate the remaining 364 days a year."

Now, I tolerate all manner of ridiculousness in the Letters to the Editor section––its denizens wage a perpetual and fruitless war against abortion and socialism and whatever, and there simply isn't enough time or energy in the whole world to convince these people not to be idiots in public––but this kind of misconception will not stand. To even suggest that the most important day in advertising is no better than any other day in advertising reveals nothing short of tone-deafness.

Some of this blog's most popular posts are about advertisements, and I'm pretty passionate about television commercials, so I feel the need to offer a rebuttal to Ms. Temple. 

America has the greatest and most magnificent culture of consumption the world has ever known. From food to energy to cleaning products, we buy more of just about everything more than anyone else. Over time that culture has developed a thicker skin than most to the traditional tricks advertisers use to persuade us to buy their products.

Admittedly, there's a lot of "drivel" out there, and it's axiomatic that a bad commercial will get more airtime than a good one. After all, why pay more to make a good commercial when you can make a bad one and spend the savings on more air time? These are the same advertising geniuses who believe the best way to reach their audience is to turn the volume up on their commercials. 

There are also some fantastic ad campaigns that make us laugh, invent markets for things we never thought we'd need, or even stir our weary senses of patriotism. These campaigns are spearheaded by smart people who know how your mind works and know how to make it hum with excitement. Super Sunday is the day when all the best minds in advertising (and possibly the world) are on display. It's practically Christmas.

The Super Bowl is advertisers' Christmas

I think of Tabasco as analogous to a gateway drug. It opened the door to Cholula sauce and eventually the meth of hot sauces, Sriracha (or as I call it, "Hot Red Cock"). When this commercial aired, though, I thought Tabasco was about the hardest shit there was outside some Texas roadside barbecue pit. We watch as a fat, sweating hoosier douses a downright unappetizing slice of cheese pizza in hot sauce, then noisily chew and swallow. Everything about this commercial is muggy and undignified and disgusting, right up to the point that the mosquito explodes in a ball of flame.

That mosquito reversed the banality of the commercial in an instant. It's a gimmick that turned Tabasco from that hot sauce of choice at Denny's to the hot sauce that makes fireworks out of unsuspecting mosquitoes, and every good ad man knows that the ability to shift public perception of your product is a gift from the gods.

Detroit as the dying warhorse of American productivity

Certainly, some of the most memorable Super Bowl ads are funny, but there are others that pluck on the heartstrings. Detroit is the dying warhorse of American productivity: It has been in decline for years, and since the 2008 economic downturn, it has become the symbol for America's lost prosperity. It's fitting that the city's motto, Speramus Meliora, Resurgent Cineribus, means "We hope for better, it will arise from the ashes," since the city's resurgence will likely be symbolic of a renewed national focus on production, creativity, and export. 

Eminem's Chrysler ad was a sharp and refreshing departure from everything we've come to expect from Super Bowl commercials. It's sleek, but relies on Detroit's grit for emotional impact. Imported cars have become so commonplace, the ad argues, that they've replaced domestic automobiles. It comes as a kind of shock that our own cars are reliable and classy.

When media critics dedicate articles to the best and worst Super Bowl commercials, they're paying homage to people who have been entrusted with hundreds of thousands of dollars by agencies to create the most show-stopping ads money can buy. Their only restraint is time, which means your average 30 second ad slot is jam-packed with as much production value and narratological brilliance as possible.

What's more, many Super Bowl parties I've been to are hosted by people who know nothing about football. They're people who open their homes to friends so they can enjoy the spectacle of one of America's most glitzy annual events and laugh at the funny commercials.

And your reaction is, "Wow, I can't believe you watch this drivel"?

Seven great rules

I'm not an educator anymore. Sure, that's what I'll say I was for tax purposes, but it isn't my job to correct you when you're wrong. As I've gotten older, I've seen the wisdom in going with the flow, and if that means keeping my mouth shut to avoid consternation.

