tag clouds for first presidential candidate debate: obama and mccain

My collaborator CJO used Wordle to make these tag clouds for Thursday night's debates. Click either for full-size.

McCain's frequently-used words:

Obama's frequently-used words:

Obama's cloud is interesting: it strikes me as more cerebral, with less concrete nouns and more abstract, action-oriented words, "going, make, think." That is all for now.

Labels: language, politics

Sunday, September 28, 2008
11:32 AM
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about that skrull

So, those of you who read my blog at the Raccoon page (instead of somewhere else) may have noticed the Skrull / McCain PSA over on the left-hand side of the page.

Skrull-related humor is pretty much the province of comics geeks only, but for the benefit of the non-comics readers in the crowd, I thought I'd try explaining.

Skrulls are an alien race in the Marvel Universe, with the unique evolutionary advantage of being able to shape-shift. (In their natural form they're green, with a ridged chin.) They've been standard-issue Marvel Universe villains for close to fifty years now (they made their first appearance in Fantastic Four #2, 1962).

Anyway, this summer's big Marvel Comics crossover event is Secret Invasion, a plotline that involves a Skrull infiltration of various super-teams and powerful organizations. So any Marvel Comics character could (until the end of the plotline) secretly be a Skrull in disguise. And it got Skunkcabbage and I to thinking... if it could happen in the Marvel Universe, could it happen here?

Which brings us to John McCain. I've never really been a "fan" of McCain's, but it seemed like, years ago, he at least occasionally took stands that caused him to break from his party's ranks, and thus at least earned my respect as a man of principle. But in recent years that seems to have changed. For those of you keeping score, McCain's voting record made him the 45th most conservative Senator in 2001... and the 8th most conservative Senator in 2008. Has he sold out his principles in the name of wooing the party base? Has he simply dedicated himself, as never before, to the key tenets of conservativism? Or is he not "himself" at all?

In conclusion: John McCain is a Skrull. QED. More here.

Labels: comics, politics

Monday, April 21, 2008
2:03 PM
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fear and the freedom from fear

Grades went in on Monday, so now I'm beginning to work out a plan for my summer. I have a few goals, including to begin sending the novel out to publishers. It's now in its third draft, although still not exactly "completed." But done enough that I might be ready to send out a few chapters to see if people were interested.

This is the part of the writing process that I hate the most, and the part that I always vow to do well and then lose interest in almost immediately. Will it be different this time? Stay tuned.

In other news, I had a nice conversation last week with a few colleagues and friends about next year's Presidential election. At some point the conversation turned to the question of how/whether a Democratic president might be able to fix some of the damage done by eight years of Bush Administration policies. (I mean here both the damage done in the national/global context but also the "damage" that I experienced personally. I doubt I am alone in experiencing events in the wake of 2001 as a strangely intimate kind of emotional violence, a kind of trauma. And the often nightmarish intervening years have proven, unsurprisingly, to be a poor context for my personal recovery, so much so that I feel like I've had to perform certain sorts of psychic self-amputation in order to even survive.)

In any case, not long after that conversation I saw that the new issue of Harper's has taken as its cover story the question of "Undoing Bush," with eleven mini-essays on the topic. An interesting one is Earl Shorris' one on repairing the "national character," in which he describes America as a country in the grip of fear. (Note the related book.)

It's easy, though, when thinking of fear and the national character, to think only in terms of the fear of terrorism, which drove and continues to drive people to wildly seek safety/revenge in in catastrophic ways. And it's easy to look at the ways in which this fear has been deliberately stimulated and to reject this, to refuse to be terrorized and declare ourselves done with it. But courage means not only refusing to be afraid of manufactured evils but also being willing to seek out and confront real ones, whether they be in the offices of our own government or in the uninspected dark corners of our own selves. If we balk at the task then we, too, must acknowledge that we are fearful people, and when Shorris writes "a fearful person is unlikely to be temperate, prudent, or just" we must acknowledge that he is not just writing about Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld but about us too.

In closing, Shorris writes: "To the three basic questions written by Immanuel Kant at the height of the Enlightenment—'What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?'—we must add another: Why am I so afraid? It is a beginning."

Labels: fear, personal, politics, war_on_terror

Wednesday, May 16, 2007
9:05 AM
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the 300 club

There are many reasons why one might want to go to see 300, but the one I can at this point most heartily advocate is that I can not think of a cultural artifact that is more clearly the byproduct of life under the Bush Administration.

To wit: it's militaristic, it's stupid, it's racist, it's homophobic, it's openly contemptuous of anything that falls under the sphere of what we could broadly call "the humanities," it explicitly endorses hate as a virtue, it's terrified of the imaginary power of exotic enemies, it conflates compromise and submission, it conflates resistance and treason, it refuses to admit moral ambiguity, it invokes God while denying the value of spiritual experience, and its justification for all of these things is to utter and re-utter the name of abstract ideals (duty, honor, freedom) that it has absolutely no idea how to embody through actual choice and action.

In conclusion, I will mention that I made the "jerking off" motion during two different sequences in the film, and that, in retrospect, this seems low.

Labels: media commentary, politics

Wednesday, April 04, 2007
2:07 PM
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in defense of don rumsfeld

I'm no fan of Donald Rumsfeld, and I won't be sad to see him go. But his departure has sparked some retrospective commentary, in which his (in)famous statement about "known knowns" has made another round of appearances. I've always felt that it is, in fact, misguided to present this quote as a golden example of governmental obfuscation, which seems to be what people intend when they trot it out. Let's give it a listen:

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

OK, I'll admit that the repetition is initially curious to the ear, but beyond that neither the English nor the meaning behind it is particularly tortured. Furthermore, this is a completely reasonable, strategically sound, and actually somewhat insightful way to think about not only military knowledge but knowledge in general. I'd go so far as to say that maintaining an awareness of "unknown unknowns" is good mental practice, a vaccination against hubris.

It is true that Rumsfeld leaves a quadrant of his scatterplot chart unarticulated: "unknown knowns," things that we don't know that we know. The omission may be revealing. Slavoj Žižek, writing on this, relates "unknown knowns" to the Freudian unconscious, and describes it memorably as "the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values." Perhaps this blind spot helped contribute to Rumsfeld's failure.

Labels: knowledge, politics

Thursday, November 09, 2006
5:31 PM
1 comments

midterms

Regime change begins at home.

Labels: politics

9:56 AM
0 comments