Month: February 2012

Time to knock off a couple more answers to questions posed in Ask Me Anything! February 2012. As before, note that I’m still open to questions!

In this edition I’m going to tackle all of the political questions at once, so if you don’t want to read ranty liberalism, just keep scrolling. I’ll put the rest of this after the cut.

First, Roger asks: Your specific analysis of the 4 GOP candidates for President (and any of the dropouts if you want). Positive/negative traits, whether your opinion of them has improved or declined since the campaign has started. How you think each would fare against Obama, and who you think each would pick as a VP candidate.

Anyone familiar with me likely knows that I’m honestly not the person to ask this question. For me to ever consider voting Republican again, that whole party is going to have to move significantly to the left, and I think the odds of that happening are spectacularly low. I honestly don’t want to get into a big long rant on why I find them all so loathsome, so here’s a short rundown:

Mitt Romney: He’d probably be the best President of the bunch, in terms of policy; but I don’t think that even if he was elected, he’d be able to command the party loyalty that it would take to get some stuff through Congress. Or, given his slavish desperation to prove that he really is a good little Movement Conservative, I suspect he’d espouse policies that he doesn’t really believe in himself…which would make for half-assed governance.

Newt Gingrich: This man is the Father of Scorched Earth Republican Politics. He’s a moral midget, a man with zero policy ideas that interest me, and…well, the man is a shit. I think that he’d be Nixon without the charm.

Rick Santorum: For different reasons, he’s even more loathsome to me than Gingrich. I hate this guy. I hate his smarmy smile, I hate his sweater vests (not that he can help that one, I just hate sweater vests), I hate his apparent belief that God communicates through him, I hate his misogyny, I hate his stance on everything he ever opines about. Everything about him screams out that he sees a Santorum Presidency as his chance to be High Moral Arbiter of the Land. The Inquisition would come to America, if he had his way.

Ron Paul: I hate this guy too. I hate that he’s almost certainly a sickeningly banal racist who has tossed out a whole series of contradictory and unconvincing lies to explain the existence of racist writings that appeared over his signature. I hate his transparent manipulation of the legislative process to score all kinds of Evil Gummint Money for his district, while he claims purity in his hatred of Evil Gummint Money. I hate that his Great Commitment to Freedom doesn’t so much extend to people who are attracted to people of the same sex, or people who have vaginas. And I hate the dewy-eyed cult that surrounds this guy, consisting of mostly young people who know exceedingly little but think because they’ve read Paul tracts and Cliff Notes versions of Ayn Rand that they get to tell everyone else to “educate themselves”.

A week or two ago, MightyGodKing described the Republican field thusly: “This primary is between a Republican version of John Kerry except less likeable and human, a dude who lost a re-election campaign by twenty points, a guy who was so dishonest that his fellow Republicans said “dude, whoa” and an insane dwarf.” That’s about right. All of these candidates deny global warming. All of them deny evolution. All of them champion a continued stampede toward stupidity.

How would they fare against President Obama? A lot can happen, but if the economic news continues to be good each month, leading to an increased mood of optimism in America, I can’t see any of these guys winning. My hope is that this is the last election cycle that the Republicans can get even crazier, because if they manage to come up with an even more vile batch of crazies in 2016…ye gods.

Sorry, Republicans. But I didn’t ask the question!

Sticking with Roger: Why, do you suppose, that Tea Party folks support the economic policies of the rich when it is not, IMO, in their own best interest?

Because they’re dumb? OK, maybe that’s not nice or charitable or whatever, but…I can’t come up with anything else. But when you get right down to it, the Tea Party is nothing more than good old Angry White Republicanism, dressed up in tricorns and spouting Revolutionary War rhetoric. I don’t see any interesting new arguments from them, just warmed-over “Anything gummint does is bad” nonsense. The Tea Party is branding, nothing more. There’s a visceral loathing of government in the American psyche that’s been there since before the country even existed. It’s often not even rational, but we have a powerfully mythological belief in this country in rich people who made it for themselves with no help from anybody, in awful government bureaucrats whose only reason for existence is to make decisions that affect people adversely (all the while accepting corporate bureaucracies whose only reason for existence is to make decisions that affect people adversely, with the extra bonus of doing it for a profit motive), and in the whole idea that so many have that “I do everything for myself!”

I could say more, but I don’t think I will.