A few weeks ago, I had a dinner guest who, though kind-hearted, launched into a 30-minute explanation of laissez-faire capitalism and why the government needs to get off his back. He's a medium-sized business owner, and has done rather well for himself, but feels he could do a whole lot better (and hire more employees) if the government imposed fewer regulations and taxes on his enterprise.

Don't we all.

My conclusion after his explanation wasn't that socialism is bad, and I didn't feel so imposed upon by the man that I became capricious. I decided the man was just terrible at conversation and left the whole thing at that.

Below are a few more rules in the mold of my previous post about things not to do on Facebook. I've extended the reach of these rules to include the outside world, but many of them apply to the Internet as well. I will make no claim to them being exhaustive. They're here for your edification and amusement––not to be complete in and of themselves.

Breaking one or more of these rules doesn't make you a bad person: Bad people are chronic offenders and malicious haters. In my experience, bad people allow their personal flaws to infect their entire lives. A man frustrated with himself will kick his disobedient dog, but a man who hates himself will beat his kids and lie about it to the cops. A man cornered will lie, but a liar will look for ways to profit from his lack of moral inhibition.

These are rules for good people who go astray. If a reader of this post catches him or herself about to violate one (or more) of them and thinks twice, I'll consider my good deed done for the day.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. 


This is the Golden Rule, and, naturally, it's the first and most important. It's the parent of all good rules of behavior.

When I was a kid, I thought the "unto" meant that I shouldn't do things to other people that I wouldn't want done to me––that it was a proscriptive rule. Upon further reflection, and seeing the rule written before me, I realize its meaning is quite the opposite.

The Golden Rule isn't a rule at all: It's a philosophy. If we do good things for people, even small things, other people will do good things for us. Thou Shalt not be Mean suddenly turns into Thou Shalt Consider doing Someone a Small Service, making the rule at once simpler and more life embracing.

Don't drag religion into it.


Reading the New York Times online this morning, I noticed a story about a young atheist in Rhode Island who has successfully petitioned to have a semi-official school prayer banner removed from the halls of her public high school. Her hometown of Cranston is predominantly Catholic, and the prayer has been displayed for 49 years. This young woman's objection to the prayer banner has made her one of the town's most reviled residents.

Honestly I don't know who's more to blame. Sure, Cranston's a Catholic town, but I don't see why it's so hard to keep the your religion in your pants for eight hours a day while public school is in session. And little atheist, are you really so butt-hurt over a piece of paper that you feel unwelcome among the people you've known since kindergarden? Or is this one of those atheist things where anything that even smells like God is so odiously stupid that you just have to tear it down?

My point is, if you're going to drag your religious baggage into a conversation, be prepared to have a fight over it, because people take that stuff seriously––not to mention that it's annoying.

Don't be sanctimonious. 


Sanctimony is one of my most obvious character flaws. I once berated dinner guests for their love of Milan Kundera, whom I think is a mediocre writer at best, and at worst one of those authors whose lack of talent hides safely behind the common misconception that writers who experienced communist oppression are simply better than their Western counterparts. He's no Czeslaw Milosz or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that's for damn sure.

I felt really bad immediately following my tirade, even though my friends were pretty cool about it. The thing about sanctimony is that it's a label imposed upon you from outside: I was just stating my (strong, draconian) opinion and supporting it with facts and assessments, but my guests must have seen things differently. They were probably thinking, "here's a guy who really hates Milan Kundera, and he's not being very nice."

A college housemate once interrupted an argument between myself and a third housemate with one of the most insightful observations I've ever heard. He said, "you're both so obsessed with being right." And it was true. Neither my opponent or myself were cool with just letting the argument be over with. Being sanctimonious isn't about having the better argument or true moral superiority. It's about being righter than the other guy, and that's kind of an ugly thing to want to be.

Use your indoor voice.


Even at a very young age, I understood how ridiculous it was that my teachers referred to "indoor voices," as opposed to "playground voices." We were kids, after all, and "indoor voices" seemed so full of artifice that it had to be one of those jargon terms a textbook writer made up.

But it wasn't.

