Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to some Kevin Devine.

I can haz dekonstrukshun?

If you're here, on the intertubes reading this blog, I'm not going to explain to you what lolcats are. Instead, I'll point you toward this wickedly smart Salon piece by Jay Dixit, an editor at Psychology Today. Money quote:

"A second major factor in the poignancy of the sad lolcat, I would argue, is the use of animals. The comic form is generally a prophylaxis against sentimentality. By articulating profound feelings through cats and marine mammals speaking garbled English, we're able to shroud genuine emotions in pseudo-irony -- which means those animals can evoke deeper emotions without fear of mockery or cheapness."

If there was going to be anything that could break through the irony force field of today's postmodernly aloof, internet-savvy youth, who'd have thought it would be lolcats?

WTF?

"Behavior detection officers"? What the hell is a behavior detection officer!

Somewhere, George Orwell is screaming.

Zelda warriors

Because we don't want Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun to get too serious, here are some links.

# Here are more images from Cracked that will make you want to say "authenticity FAIL," but are actually true-life, no joke, real photographs. Who knows what to believe any more.

# This is just cool: the Life magazine photo archive is now available on Google. Some of the most iconic images in American history have appeared in Life, and they're all (I think) available for browsing. It's probably a better way to kill time than, say, reading your friend's blog. But not that much better!

# The "Kid Playing Dragonforce's 'Through the Fire and Flames' on Guitar Hero" Youtube video has become a genre in itself in recent months, up there with "Laughing Baby" and "Kid Faceplanting Off the Roof." But this guy goes the extra mile. Kudos, friend.

# This story is getting a ton of play, so you probably didn't hear it here first: meh is now a word in the Collins English Dictionary. It's not Webster's or the OED, but still noteworthy. I'm obviously excited, but like a lot of you, I've been saying meh for quite some time. In fact, I say a lot of words, irregardless of whether they're actually in the dictionary.

Crisis on Infinite Economies

Did you know that we're in the middle of a huge financial crisis? And on our way to a recession? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's true.

Now that the election is over, we no longer have to view this crisis through the lens of partisan slogans and sound bites ("The deregulators did this!" and "Freddie Mac did this!" and the like). I just recently read two very sharp, very engaging articles that offer a big picture view of the crisis, and I though I would share. You're welcome!

The first, "The End" by Michael Lewis (of Moneyball fame), is in this month's issue of Portfolio. Lewis wrote a book called Liar's Poker about his time as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the late 80s, and uses that experience to draw the necessary parallels between the go-go 80s (which ended with the savings and loan crisis and a multi-billion-dollar government bailout) and go-go 00s (which ended with the subprime mortgage/collateralized debt obligation/credit default swap crisis and a multi-billion-dollar government bailout).

The second is "Wall Street Lays Another Egg" by Niall Ferguson, a history and business professor at Harvard, from the new Vanity Fair. I especially like this one because it traces a coherent narrative of the history of not only the current crisis, but of banking itself. (His latest book is called The Ascent of Money, so I guess he knows a thing or two about it.) It's one thing to read the Wikipedia page about collateralized debt obligations; it's another to be able to coherently connect the dots from farmers negotiating future prices for their crops to bankers slapping mortgages together and selling them as AAA-rated bonds. Ferguson does a good job.

Tending the flock

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I have no problem speaking my mind about political matters. Religion, on the other hand, is a bit of a collar-puller. I've always been reluctant to talk about faith, because I think it's a really personal thing, and also something that can cause otherwise rational people to think and behave quite irrationally (for example, I'll cite, oh, all of human history). But, here it goes. Recent political events have prompted some pretty wacky stuff to come out of the Catholic Church, the faith tradition that I was raised in. And quite frankly, it's all bullshit.

One of the most insidious trends in recent years has been the co-opting of the Eucharist as a political cudgel. You saw it in 2004, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, encouraged denying Holy Communion to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a Catholic senator who supports legal abortion. After the most recent election, you saw a Catholic priest in South Carolina go a step further, telling his parish

"Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ's Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation."

Eat and drink their own condemnation, he said. For the faithful who believe that women have the right to choose what goes on with their own bodies, one of the Church's most sacred rites becomes their condemnation. Wrap your head about that.

