A friend writes:

Are you getting involved at all in the Democratic presidential primary? I keep giving money to Howard Dean, who if nothing else seems like the one who's most likely to be able to beat Bush (I know, the media all think the opposite, but I think they've got their heads up their asses as usual).

Since you asked:

Good question. I guess once I get some money, I'll have to think about it. I generally feel pretty good about Dean. He wouldn't normally be my favorite guy—he's very analogous to Clinton on first glance (but without the sex, drugs & rock-n-roll)—but under the circumstances I think he's the best bet. (My biggest reservations, and they're big ones, are with his law-and-order posturing about executions and his selective blindness regarding Israel.)

I did vote for Nader last time—and knowing what I know now, I still would've done the same since I lived in New York; I just would've told the Greens to send a few thousand more poll-watchers to Florida. But now is now. Besides the obvious immediate need to cast Cthulhu back into the sea, I guess I see Dean as being potentially more of a real alternative than Clinton or Gore were... he's not the anointed child of the DLC (evil Republicans in disguise), plus I think the leftist momentum that has gathered against Bush will stick around long enough to hold Dean's feet to the fire if he tries to screw us after election. Famous last words, I know.

As you'd probably guess if you know me, Kucinich is a lot closer to my politics but I don't consider him a serious candidate even compared to, say, Nader—just way too much baggage from Cleveland and he is awfully cozy with that bizarre Natural Law crowd. As for the others, I can't support for the nomination anyone who voted for the war and/or the Patriot Act, though I'll vote for whoever the nominee is—except possibly Lieberman, if he gets it by some ghastly miracle. (People keep writing how Lieberman is really a liberal, despite being an unusually war-hungry theocratic culture-cop in the pocket of industry... man, I hope we haven't lowered our standards that far.)

It's hard for me to talk about these things because there's an almost exactly even three-way split in my brain between pragmatic liberalism, Green socialism and anarchism, which I realize don't really go together. But if we get a Democrat in, I'll be fairly happy. Still... I hope that doesn't mean that the 99% of Democrats who are more conservative than me will spend the following years convinced of their eternal rectitude and trying to forestall debate on everything (i.e. "Shut up—you don't want Bush back, do you?").

As I wrote in my sad little journal in 2000 (see "So I'm not just talking to myself"), if you choose lesser evils for short-term reasons, you should at least consider the question of how you'll ever know when it's safe to stop doing that. (Speaking of famous last words, see the last paragraph of that page.)

1.
Like most people my age, I don't know a whole lot about the Vietnam War. But growing up in the '70s and '80s, it was pretty much a given among everyone I knew that the Vietnam War was a big horrible mistake from hell. Never dreamed that in 2003 there would be so many people still trying to win the damn thing in their minds. Every so often I see some newspaper op-ed casually discussing the "realistic" side of that war... with a sort of smug rebelliousness, as if the general national consensus that it was a load of crap just proves that the bleeding-hearts fooled everyone. And sadly, even many of those who agree that it was a load of crap seem to be awfully ready to listen to a bunch of take-charge guys who sound just like the previous take-charge guys. But I guess it makes sense. If you protest against something shameful, and it passes away and there's no great improvement in the world but you're still left with the shame, you might listen to someone who promises to show you how it wasn't all that wrong. I hope that's not me and my friends in 30 years.

2.
I'm always overly surprised by how carelessly people toss around grievous images of the past. I can't seem to get over the case of Matt Ramirez, the pro-Bush cartoonist who was investigated by the Secret Service for drawing one of the lamest political cartoons ever. The guy was looking for an easy way to portray Bush as a victim and picked the famous Saigon execution photo. I can't figure out what's crazier: casting Bush in the Viet Cong role, or using such a horrifying image of personal death to make a vague point about "politicization." (Ramirez apparently thinks the message of the photo itself was "the politicization of the Vietnam war.") He doesn't seem to be very smart, but poking around on a right-wing bulletin board I saw several people defend him with an amazing argument:

(* Interestingly, the guy who took the photo thought it came across as too anti-war. In this rather hideous article he's quoted as saying more or less that you shouldn't blame a guy for killing prisoners of war if they were recently shooting at him.)

i) anti-war people were the only ones who thought that photo was a big deal(*); ii) therefore, Ramirez is using their own thing against them—like, reverse double irony: in your face, bleeding hearts! As others have no doubt pointed out, he could've made his point even better if he drew Bush as a child running down a road, naked, on fire.