Kids will be kids, but I've noticed that some people––one of whom is my sister––simply haven't figured out how to speak softly. As a person who has surrounded himself with more-or-less softly-spoken people, there's nothing more jarring than walking into a room where people are talking at full blast. It's like suddenly finding yourself on the tarmac at JFK or walking through the doors of a KISS concert.

Loud people are, one and all, shouters. My parents were shouters, and were always barking commands from the top of the stairs or across the street, as though somehow it was too much work to walk down the stairs and speak their piece. As I made friends and visited other families, I learned that a lot of other families (the cool ones, it turned out) would extend all kinds of courtesies to their kids, including using indoor voices, knocking on doors and requesting permission to enter, etc.

Their kids learned to do the same, and I can only assume it was all a devious parental ploy to get kids to be polite in society.

Cite your sources.


At least once a night I hear my mom say words to this effect: "They say that antioxidants prevent cancer." Who the f@#k are "they?" A much better way of putting this is, "I read in the newspaper that antioxidants prevent cancer."

Failing to cite one's sources is the surest sign that one is about to apply some common bit of information to one's own internal logic. In my mom's case, it's usually to justify her purchase of a new and expensive bottle of pills her own mother claims promotes brain function. Or whatever. My mom loves pretending to be a medical expert, when I know (and often have to explain to others) that my mom doesn't know shit about anything, let alone medicine.

The Internet is one of those fascinating tools that allows us to do research and make up our own minds. Citing your sources allows those of us who are interested to do independent evaluations and possibly pass on your information.

Think about it this way: If you don't tell people where you got your information, you're a charlatan; and if you do, you're doing everybody a favor. The choice is clear.

Observe the three subjects not to be discussed in mixed company.


We've already covered religion. Now it's time to talk about sex and politics.

I have a friend who, in the early stages of her courtship with "the boy," couldn't help but tweet endlessly about all the cunnilingus and dirty sex she was getting. The reason I tell you this is so you'll understand how off-putting it is when people do this.

Sure, there are delicate, conversation-friendly ways of making these subjects palatable, but only for a short time. Sensitive topics tend to spiral out of control and decency.

Case in point: my dinner guest who wouldn't stop talking about laissez-faire economics. The "conversation" didn't become a fight––since there's certainly more to taxation, regulation and governance than encouraging economic growth––because I let the man say his half-hour piece, and not because we were having a thoughtful conversation that challenged our assumptions about business and the role of government.

Be honest.


My uncommonly wise college housemate once asked me if I wanted to go to an orchestra recital with him. Cornered, I gave some bullshit excuse about how I'd love to, but I had something else going on that night. "You could have just said you didn't want to go," he said, because being dishonest isn't just rude: It's stupid.

Notice how the rule isn't "Don't lie." That's because we tell little lies all the time. I once met a mother who cried the first time her child lied to her because it was the first time her child had information worth concealing. Now, I'm not saying lies are good things, but the truth isn't nearly as valuable as honesty.

Being honest is a lot easier when you surround yourself with honest and forthright people. There's something hip about being able to say (without being mean), "no, I don't want to do that," or "sorry, your haircut makes you look like a dweeb." Losers are always equivocating and trying to make people feel good to be likable. Cool people will be honest when pressed for an opinion.

…

I'm going to keep writing rules. Really, this post is about all I have time for today, and I'll probably return to this theme at a later time. But until then, I'm always on the lookout for new rules, so world: Keep being stupid.

Sarah McLachlan is a terrorist

Have you ever been filled with blind rage after those animal cruelty commercials? I have. When I see them, I feel a sudden and nearly uncontrollable urge to twist Sarah McLachlan's head off her shapeless Canadian shoulders.

If I don't beat my dogs, I shouldn't have to watch these commercials.

It's a testament to the power of sad music and low fps rates––the power to turn almost anything into a sentimental tear-fest. You could slow down footage of your children at the dentist's office or eating cat poop out of the litter box, play it during primetime, and probably get someone to donate money to you. People will be forced to believe that your kids were the victims of drunk drivers or mesothelioma. 