Then, we've got James Francis Cardinal Stafford, who serves as Major Penitentiary in the Roman Curia (and presumably has the ear of the Pope). In a talk at Catholic University, the Cardinal called President-elect Barack Obama “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic,“ and said “For the next few years, Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden." Maybe I'm just jaded, but that "apocalyptic" sounds quite a bit like a pernicious dogwhistle to all the lunatics who believe that Barack Obama is the anti-Christ. In this blogger's myopic opinion, Cardinal Stafford should have been a little more candid: "For the next few years, Armageddon will not be marginal. We will know that valley." Why sugarcoat things, you know?

Then there's this bit of folly:

"Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood," released Oct. 30 by the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, not only reiterates the teaching that men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies are unworthy of ordination, it also urges seminaries to enlist the aid of psychologists in screening candidates for homosexuality and other "psychic disturbances."

You read that right. "Homosexuality and other 'psychic disturbances.'" Interesting choice of words there. Since in order to refer to "other" psychic disturbances, you have to have one psychic disturbance to begin with. Homosexuality is most definitely not one. And it's alright for the Church to bar gay men from entering the priesthood. Young men are banging down the doors of the cathedral to become priests, so the Church can afford to cling to anachronistic junk-scientific bigotry.

I understand that the Church has a right to run itself the way it sees fit. And I'm sure, as that L.A. Times editorial says, there are plenty of esoteric theological reasons for the decisions the Church makes. But I think the question begs to be asked: are these the horses that the Church is hitching itself to? Fire-and-brimstone-style hostility towards those who support reproductive rights, and blind, counterproductive homophobia? Is the great balance sheet of "intrinsic evil" so heavily loaded on the side of abortion that it outweighs a host of other things that reasonable people find to be evil, like torture, and war, and state-sanctioned killing, and antipathy to the poor and infirm?

I don't mean to frame this as a "Jesus was a liberal" or "God's on our side" thing. What I wonder, though, is why Catholics aren't threatened by their leaders with condemnation if they vote for candidates who vigorously support torture and war. I also wonder how the Church can justify shooting itself in the foot by denying ordination to gay men when it's literally starving for people to fill the ranks of the priesthood. The Catholic Church isn't the only guilty party here; so much of what passes for Christian values in our discourse is just hatred gussied up in a moth-eaten Old Testament veil.

I often wonder if I'm reading the same Bible as everyone else. I hear a lot about condemnation and sin and anger, but I don't hear a lot about love and forgiveness and service. I mean, doesn't it say in the first letter to the Corinthians "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing"? Didn't Christ Himself say in a parable "Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me"? Doesn't the first letter of John say "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us"? No one has ever seen God. Not me. Not you. Not the pope. Not the woman walking out of the abortion clinic, or the man protesting outside of it. We're all in the same boat here in this world. We ought to love one another.

I think those are the important parts of the Bible. There's a lot more like that. We'd all do well to remember.

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to this cover of "Hot in Herre" by Official Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Super-Crush Jenny Owen Youngs.

The audacity of updates

So remember the other day, when I wrote that post about Barack Obama's election? And I said this:

From the days of the first colonists, when John Winthrop said of his Massachusetts Bay colony "For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us," America has seen itself as a uniquely great nation. The mistakes that we have made have happened when we act to exert America's greatness, instead of working to make it great. When we fall back on America's might, instead of its ideals. When we treat our greatness as a birthright, instead of a goal to be strived for. The president-elect understands this. His election was historic—really, significant beyond my ability to put it into words. But the real work is yet to be done. His election is a symbol of a concrete change that we have to take up ourselves. It's a chance. We may take it. Or we may not.

And then remember when the new issue of New York magazine came out today, and Kurt Andersen's story about Barack Obama's election said this:

We acted true to the original Puritan vision of America “as a City upon a hill,” as opposed to the self-satisfied, we’re-Number-One-no-matter-what revisionism of the last few decades. John Winthrop’s phrase was a warning to do right so as to avoid the world’s disappointment and condemnation, not an eternal dispensation to do anything we wanted because we’re specially blessed.