3.
I just saw the documentary The Weather Underground, which I recommend. I saw the movie with my parents, who had lived in California for a few years in the '60s but moved back to the Midwest before things started blowing up (they first met at Northwestern—where one of the Weathermen works now). I could hear them occasionally holding their breath at some of the awful footage of Vietnam, Nixon, and police violence, which made me feel very slightly better about the present day. And they were both surprised to see what a large number of things the Weathermen actually blew up in those few years—presumably they were all on the news, but as my father said, if you see Walter Cronkite every night saying "There was a bombing of blah blah in response to blah blah" in the same tone, it becomes background noise.

The movie leaves out a lot of context, but I think it says important things about the huge spiritual dangers faced by any young person who becomes radically aware of the state of the world. It's very, very sad, and unfortunately it doesn't provide much hope that we won't have to confront a lot of that again in the near future, but it's a story worth knowing. It's too bad that the main outside critical voice on screen is the incredibly annoying Todd Gitlin, but he's not what lingers in my mind—he speaks from anger and certainty, which there's no shortage of. But the people who broke things and broke themselves, and are now looking back to make sense of it and to help connect the past with the present, do linger.

4.
Not coincidentally, I'm reading Daniel Berrigan's difficult book Consequences, written between 1965 and 1967. Some of it is Christian devotional thoughts, some is a political diary. In his introduction he writes:

I am oppressed beyond words by the "normalcy" of the atmosphere, by our ability to "carry on," as though the war were no more than an afterthought at the edge of our consciousness .... Does no one hear the hinge of fate, closing in our faces?

.... as long as such a war as ours continues, the rich too grow poorer—poorer in human resources, in everything that counts for a human future. The emperor can deal with his enemies; but that, after all, is a savage and inferior talent. What he cannot do is order his own life in the paths of mercy and love ... His mind dulls; he is governed more and more by caprice and distraction and impulse; he literally cannot imagine what human needs are, who his neighbor is, what his stewardship demands of him.

There are probably a lot of angry people who would understand that part. But this part is harder: Berrigan talks about the process of letting go that's part of nonviolent confrontation, the necessity of allowing yourself to experience defeat that feels like death, to see that the truth is more enduring than either your enemy's plans or your own. He writes:

When men have risen from the dead, they are like a risen Socrates—or Christ. Their eyes are full of questions: Why are you weeping? Whom do you seek? Have you believed only because you have seen?

Susan would like you to repeat this mantra, and so would I. More later.

In other news, she has eyewitness evidence that Garfield the cat is dead. But personally I think he employs dozens of body doubles, as do all evil dictators. We may never know, since he has no DNA.

This digital photo retoucher's disturbing portfolio has been making the rounds (can't figure out who posted it first, sorry), and the weird reality-screwing aspect speaks for itself, but I found another reason to be distressed by it: photographers are getting lazy and models are getting an even worse deal than usual. I can't stand fashion photography, but I have to admit those guys know how to make people look just so, or at least they used to. There used to be these things called lighting, makeup, and lens filters. Now, apparently they just take a garishly lighted, poorly posed picture with crappy makeup; then some guy feeds it through the Matrix, smooths everything out, and screws around with the bone structure until it looks like the cartoon girl they had in mind. Well, great, except now the model—who needs these pictures for her portfolio, to get work—has to choose either a god-awful photo of herself, or a slick photo of someone with a different nose, eyes, and skull.

(From what I've heard, except for the rare big money-makers, modeling is a pretty lousy job: spend all your time chasing work from overpaid bozos, get treated like a piece of furniture, and know that any talents you may have are meaningless if your nose is the wrong shape. But at least you used to know that if they hired you, they liked your face.)

Usually, leaving food out for too long leads to no good. But by the time all three of us figured out that no one was doing anything about the sweet potato on top of the microwave because it belonged to our former roommate, it had sprouted into Potato Island... which made us all happy, not to mention the sunbather.