For the less pliable among us, these commercials are a shock to the central nervous system not unlike suddenly being dunked into icy water from a position of relative comfort. Let's say you're the average Joe unwinding with one of my least favorite shows (Two and a Half Men, How I met your Mother). You're giggling a little, because nothing you've seen is so much funny as uniformly tittered at by canned laughter. The show cuts inevitably to commercial, and your expectations are nil. 

Instead of a bland Pepsi ad or one of those insipid Campbell's Soup commercials narrated by Tim Allen, you're treated––without warning––to the pathetic countenances of dogs and cats at the pound, ostensibly the victims of animal cruelty. They have huge, goober–filled black eyes, mangy coats, and some glistening, watery snot hanging out of their noses. 

You have done nothing to earn this. You probably don't swing your cat by the tail or gouge out your dog's eyes. And if you do, you're a fucker unworthy of human dignity because cruelty of any kind isn't tolerated in this tribe. But if you're a normal person you're 1) not expecting the levity of, say, 3rd Rock from the Sun to contrast so savagely with McLachlan's mournful tune and the disheartened gazes of pound pups; 2) more than a little offended that someone would shill anything, no matter how noble, in such a discombobulating way; and 3) annoyed at the bleary-eyed self-righteousness of the whole affair.

Intelligent people see this as fertile ground for satire.

Believing in something so strongly that you alienate your family, friends and fans is a sign of mental illness.

Ibishcomedy got it right: These ASPCA commercials emotionally strong-arm you into donating money. No matter how worthy, no cause is worth the heavy-handed treatment you've received at the hands of this commercial. There's something icky––greasy––about it.

Most commercials try to influence your purchasing decisions through sheer saturation. If you've seen a thousand Burger King ads, you're more likely to buy a hamburger there, even if you're not predisposed to eating at Burger King. The reason everybody owns an iPod is because Apple made the image of the iPod ubiquitous. Next time you want a burger, you'll visit BK; when you need tunes, you'll reach for your iPod.

ASPCA doesn't work like that. There's no market for saving abused and neglected animals, but by hijacking your compassion it can create a market out of a moment's guilt. The word for this is "rude." Where every ad you see on television relies on pre-existing buying habits, the ASPCA elbows its way into your life on a road paved with pure pathos. 

Join ASPCA or we'll kill this dog.

What bleeding heart organizations have created are anti-ads that break you away from your passive, TV-watching state. They're not selling products, but a whole philosophy that's antithetical to the gentle drone of televised blather. But that's why we watch TV, and why ASPCA owes you an apology.

Why I can never eat at Pac-Out again

For me, Pac-Out was the local fast food joint at the bottom of my hill. At least for this Boisean, it occupied a privileged place in my imagination, as it was (and is) across the street from the nearly mythological McU Sports and that rainbow road to downtown, Harrison Boulevard.

And so it remained, enshrined in its past glories. It was my junk food joint of choice, and between the ages of 13 and 18, the home of the $4.85 Herby Special––a greasy pile of meat, lettuce, and pickles, hurled carelessly into a golden nest of french fries and served up with a white foam cup of Mountain Dew.

Imagine my disappointment when I revisited my old haunt yesterday, only to find that the Herby Special had almost doubled in price. I felt like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, when he trashes a convenience store over the grossly inflated price of Coca Cola. I wanted to jump over the counter and tip over the Soft Serve ice cream machine. I wanted to belch bile and fire and hate.

Luckily I didn't. I don't have enough money to replace a Soft Serve machine, and it would take years for the innocent high schoolers who work there to process such an outburst, let alone comprehend it. But I was truly crestfallen that such a magnificent facet of my youth was now prohibitively out of reach. There are better things for a guy like me to do with eight bucks and change, and there's a certain pain that comes from having your favorite junk food fail to meet the cost/benefit test.

When I came down with the flu in high school and lost 18 pounds, it was to the Herby Special that I turned to regain my strength. After my protracted fight with that illness (during which I couldn't eat, sleep, or even pee for three days) my stomach had contracted, and I couldn't even finish my meal; but being so full I might burst never felt so good.

