satan for president

jesus was a maverick, too

I love my home state:

Columbus — Georgia Republican Party chairwoman Sue Everhart said Saturday that the party’s presumed presidential nominee has a lot in common with Jesus Christ.

“John McCain is kind of like Jesus Christ on the cross,” Everhart said as she began the second day of the state GOP convention. “He never denounced God, either.”

Everhart was praising McCain for never denouncing the United States while he was being tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

“I’m not trying to compare John McCain to Jesus Christ, I’m looking at the pain that was there,” she said.

This makes perfect sense. Jesus had his twelve apostles, McCain has 12 lobbyists.

what is the meaning of C.L.A.S.S.? is it a conspiracy levelled at sleepy students trying to pass?

Professor X — who, as far as I can tell, isn’t affiliated with Public Enemy — dares argue that college isn’t for everyone. It’s about time somebody said this. When you’re told from kindergarten that your divine destiny is to attend college after high school, you don’t give the decision to go to college much thought. And if you do, your guidance counselor schedules a conference with your parents. Never discussed is the fact that going to college is only useful for a particular subset of the workforce. I know plenty of people who are in college for no real reason. They’ve been brainwashed to think that the only way to obtain success/fulfillment/whatever is to get a meaningless humanities degree. Most shed this idea, like I did, when actually looking for jobs that require experience and technical knowledge.

I can’t speak for community colleges, but my own experience at the McUniversity of Georgia has taught me that such schools face two tasks that are fundamentally irreconcilable. The first is to get as many 18-year-olds to give them tuition money as possible with the hope that they will keep doing so as alumni. The second is to provide a quality education. When people enroll in college only because of a mandate from parents, high schools or government programs, they misdirect scarce educational resources away from those who might otherwise benefit.

Me, I was four years late in realizing that getting some vocational training was a far better career move than reading Kant and Heidegger. But a good thing about McUniversities, I guess, is that they’re nothing if not idiot-proof.

talking loud and saying nothing

This is hilarious:

We are all appeasers now.

wristcutters

Picked up Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006) at the video store last night. The premise is interesting enough: scorned lover commits suicide (you’ll never guess how), finds self in unbearably bland purgatory, meets quirky fellow self-extinguisher, seeks reconciliation. The DVD cover quickly reveals the film to be another entry in the “self-consciously indie” genre. But beyond the bleak colors and Zia’s initial overview of purgatory itself, it’s essentially a road trip film, one that relies on forced cliches to drive the story. What drives the junkie Mikal to get unpredictably angry at the other two travellers? What, other than the conventions of the genre, makes Zia fall in love with her? Why is he suddenly so willing to abandon his deceased ex — the whole reason for the trip in the first place? The audience is forced to accept these plot twists without any substantial exposition or character development.

But the ending is the most annoying part. Zia and Mikal find their way out of purgatory and wake up next to each other in the ER. They smile at each other while Zia’s parents fret in another room. The filmmakers present the corporeal union of wristcutter and heroin chick as a happy ending. I guess, in some bizarre way, it is. If the afterlife involves spending an eternity with such self-hating and ironically-mustachioed types, then maybe hell really is other people.

money didn’t change me

Figures that the one time I pick up a copy of Atlanta magazine, they’d run a lengthy, fairly interesting history of the last 20 years at the AJC. It’s labeled a profile of the AJC’s editor-in-chief, but Fennessy’s article delves into the events surrounding the paper’s late-80s pinnacle and subsequent decline. He rightly calls out the AJC’s transparent, cash-grabbing attempts at pseudo-hip posturing (the AccessAtlanta section, the cheesy front-page weather reports), showing them to be demonstrative of a tendency toward continual reinvention at the paper.

Also bearing in mind this item, an obvious problem with a wire-centric newspaper emerges. I can read all the AP/Reuters/Cox articles I want nearly anywhere. The media scene is saturated with wire copy. Why would I want to buy a newspaper that prints the same stuff I could read in hundreds of agglomerator Web sites, not to mention every small chain newspaper in the region? Charity? Nostalgia?

starving children, reconsidered

The other day we wrote about the abuse of starving African children by editorial cartoonists. Adding to what we discussed then, here we present an “ethanol is starving African children” wrap-up:

What political cartoonists consider daring and controversial is often sanctimonious, heavy-handed and obvious — the Vultures Over Darfur school.

Katy Roberts, New York Times editor

We can agree that starving African children is bad policy. We can also agree that corn ethanol is bad policy. But cartoons like those above manage to conflate the two without making any sort of substantive critique. “We shouldn’t use ethanol because children are starving.” Does that sentence even make any sense at all?

Considering the far bigger problems of which corn ethanol is symptomatic — U.S. subsidization of corn, the resulting obesity epidemic, our country’s overreliance on cheap gas, our government’s complicity in the supression of sustainable energy R&D — one would think that cartoonists would come up with something better. But a girl can dream.

a brief aside: charter communications is a conspiracy to keep you poor and stupid

Allow me a brief interlude to tell a story.

Two nights ago, I was working on a paper. It was about 1AM, and I was in my “zone.” Call it a trance, call it being catatonic — call it whatever you want — but I was there. But the Internet was acting up. Now, when it comes to consumer electronics, I am fairly technologically illiterate. If it came into existence after about 2003, I am essentially useless, though I am good at pretending not to be. My most prized possession is a 20-year-old beat machine. I still have trouble with DVD players.

So when my wireless Internet died, I did what I usually do to make it work (plug and unplug the modem). After about an hour, I realized it wasn’t going to work this time. So I called Charter Communications. Charter has an auto-troubleshooting system, whereby the angry caller is talked through the service interruption by a smooth, calming female robo-voice. “Just let me know when you unplug the modem,” coos the fembot. “Just say ‘Done.’”

“Done.”

“OK, great,” replies the program, using state-of-the-art emoting technology. “Don’t worry, pitiful human, our operators will assist you if I can’t solve your problem.”

“Do robots feel love?”

“Sorry, I did not compute your query.”

After about 45 minutes of this, at around 3AM, I finally got referred to an actual human. Which is to say, I was put on hold. “All operators are assisting other customers.” Who calls Charter Fucking Communications at 3AM on a Wednesday morning, anyway? Madmen and lunatics, probably.

I was on hold for fifteen minutes. Within 30 seconds of talking to a human, he told me that Charter Internet was down for the entire state of Georgia. That, plus I could pay a low additional fee and get Charter telephone service. I then did my best Ice Cube impression, yelling “fuck that shit, cuz I ain’t the one” as I hung up the phone.

Not really. But it still brings me to the moral: it is the Year of our Lord 2008. The Internet is an integral, inescapable part of our lives. I pay 53 dollars a month in order to take part in the glorious global cyber-commons of the World Wide Web. Hundreds of thousands of college students are studying for finals. How the fuck does the Internet get switched off in this day and age? And for an entire state? Did the guy cranking the wheel to power the Tubes go out for a smoke break and get trapped in the elevator?

In the U.S., we expect our corporate monoliths to treat us right. Wednesday morning, too wired to sleep and with nowhere to turn, I lost my faith in the dream.

And Jesus wept.