Should civil rights issues such as gay marriage be decided by the courts, the legislature or by plebiscite, and why?

Probably a combination of the courts and legislatures. I am not a fan of voter referenda. I’m a fan of representative democracy, where sudden moods of an electorate are removed from direct decision making. It seems to me that referenda tend to be decided by the side that gets angry enough to vote on something, and further, that anger seems too often to translate into a referendum being decided on the side of limiting rights, rather than granting them. The fact is that public opinion often needs to be dragged kicking and screaming forward.

The 20th Century was clearly the American century. What will the 21st be?

Well, I see no reason to write off America yet, although we’ve got some troubles in front of us. China is coming on strong, isn’t it? And India is making big strides as well. This may be the Asian Century…but I’d be happy if it could somehow be the era when we start to put notions of nationhood behind. I’d like it to be the human century.

More answers to come!

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OK, I think I’ve waited long enough — it’s time to start answering the questions from Ask Me Anything! February 2012. And feel free to still ask, if you like…it’s the 10th anniversary month here, so let’s make this one special! If there’s something you’ve always wondered about Yours Truly, or something you’ve always wondered what Yours Truly thought about it, or something you’ve never wondered about Yours Truly but it just occurred to you to ask, go for it!

My good old college friend (and husband of another good old college friend) Aaron asks: As a very slow reader (I started reading Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy in October and am just nearing the end. And, that is a pretty good pace for me), with a decent sized list of books on the “need to get to” list, should I add the Song of Ice and Fire series?

Krista and I are just finishing up the first season of the HBO adaptation, and have loved it, but it feels like so much is missing.

I just finished A Clash of Kings the other day (blog post forthcoming), and I do recommend it, thus far. My admiration of the series’s first two books remains untouched; I’m most nervous now about the next two (as well as the fifth one, which I’ve never read yet), because I didn’t like those ones as much the first time through. For a slow reader, these books do represent quite an investment — I mean, look at these things! Since paginations differ, the best way to gauge lengths of books is word count, and check out the numbers on this site. Assuming these are accurate, and I don’t see reason to doubt it offhand, the entirety of The Lord of the Rings checks in at approximately 473,000 words, while just the first two of GRRM’s Ice and Fire books top 610,000 words. A Storm of Swords, GRRM’s Book Three, is 404,000 words…meaning, that one book is a short novel shy of the entire Lord of the Rings. Wow.

Of course, word count isn’t everything. Martin’s prose, when he’s on his game, can really propel the reader forward, in my experience; his dialogue can absolutely crackle, and the device of each chapter being told from the point of view of a different character is extremely effective when one gets used to it — one effect I’m rediscovering is that I’ll finish a chapter for a character I really like, Jon Snow for example, and then decide to keep reading until I get back to Jon Snow. What GRRM does, language-wise, is rarely as dense and descriptive-heavy as JRRT. So this is definitely a “Your mileage may vary” kind of thing.

As for the differences between the books and the teevee adaptations, I honestly don’t know, as I haven’t yet watched the teevee show beyond the first episode. I do plan to, though.

(BTW, on the subject of word counts — I’m really hoping to bring the first draft of Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) in at no more than 180,000 words, with a further eye to cutting at least ten percent of the words upon the edit. We’ll see!

Bill asks: Have you kept up your chops? Do you play anything besides trumpet?

Sadly, no. I haven’t touched the trumpet since I played in a friend’s wedding — Aaron of Question Number One’s wedding, actually! — and that was in 1995 or thereabouts. Time and opportunities available tend to make it hard to do such things…not that there are no opportunities, but life has that odd way of moving on, and other interests surge forward, arise anew (when we have space to do so, one day, I plan to take up woodworking and carpentry), or resurface in a big way (I loved writing as a kid several years before I knew what music even was). My musical life now is pretty much as a listener, only. But that’s fine for me; at least my musical training earlier in life has equipped me to appreciate music on a level that would be harder to attain had I never touched an instrument.

As for other instruments, I played the piano in high school and college. I do wish I had devoted more effort to the piano, because in all honesty, I was actually fairly decent at it. But I never took the piano as seriously as I took the trumpet, so I never got good enough at it to do more than scratch a surface. I consider that one of the missed opportunities of my life. I suppose I should write a post about my piano teachers one of these years….

More answers to come, and feel free to ask more, if you like!

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