During my junior year in high school, my then-girlfriend, Tanya, had a part time job at Pac-Out, and I well-remember visiting her there to stuff my face and gaze into her blue eyes. She had just gotten out of a relationship with her 26-year old manager, whom I met several times, and who could never remember who I was. (I was convinced he was the biggest idiot in Boise.) After Tanya quit and left for college, she told me that she still dreamed about the drive-thru buzzer going off.

Soon after I noticed that the burgers got a little greasier, and the fries a little drier, a little less scrumptious. I went to college myself, lost touch with Tanya, moved out of the Boise highlands, and forgot about my beloved Herby Special for almost a decade.

When I returned to Boise from graduate school I hit up my old haunts. In my opinion, you haven't settled back in to living in Boise until you've dined at Guido's Pizza, Chang Mai, and Parilla. Occasionally I'd be in that neck of the North End, and hate myself for not carrying enough cash to visit.

Last night was going to be Pack-Out's night. My lady-friend lives near 26th, and we were going to grab a bite to eat and do the First Thursday thing by visiting an art gallery. We parked in that no man's land between Pac-Out and Hill Road, walked to the counter, and peered myopically at the menu. My heart revved, fluttered, and sucked in bloody backwash: "$8.35 for a Herby Special? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?" I thought.

Those sweaty summer evenings when I would bike down and get a hamburger or visit Tanya washed over me like a tsunami and dragged me out to sea. After taking leave of time and space, I took leave of my senses and launched into an anti-Pac-Out tirade that I'm sure drove the new car smell from Vanessa's RAV-4 and will be the ultimate demise of our relationship.

My inarticulateness stuck in my craw: Why am I never as good at expressing myself with the spoken word as I am with the written? Why is the past always brighter than the present? My only consolation is that the Herby Special continued its slow decline and isn't coated in gold leaf like it is in my fondest memories.

Because Facebook needs a rulebook

Typically when I meet someone out in the world, my interactions with him/her are limited to quasi-formal social or professional gatherings, and I could care less if that person, say, obsesses over horoscopes or sends money to PETA. In fact, I'd rather not know, and thankfully commonly understood social protocols make it awkward for my passing acquaintances to expose their niche interests or psychological quirks in public.

But Facebook is a little different from out in the world. Everybody has that one friend who three times a day posts gooey inspirational quotations, or picks fights, or makes everything political. If you're that person, or if you're that person sometimes, there's hope. Just follow the six rules below, and let me know if you drum up a few of your own.

Never reveal anything on Facebook you wouldn't say to someone you're meeting for the first time in person.

Imagine the following scenario: In the last seven days, your grandmother (whom you didn't know all that well) died; and you've just had amazing casual sex with someone you've had a crush on for a long time. Which of these two events will you share with a person selected at random from your Facebook friends?

If you chose to talk about your sex life, grab a square foot of tin foil out of the pantry, roll it up into a ball, and chew on it. That's how you make everybody feel when you write about your sex life or troubled relationships on Facebook.

Think before you post.


I've had this happen to me way too many times: I'll have the perfect one-liner response to someone's post, but it's not exactly PC. I read over what I've written, and decide that I'm not comfortable having that one-liner under my name, so I move on. And every time I failed to move on, I regretted it later.

Remember that when you respond to a post or comment, everybody who has posted to that thread gets an e-mail.


So, you know how every time your super popular friend says something even remotely witty, he/she gets 35 comments and 60 "likes?" You might not realize this, but your popular friend receives an e-mail for every idiotic "u r so purty grrrl!" and "I'm so grateful to have such a wonderful person in my life!" your dumb ass decides to "add" to the conversation. So don't be the last person to say what everyone else already knows.

There's nothing more irritating than a cause.


Some time ago there was a trend of people changing their profile pictures to cartoon characters to protest child abuse. Here's the thing: People who beat kids don't give a shit what you think. They rough kids up in private, then threaten them into not getting help. It's just about the most heinous, fucked-up thing there is, and changing your profile picture to Goofy isn't going to do anything to stop it. What this show of solidarity amounted to was a bunch of do-gooders agreeing with each other that child abuse is wrong while achieving absolutely nothing.

