JD Salinger drank his own Kombucha. Pass it on.

I’ve been dealing with an organization at work for over two weeks now. This Shall-Remain-Anonymous organization has information about my organization on their Web site. I have been asked by my boss’ boss to update the information because the information is inaccurate.

Thus began the fun. Upon going to the organization’s Web site, I was delighted to learn that I wasn’t the first person to want this kind of information changed. In fact, there was a giant flashing button on their Web site that says: “Update Your Nonprofit’s Information.” Wow, a flashing button? This is gonna be the easiest part of my whole week. Click…

Next page says, “You currently do not have permission to update a nonprofit report.” Uh yeah, OK, I mean how would this Web site know who I was? I could be playing one of those classic nonprofit practical jokes where I lower the fiscal year operating revenue by a couple hundred thousand dollars on this Web site, and then everyone has a good chuckle. All right, though, I’ll play your game.

“If you’d like to request permission to update your organization’s report, please enter your EIN here. Then click ‘Request Permission’” These people have thought of everything. After figuring out what our EIN was through a series of internal phone calls, I was given a 9 digit number (our Employer Identification Number). And I entered it. To which, I received an error message: “This EIN does not exist. blah blah.”

After double-checking the number (it was correct), I contacted customer service to inform them of my plight. What do I do if my EIN does not exist in your system? Can I register it with your organization? etc. I received this response ‘Thank you for contacting XX. It appears your EIN does not exist.”

Ah, yes, thank you for repeating the error message I told you I received. I responded, this time copying the error message in the email. To which, I received a snooty reply. “Sir, you need a dash after the second number.” It must be rough having to deal with such idiots who don’t know where to put the dashes in their EINs.

This time, when I entered the number with the correct placement of the dash, I received the following error message: “Jane Doe is already registered as the person responsible for updating your organization’s information. If Jane Doe is no longer with the organization, please contact us at XXX@na.com.”

An answer, finally. “Dear X, Jane Doe is no longer with our organization, can you change the access so that I can update our information. hugs and kisses, duodecad.”

And the response a few minutes ago? “Dear Duodecad, Jane Doe is already registered as the person responsible for updating your organization’s information. If Jane Doe is no longer with the organization, please contact us at XXX@na.com.”

This could get ugly.

There’s a lot of serious discussion surrounding the elections, which is all fine and dandy, but yesterday, I came across this article from The Root. Christopher Beam (from Slate) and Chris Wilson would like to remind us of the things that white folk should not do just because Obama has been elected president:

1. Don’t personally congratulate all your black friends.

Black people are not a sports team, and Obama did not win the Super Bowl.

2. Don’t declare that you “never thought you’d see the day.”

You never thought you’d see the day?

3. Don’t start crossing the street in order to walk next to a black person.

President Obama is glad you support racial reconciliation, but he takes a hard line against jaywalking.

4. Don’t name drop “Dr. King.”

If you absolutely must make some comment about how this is a victory for civil rights, pick a marginally less obvious figurehead.

5. Don’t use the phrase “white people” in any way that suggests it doesn’t include you.

Contrary to popular belief, having voted for Obama does not make you even “semi-down.” Sorry if there was any confusion there.

To be fair, The Root also has a companion piece on what black people shouldn’t do. But seriously, it also hosts Henry Louis Gates’s article on what it feels to have Obama elected, and an open letter to our president-elect from Alice Walker.

[N.B. For those of you offended by the title of this post, I apologize. I simply could not resist the double entendre]

Yesterday’s election finally proved the cynics and naysayers wrong. The defeatism evident in the public statements of men like Karl Rove and Steve Schmidt was shown to be premature, as Americans collectively proved that they are still as susceptible as ever to overblown rhetoric and political posturing. Obama supporters are elated, and they have every right to be: their candidate for president won an historic victory and won decisively. Like many people, I was overwhelmed by the announcement and have cried several times, most recently when watching Sherri Shepherd talk about what the election meant to her on The View (I’m pleased to announce she is no longer a flat-earther). McCain supporters are incensed that their hero has lost yet again and must return to Washington with his head held high despite a debilitating defeat. But supporters of both candidates should recognize that for the past twenty-two months strategists, handlers, and politicians have been attempting to manipulate their affects and their beliefs. They should be furious, but they should direct their collective anger constructively.

