Author: Aaron Weber

Personal Essay: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Television

Yes, this is the real cartoon textRight around election-time, pundits always begin to lament the frivolity of the average voter. “Why can’t we pay attention to what really matters?” they wail. Why must we focus on Britney Spears and her pubic hairstyles? Why must we devote more column space to whether Posh has breast implants, and whether David Beckham’s crotch is enlarged with props and Photoshop in that Armani underwear ad?

I admit that it’s certainly possible that the average voter is a fucking idiot, but isn’t it also possible that politics and “serious” matters don’t focus enough on what matters to the average voter, and that what matters to the average voter is a little diversion before the comfort of the grave?

It’s been nearly four hundred years since Thomas Hobbes coined the phrase “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and while life has improved on all five points, society hasn’t exactly perfected itself, either:

  • Life is still solitary: I’ve got lots of Facebook friends and plenty of face-to-face friends as well. It doesn’t make me any less alone, though. Pundits like Lee Siegel decry the effect of the Internet on society and say that online relationships are a poor substitute for face-to-face relationships. But direct human interaction is greatly overrated and frequently soulless. Is any real connection to another person possible?
  • Life is still poor: On the one hand, we wallow in material possessions. On the other hand, David Beckham is far wealthier and is better endowed. And even he doesn’t seem satisfied, or why else would he be appearing in those Armani ads?
  • Life is, if anything, nastier: Perez Hilton. Enough said.
  • Life is still brutish: An organ-trafficking ring was recently uncovered in India. Marijuana farms in the UK are employing slave labor. The American government admits to using methods of torture perfected by the Inquisition. We’ve refined our brutality, but that’s like putting a pig in a suit: It’s still going to roll in its own shit.
  • Life is still short: As another notable economist noted, “in the long run, we are all dead.”

 

Care to discuss tax policy now? The politically high-minded (myself included) love to talk about rational decision-making. The flaw in that approach is that rational decision making requires assuming that there’s some kind of goal or point to what you’re doing, and if you think too hard, you’ll remember that there isn’t one. Given that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, is it really worth the effort to think about substantive proposals for farm subsidy reform?

No wonder people just vote for whoever makes them feel good, and then go back to distracting themselves with Britney Spears (her problems make my problems look totally surmountable, even though both of us are, in the long run, dead). Frivolity makes us feel a little better, and between mewling infancy and helpless senility, feeling a little better is all we’ve got.

And that’s why I love television: Because it’s the opiate of the masses (I’m a mass on the couch right now, trust me. Probably a cancerous mass, but I guess you’d have to ask Dr. House.) and anything which eases suffering is a blessing indeed.

Where Should I Really Be Living?

It’s cold and wet here. And expensive. Yet people tell me frequently that Boston (and environs, such as my home of Somerville) are awesome. And to a certain extent, I agree. But on cold, wet, evenings, I often think… couldn’t I be somewhere… better? Boston may be great, but is it The Greatest City In America?

Apparently not: Search for “The Greatest City In America” and you’ll come up with… Baltimore!

Since we know that Google never lies (see also the search for “dangerous cult“), I’m obviously going to have to move to the Charm City.

Boston Globe Totally Losing It

Things the Globe could do a good job reporting on, but for some reason doesn’t: Violent crime in minority neighborhoods. The turnpike authority. The state budget. The MBTA. And this weekend, the regional housing market.

Yesterday’s Real Estate section covered the Route 2 corridor in central MA and described it as “a crisis,” but failed to make a case for why it’s different from the housing disaster to the south, east, or north. Their justification:

“Lawrence and Brockton have higher rates of foreclosures. But people here said the real estate market’s collapse in northern Worcester County has been especially devastating because of the area’s relative economic isolation, compared to cities closer to Boston’s transportation networks and urban core.”

In Lawrence, the foreclosure rate is nearly double that of even the most hard-hit areas in the Route 2 West corridor. You want to write about a housing crisis, and you ignore Lawrence? Is that more of a Herald town or something?