Pithier, smoother, yes, but the same sentiment. Eh? Eh? Eh? How cool is that!

Official friend of DD&U

Well, there's no sense putting it off any more. If you ever read this blog and say "Whoa, people actually leave comments? Amazing", then you can thank my buddy Miles, aka spikemgb, who is secretly the author of Now is Not the Rhyme. Look for some inter-blog collaboration in the hopefully not too distant future, but in the time, watch him regain his faith in American democracy in real time.

Audacious

I just trashed 500 or so words worth of a rambling, verbose exploration of the redemptive power of change. It wasn't that good, so let's talk about books.

Do you remember East of Eden? In it, the character Lee is tripped up by a section of the book of Genesis (chapter 4, verses 6 and 7, to be precise). You see, in one translation, God tells Cain "thou shalt rule over" sin; in another, God says "Do thou rule over" sin. Lee, a thinker, was understandably perturbed by the difference. When it comes to conquering sin, getting a promise from God and getting an order from God are drastically different things.

So of course, to get to the heart of the matter, Lee learns Hebrew, to better understand the original text. And what does he discover?

"The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’"

Not to spoil things, but this whole timshel idea is the crux of the story.

I was reminded of Steinbeck's story the other day when President-elect Barack Obama gave his victory speech from Grant Park in Chicago. The long presidential campaign, during which our identity as Americans was used as a political cudgel, was over, and something needed to be said about what America really is. The president-elect might not have used the term "thou mayest," but he came pretty close:

"This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. . . . And to all those who have wondered if Americas beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope. For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."

A lot is said about American exceptionalism. From the days of the first colonists, when John Winthrop said of his Massachusetts Bay colony "For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us," America has seen itself as a uniquely great nation. The mistakes that we have made have happened when we act to exert America's greatness, instead of working to make it great. When we fall back on America's might, instead of its ideals. When we treat our greatness as a birthright, instead of a goal to be strived for. The president-elect understands this. His election was historic—really, significant beyond my ability to put it into words. But the real work is yet to be done. His election is a symbol of a concrete change that we have to take up ourselves. It's a chance. We may take it. Or we may not.

President-elect Obama gets it, drawing from the preamble of our founding document: our union can be perfected. The diction in the Constitution is no accident. It wasn't written to form a perfect union, but rather a more perfect one. The implication couldn't be more clear: perfection isn't on the horizon. It's just beyond it.

That's what makes America great, that quest for perfection. Our history as a nation is pocked by almost unforgivable sins: genocide, slavery, war. I say almost unforgivable, because I believe that the American story is a story of redemption. (I guess we're back to the redemptive power of change.) And whether the redemption is of the ancient crimes of European tyranny, or our own more recent ones, America is a place where that cleansing can happen, where things can be made right. Because even though their application hasn't always been consistent, the words that actually are our birthright have never changed: that all men are created equal; that our union can be more perfect; that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish. The American story is a long slog; too long, in fact. But the slog inevitably leads to the same place. That's the genius of America.

I have a favorite quote, which I think is appropriate here, and crazy enough, it's from Captain Jame Kirk, of the starship Enterprise. He said "We’re human beings, with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we won’t kill today." Yes. We can.

Don't be stupid

Vote tomorrow. I don't care who you vote for (actually, I do, but for the sake of this rare during-the-workday post, let's assume I don't), just vote. But go here first and get the information on your state's election day procedures.

Lame Halloween

So Halloween, my favorite holiday, has come and gone, and as the title of my post indicates, it was sort of lame. Neither of my roommates were particularly into it (i.e., no costumes). Friday night was cool enough, but I actually went to a non-costume party on Saturday. Swish that around in the ol' head for a sec. A party thrown on Halloween weekend...and there are no costumes involved! Wtf?

In discussions with some of my compatriots, this turn of events hasn't raised the eyebrows that I thought it would. "Well, Saturday was the day after Halloween, so I'm not surprised there weren't a lot of costumes," or "One day is enough for me." Are these people crazy? We should be dressing up more! We should be extending Halloween for as many days as is reasonably acceptable! And then maybe a day or two after that.

I almost feel like I grew this stupid beard for nothing.