If you volunteered/voted for Obama, you undoubtedly are suffused with pride, which seems to be the general tone of many of the postings I saw on facebook throughout the day. If you volunteered/voted for McCain, you have undoubtedly uttered some iteration of the America is doomed meme—“Americans deserve what they get!” “Get ready to shell out more of your hard-earned money!” “Welcome back to the welfare state.” Both sides need to take a collective breath and be more circumspect in their speech. Elections are always a depressing time for me. I am saddened by the defeatism of those who allege they voted for the lesser of two evils. But I am even more concerned by the naiveté of those who profess dogmatic faith in the infallibility of their respective candidate. (Senators McCain and Obama have both admitted to being imperfect human beings. Why should we not take them at their word?)

When a friend asked (via a surrogate) whom I would be voting for in the election, he was disappointed when he eventually heard I was supporting a major party candidate. In defense of my decision, I pointed out that my candidate clearly had the edge when it came to rhetoric, stage presence, and political savvy, which became one of the deciding factors for me this election. Many of you will undoubtedly accuse me of being flippant, if not utterly moronic, for basing such an important decision on aesthetics, but when all is said and done, the only metric we have for measuring what kind of President someone will be is his or her campaign.

We must, however, not lose site of the seductive power of presidential campaigns, particularly world-historic ones like the one we witnessed yesterday. Barack Obama is not a J.F.K., a F.D.R., or even a Teddy Roosevelt, nor is he a Lincoln or a Washington. Barack Obama is not even a Barack Obama, an irony that has not been lost on this Senator now turned President Elect. To be fair, none of these men could ever live up to the idealized representation of them that historians have bequeathed to us. True, they were all transformational figures in their own right, but the paths they laid out for America were always cautious, measured according to their own political aspirations and their knowledge of the fickleness of the American electorate. Whether or not President Obama will be any different remains to be seen.

Make no mistake, Barack Obama is a moderate Democrat, a centrist, who will do what is necessary to govern with the highest degree of consensus possible. While I recognize that it was politically expedient to praise the Clinton Administration during the course of the campaign, I sincerely hope that he will not govern according to the same strategy of triangulation invented and trumpeted by the Clinton White House. Despite the hateful speech spewing from the mouths of the rabid partisans supporting McCain, Barack Obama is not a Socialist or a terrorist. At the very least, he will help to usher in a new era of economic prosperity for the country similar to that which Clinton presided over, but let us not forget that the Clinton years were followed by the Bush years and the Obama years could very well be followed by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Earlier today, world leaders as diverse as President Hu of China, Chancellor Merkel of Germany, and Prime Minister Olmert of Israel offered their congratulations to the President Elect, but let us not forget that these men and women, like many leaders around the world, may have come from relatively humble beginnings but all now serve with the implicit (but often explicit) consent of the wealthy and the privileged.

Barack Obama’s campaign succeeded, in part, because millions of people made small donations of money and time to help the candidate spread his message of change to the electorate. However, despite the histrionics of pundits and public figures who are today heralding this transformational moment in American history on the major news networks (will Oprah Winfrey ever go away?), those of us who supported Obama must recognize that we are now placed in a somewhat precarious position. If we are not careful, the influence of Washington and corporate America (they donated to his campaign too, and they are the Goliath to our David) will prove too great for a President Obama and not because of any personal weaknesses of the man. In his victory speech last night, Obama once again affirmed that his supporters all have a stake in his campaign, but the cynics in the power centers of New York, Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, etc., etc., etc. are hoping that the once disaffected will again disengage from the political process. If we allow this to happen, Obama will surely fail, and this moment will be little more than a blip on the radar of capitalism. On the other hand, if we blindly follow the policies that will inevitably be put forth by the Obama White House without retaining a voice in the process, the pressure to submit to the will of the moneyed elite will prove too great, and the country may once again see an arrogant demagogue ascend to the highest office in the land. Several people have pointed out that the Obama campaign will pass on a formidable listserv to the Obama White House, and I can only hope that they can use this database as leverage against some of the major impediments to real reform—lobbyists, career politicians, Wall Street bankers, and the military industrial complex. However, no amount of emails will have an effect if the American people reprise their role as Rip van Winkle. The direction this country will take in the next four years is still shrouded in mystery. Personally, I am still holding my breath—holding my breath and hoping for the best.