Election season is coming around. I hear there will be one at the end of next year. So if you're posting Barack Obama's Christmas photos and taking cheap shots at Ron Paul, just remember that you're the reason why some smart people capriciously vote Republican––because anything is better than being like you.

Don't fish for comments.


Do you refer small decisions to your loyal Facebook followers? Does it bother you when you post something and nobody leaves a comment? Do you frequently post provocative details about your life to see if a certain person will respond? I was that guy way back in high school (before Facebook, when MySpace was king), and I only woke up from my sleazy little stupor when I realized how needy and insecure I was being.

People are who they are inescapably in the real world, and even more so on Facebook because social media offer the illusion that you can be whomever you want to be. Thus your crippling personality flaw––in this case, your constant need to be validated on account of your insecurity––is magnified to the point that every right thinking person in your social circle can see it in sharp contrast. It's the social version of Oprah standing against striped wallpaper and the only known cure is, for one collapsing-barn-that-is-your-heart moment, seeing yourself for the ass you really are. You're welcome.

Never, ever post song lyrics or inspirational quotes.


These two things may seem unrelated, but I know what drives you to sing on Facebook or wax philosophical: It's the overpowering (and false) sense that you're an individual, reveling in the joys and calamities of life and sharing perfect gems of articulation with your loving friends and family.

The problem is, people ignore serial inspirers the way they ignore fallen leaves and broken beer bottles on the side of the road, so these nuggets of wisdom and snatched-from-context song lyrics amount to nothing but clutter. What's more, this chicken soup for the Facebook soul advertises the poster's insecurities. Life has given your annoying friend lemons, but the fact that he/she is quoting Bartlett's on Facebook means that your friend isn't making lemonade right now because he/she can't find the sugar.

My guess is, posters of quotes and lyrics are the most likely to take offense by this blog post. They're probably asking, "Where does all this hate come from?" Shut the fuck up. The chronic do-gooders of the world only want to spread peace and love, and for the life of me I've never been able to convince them that painting the world in their saccharine false light doesn't actually make life better.

…

Like I alluded to earlier, this isn't an exhaustive list of annoying behavior on Facebook. There are some great rules out there that still need to be ferreted out and articulated so people will learn good social media citizenship. 

J is for Jeezus

J is for Jesus. I know this because the lady in the dinged-up 1990s minivan told me so.

My interaction with this person began innocuously: I had gotten off my bike at the foot of the Boise foothills to make a phone call. Coming to a halt at a nearby stop sign she rolled down her window and asked me if I was freezing. This is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a person wearing Spandex at five in the evening the day after Christmas. I told her that, yeah, I was fine. That would have been a great moment for this Good Samaritan to roll up her window and go on her merry way.

Instead she took the opportunity to brandish a candy cane and ask if I believed in Christmas; if I knew that J is for "Jesus," and R is for "chevron." Now, a question about one's belief in a major Christian holiday in Idaho is code for "are you a Christian?" and after a brief discussion that consisted of her asking pointed questions about what I believe and me nodding like an idiot bobble head doll, she eventually wished me well, waved, and drove off.

J is for "Jesus?" Chevrons? There's an acronym for that: WTF. It turned my head that after millennia of Christian dominance over the Western world, this woman had the gall to talk to me in ciphers, as though Nero's spies might overhear and feed the twain of us to the lions.

But once an oppressed group, always an oppressed group. Just think about all the people you know who life has kicked around, or social conservatives, or spokespeople for labor unions: Like Nietzsche's slave morality, these people carry the politics of oppression with them wherever they go, even when they're in charge. Within the broader oppressed community, authenticity is defined––as it always has been––by suffering and underground-ness.

So now that Christianity is a mainstream faith cherished two or three times a year by millions of sensible people the question is, who's the most hardcore kind of Christian? After all, these establishment Christians can't be the real deal.