They also said that “In 2006, for example, the Fitchburg-Leominster region had the seventh-highest number of subprime mortgages in the nation, 187, that went delinquent just three months after the borrowers closed on their loans, a Mortgage Bankers Association study released last year found.” That’s less an indication of a financial crisis than an indication of financial fraud. I know it’s possible for legitimate 30-year loans to go sour after just a couple months, but when so many of them do, you start looking for falsely inflated assets and corrupt brokers who illegally pushed people into loans they didn’t understand and couldn’t afford. Does the article cover fraud? No, it does not.

Obama Has A Posse

Obama posterObey Giant, the people (person? RISD graduate, if I’m not mistaken) behind those “Andre The Giant Has A Posse” stickers that were so popular late in the last century, has decided to endorse Obama the only way they know how: With a semi-legal wildcat postering campaign.

Fortunately the poster doesn’t say OBEY OBAMA or OBAMA THE GIANT HAS A POSSE. That’s gotten more than a little tired. What they do have is a pretty damn good poster.

It’s got a little of that punk stencil influence, and a little of the socialist realism influence, but not so much of either that it says anything about that. The strong lines just say strength and the colors say he bleeds red white and blue.

Nat Friedman, my old school friend, boom-time employer, and (perhaps most importantly) one of those geniuses behind a lot of hot Linux software is also endorsing Obama.

You should donate some money. Or write a blog post about considering donating money but deciding to spend the money on booze instead, you know, to support the economy. The booze economy. It’s an important economic sector, you know.

Point being, Obama’s on a roll, but there’s still time to join the winning team without seeming like you’re just jumping on the bandwagon.

I can only hope that his politics of hope and dreams and optimism and progress actually translate into dully sensible economic policies like progressive taxation, lightly-regulated trade, a decent guest-worker program, and so forth. Because I can find the cloud inside every silver lining, I will point out that I don’t know what Obama will be able to do without cooperation from Congress, and that whoever wins the White House is going to have some unenviable wreckage to clean up. Look at the economic stimulus bill going through right now: “The CBO estimated that the most effective stimulus idea would be a temporary boost in food stamps. They concluded that the second most effective stimulus idea would be an increase in the duration of unemployment benefits. Democrats proposed both of those things. But Republicans wouldn’t go along with either. So in order to make the bill bipartisan, the best idea was stripped out. And so was the second best idea.”

Lived Experience Fights Dirty

Cat And Girl is good today. I am pretty good today too, despite a headache I will blame on dry air rather than admit that I have a hangover. I wrote the following clever banter which I am proud of:

The problem with tall, skinny celebrities like Eva Longoria Parker is that you end up with tall, skinny pictures of them. And then you have to write text to go next to those tall, skinny pictures.

In this case, I need 426 vertical pixels of filler. So, here it is:

Eva Longoria Parker is in London. She is wearing a sparkly gold and black dress that seems designed to make her look like some sort of tropical fish. Perhaps it is a commentary on the ‘fishbowl’ that stars live in, thanks to paparazzi and media scrutiny.

On the other hand, maybe she’s just been hanging out with Victoria Beckham too much, and has begun to think that “expensive” plus “gold” equals “classy.”

Less likely theories include “she’s become a magician’s assistant” and “cocaine’s a hell of a drug.” Anyone else got a guess?

Vanity Of Vanities: James Wolcott Lays The Blame

This guy’s got really good chops at the bitter invective thing:

“As the financial markets heave and purge in a heaving, purging outbreak of worldwide bulimia… I think we all know what it feels like to have the batteries drain in our laser wands…”

Wolcott also has good taste in reading: He links to Tiny Revolution with the phrase “thanks a lot, dickhead.”

A friend asked me if I was worried about the economy, and strangely, I’m not any more worried than I have been for the past decade. Sadly, it seems as though the economy has caught up with my previously-unwarranted pessimism.