One of the advantages of living in the Jersey suburbs with your sixty-three year old retired father is that you get to perform all manner of menial tasks in a futile attempt to mitigate his desire to prevent idle hands from lingering about. (It’s worth pointing out that my Internet traffic in recent weeks undoubtedly proves just how Sisyphean his task really is.) Yesterday it was shampooing urine stains left by my now deceased geriatric dog out of the carpet in our living room. Today it was blowing the leaves on my front lawn as my uber-conservative neighbor pounded cold patch into our driveway (did you know that if Obama wins, we can all stop working, and someone will drive a truck around and give us money everyday? Hot damn!!!).

As I was blowing the aforementioned leaves and watching them fly up into the air only to fall back onto some previously cleared patch of grass, I had an epiphany. I noticed that my next-door neighbor’s lawns had also managed to accumulate a fair amount of leaves since they had last been raked, so, rather than establishing a clear boundary between the three properties (a kind of leafless DMZ, as it were—oh snap! You love the subjunctive voice), I opted to clear their lawns as well (ok, just the halves that were contiguous to my parent’s property.) This ostensible random act of kindness was not, mind you, because I am in possession of any kind of highly evolved sense of community, nor was it due to my recognition that my neighbors and I were engaged in a collective struggle to thwart these autumnal invaders; rather, it was because I knew that those same frackin’ leaves would eventually blow back onto the areas I had just cleared. In other words, if I blew the leaves on my neighbors lawn as well as those on my own, it would mean that I would not need to worry about raking up any maverick detritus that might flout the sovereignty of suburban property lines and launch cross-border incursions later on this week.

So what’s the point, you ask. The recent rhetoric being bandied about by the McCain/Palin campaign—the use of epithets like Socialist, Communist and Marxist as part of an attempt to discredit the Obama/Biden campaign—has afforded liberals an opportunity to test new strategies for parrying such attacks and winning over misinformed voters. Unfortunately, the Democrats have largely fallen back on the failed strategy of appealing to the perceived “better angels of our nature,” a strategy which invariably leads to their invoking some manifestation of the quixotic motto “E pluribus unum.” However, the 2000 and 2004 elections (even if they were stolen) reveal the powerful role that an ignorant (dare I say self-centered) electorate can still play in deciding who will lead our country. The trouble, as I see it, is that young voters (let’s say for the sake of argument 18-38) are still highly susceptible to bankrupt political philosophies like Libertarianism (Aw, you’re a Libertarian? That’s adorable! But it’s grown-up time now, so pay your freakin’ taxes and think about how much it would suck if we had to drive on dirt roads all the time. Ingrates!!!) or the hyper-masculine tenets espoused by modern-day Republicans (Wars, whether cultural or military, and tax cuts are always sexy when you aren’t personally suffering their effects.). Thus, when liberals claim that government programs are important to ensure that there is some degree of parity regarding access to affordable education, health care, housing, etc., they are often confronted by a series of unrelated right-wing talking points and political bogeymen that alleged conservatives conjure up as political straw men (we’ve all seen the perverse delight with which Republicans talk about welfare mothers, garbage-pail kids, late-term abortions, etc.).

So, how can we countervail against such ignorant tripe? I’ve found that the only way to talk to rabid ideologues is in terms that they can understand, i.e., failing to take care of those who are struggling will inevitably come back to bite them in the proverbial ass—Don’t want to provide adequate funds for failing school districts? Then don’t complain when people working minimum wage jobs screw up your order at the drive-thru. Don’t want to pay higher taxes to provide health care to everyone? Then don’t cry when your premiums and medical bills rise to offset the costs of clinics and hospitals treating the uninsured. Don’t want to raise the minimum wage? Then stop whining about the fact that no one can afford to pay the costs for your plumbing services and that your business is suffering as a result. Don’t want to live in a country that is ethnically and linguistically diverse? Then move somewhere else, a–hole. You can even pepper your stump-speech with folksy wisdom like, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or shit flows downhill, or you’re a d—bag. To be sure, Obama has attempted to raise some of these issues when speaking with constituents (watch the video of his chat with Joe the Plumber), but until members of the mainstream media start calling out Republicans for their disingenuous claims about the important role government plays in our daily lives, we all need to take on the responsibility of talking to our misinformed friends and family. The bottom line is that the meme of an evil (read: European) government that redistributes wealth and/or opportunity from hard-working Americans to lazy Americans is total BS, and people need to be called out on it. Our economy is only ever as strong as the men and women who form its base. Now go out and rake your neighbors’ leaves!