The answer: Christians who speak to each other in code. J can indeed stand for "Jesus." And the chevron (usually with an eye drawn somewhere in it) is the original for the Jesus fish that now adorns so many car bumpers. Clearly I was dealing with one of the most hardcore Christians of all––a modern-day Paul or Arius––; one of those people who sacrifice the warmth and comfort of friends, intelligence, success, social competence for…heaven? Legitimacy? Communion wafers? It's impossible to say for sure.

I'd always been told that there are three topics that shouldn't be discussed in mixed company. Those are sex, politics, and religion. This formula subjects these three areas of life to the rules of propriety, which is the source of my general antipathy towards Pride Week, the Tea Party, and Evangelical Christianity. Some people prioritize their beliefs over manners and decorum just like how someone who hates pants might one day decide to not wear them to work, and the effect is a lot like when someone reads over your shoulder, or how tall people seem to tower imperiously over your personal space.

I'm not religious, and like most decent people I consider on-the-spot religious discussion a kind of intrusion. Though invisible from the waist down on account of her battered minivan, my candy cane-wielding believer was clearly not wearing pants. It was as though during her spiel about whether I was One of Us she had casually dropped them out the window as a token of our newfound familiarity. Except it wasn't. It was like something a crazy person would do.

What critics got wrong about Stieg Larsson

"We're not making any money off these Stieg Larsson novels, so here's my plan: Let's attach an intriguing director and an all-star cast to their movie adaptations so we can disregard Sweden's seminal film interpretations of those same novels and make zillions of dollars."

This conversation (or one like it) had to have taken place in some producer's Los Angeles board room, possibly accompanied by maniacal laughter, lightning bolt. And now that we Yanks have seen fit to make a version of our own, the English language Inter-tubes are aflutter with excitement.

A lot of this critical chaff zeros in on Lisabeth Salander, the trilogy's anti-heroine and feminist stocking-stuffer. The women's studies implications of Salander are voluminous: She's a battered woman with an interesting sex life who hates (and exacts revenge upon) men who hate women. She may or may not have the ladies studies merits of Pippi Longstocking.

Katie Roiphe's recent Slate post hints that there may be more to Salander than the armchair feminists and literary critics give her credit for. At the organs of right-thinking feminist prose, "you will hear the assumption of victimization…and the simultaneous assertion of power." What's more, this character has come to the forefront of our collective imagination on the eve of The Good Men Project and The End of Men. Coincidence? Roiphe thinks not.

Roiphe doesn't go so far as to explain what it is about Salander that makes her more than grease on the literati's gears. This is because critics are stuck on the woman-ness of Lisabeth Salander, and haven't broadened their scope beyond feminist cause celebre: that she's an archangel of democratic values.

Consider what she's up against in the novels. Her nemeses are misogynists, yes, but also the barrage of confusions of the rote application of the law and the pursuit of justice. Salander was committed to a mental institution at an early age because of the political significance of her father, and her further adventures are inhibited by her status as an invalid.

Like the cases of Solzhenitsyn and Ai Wei Wei (as I indicated in an earlier post), the label of mental illness haunts the footsteps of political dissidents, even in a place as genuinely concerned with the wellbeing of its citizenry as Salander's Sweden.

At one point in the first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Salander's caseworker explains that based on Salander's history of antisocial behavior no-one would think twice about his revoking certain of her privileges: Everything would be Ordnung on paper. Much ado derives from how things look in official documents and reports, and the problem Larsson identifies in his novels is the disconnect between those documents and the values of truth, justice and compassion.

On the subject of paper, consider also the role of the press in Salander's life. Mikael Blomkvist is Salander's staunchest ally throughout the Millennium series, and in his capacity as muckraker he's freed to pursue Salander's twisted case down the most unlikely avenues. His investigations reveal more than Sweden's underbelly of corruption––they reveal precisely what is hidden from the police. In other words, the investigative reporter can dig where the detective cannot because Blomkvist remains forever outside the system.

Now consider where democratic values come from. Isn't, say, freedom of speech most important to people who say unpopular things? And surely the presumption of innocence is most valuable to the innocent man who just happens to appear guilty, so it makes sense that Lisabeth Salander embodies these things in series of novels about why those values require our eternal vigilance.

The significance of all this is that if critics merely see Salander as a stand-in for feminist values, the Millennium series becomes nothing more than a revenge tale in the mold of Inglourious Basterds. Yes, Lisabeth Salander is interesting from a feminist point of view, but Larsson's novels are a defense of the whole philosophical framework that makes feminist thought possible.

Steve Bloom: professor, pariah, punk rocker

Steve Bloom has, purposefully or not, become the Sid Vicious of Iowa journalism. And maybe more. Response to his recent article in The Atlantic is divided between those who take umbrage against Bloom's facts and conclusions, and those who see his perspective as a critique of journalism or Iowa or the upcoming caucuses or whatever. At any rate, Steve Bloom is the man a lot of Iowans love to hate––the man who brought a little punk to a place that may (or may not) be the urheimat of corn and hogs.


By now there must be dozens of full-length responses to the offending article. Those responses come from such notable corners as the Columbia Journalism Review and The Washington Post, and the headline is, "University of Iowa journalism professor kicks unlikely and 'frankly frightening' hornets' nest."

Ask his students if anyone really "gets" Steve Bloom

Anybody who has ever spent time in Iowa knows that the last thing the place is, is a hornets' nest. It's full of calm, collected, clean people––with the totally understandable exception of game days––who are proud of being forthright and slow to anger. If it ever seems like a boring place, it's because Iowa is perhaps one of the most normal places on Earth.


––Which is precisely what makes Bloom's article so damned amazing: It has managed to really piss these people off. 


Not every claim Bloom makes in his Atlantic piece is absolutely 100% accurate (as more than one Iowan has noted in the comments section of the article's online edition), but a lot of Iowa is rural. Some of it is crumbling and Podunk. Corn grows. People eat pork and think highly of Jesus. But Iowa's also exceptionally verdant, tidy, and toy-bright. Barns are uniformly painted lipstick red, lawns and men's hair are cropped close as golf greens, and people tuck in their shirts.


The insider truth is that Iowans accept Iowa's contrasts without remark––the green of the corn and the blue of the sky, calloused hands and fresh linens, a disconcerting mix of progressive and conservative––and expect the same from the rest of us. The only thing that could upset such staid and placid folk is a half-truth. They ignore the lie that Iowa is flat or that its people are stupid (no man knows his business quite like an Iowan) or that it's secretly Idaho, but Steve Bloom's half-truths are simply more than respectable people can turn their backs on.


Bloom's take-down of the Iowa caucus tries to prove that Iowans no longer represent mainstream America, but in so doing he painted a picture of Iowa that Iowans themselves swear they don't recognize. And just like punk rock, the more some finger-wagging, latte-sipping, city-dwelling liberal tries to define you, the more you're likely to rebel against his definition. As one Iowan mentioned on my Facebook wall, "Reading [the article] the whole time I felt a square peg / round hole vibe when I looked at my own life here."  


This is where most of Bloom's haters miss the point. Of course, they're justified in their quarrel with his depiction of their home, but Bloom's comments about "scuzzy" towns and corporate farms are just set pieces in an argument over whether Iowa can, through the caucus, continue to lay claim to being the "real" America. The bulk of America's population now lives in the 'burbs and on the heavily urbanized coasts, as do the media corporations that are increasingly the masters of public opinion.

Outside the world of Pace sauce, New York is the new Real America

There's a general consensus that the Iowa caucus plays a disproportionate role in the Republican nomination process, playing into the hands of the social conservatives who make up that party's grass roots. Like a Frenchman wearing a beret or Africans with bones in their noses, the Iowa farmer showing up at a caucus with his hog and flannel shirt is a quaint anachronism that defrauds political discourse. In a much more recognizable Iowa, that farmer might make his entrance in a coat and tie, just like everyone else in America. 


The irony is that in order to debunk Steve Bloom, Iowans will first have to debunk the image of Iowa the media presents to the rest of America through the spectacle of their caucus.