Ron Paul ’08!!!

I’m waiting for the Republicans to bring their game.  The Democrats have an intelligent, well-educated candidate [elected editor of Harvard Law Review -- no gentleman's C's here!] who’s the most inspiring orator since Lincoln.  He’s got a detailed plan to try to drag our economy out of the sewer where it was left by Bush and like-minded rich guys after they took all the money out of it and an incredibly well-coordinated grassroots operation run by volunteers that has raised record-breaking amounts of money from combining tiny little donations from a LOT of tiny little people like me.

The Republicans, on the other hand, have as THEIR “strategy,” lawsuits attempting to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters in swing states by trying to force the states to search for typos in new voters’ names and information and then send them the lists of dubious voters.  [Remember Dred Scott?] Colorado and Ohio and Florida.
A high point of this “strategy” is trying to disenfranchise Michigan voters whose homes have been foreclosed on, and who therefore might vote Obama, by having the state send them lists of foreclosed homes so they can see whether the people still live where they’re registered, or whether, luckily for the Republicans, in the chaos of their lives’ crashing around them, they forgot to update their registration.
This is not some random, tenuous, deniable connection — this is the White House trying to get the state attorneys to do their dirty work for them.

They also have:

a VP cadidate who routinely whips up their rally crowds into a lynch-mob type frenzy,

a candidate who can had to be coached through two debates before he could look his opponent in the face and call him “Senator,”

a plumber whom they asked to go to an Obama rally and ask questions based on false information — Joe doesn’t really make $250K a year — who’s not really a plumber [or does it without a license], and doesn’t belong to the plumber’s union.  The plumber’s union said Joe is full of sewage: plumbers in Ohio make less than $50K a year.  The plumber’s union  endorses Obama

and a weirdo who claimed she was attacked by a black guy who carved a backwards B into her face.  This is yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.  Lynchings still happen — see previous post, plus remember James Byrd, and the poor kid who got run over and dragged to death by his white aquaintances in Texas last week.

Oh, and they also have a grassroots organization of people sending out emails claiming that Obama is the anti-Christ, claiming that he’s a Muslim, and claiming he’s a socialist [Socialist? how 'bout that Republican-authored bailout?].

All I can say is, Is that the best you got?

After a false start — www.eisenstadtgroup.com seems to be a hoax — I can’t definitively link Joe Plumber to Charles Keating.  True, his name is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, and Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Jr., was Keating’s son-in-law who served prison time after his conviction in the Keating scandal. But for all I know, Wurzelbachers may be as common as Smiths up there in Toledo.

Still, after watching his interview with Katie Couric right after the debate, I do wonder who found him and how.

Joe sounds like he works for McCain, saying things like “We’ve seen who McCain is — we don’t know who Obama is” [in other words, "he ain't from around here"].

Joe also calls Obama “well-spoken, better spoken than I am.”  ["How dare he be better spoken than I am?  He's black!"]

He makes fun of Obama, portraying him as a performer who just fed him a memorized response [For a memorized response he should review McCain's response to a question about Russia's invading Georgia.  For his "answer," McCain simply recites a list of all the countries in the area].

Finally, Joe gets really ugly.  He says “he’s almost better than Sammy Davis, Jr.”

Now that’s just insulting. Who trained Joe?  Apparently he took a logic course in plumber’s school; note his appropriate use of the concept of slippery slope in the transcript below of his October 16 interview with Diane Sawyer: “I mean, $250,000 now. What if he decides, well you know $150,000, you’re pretty rich too. Let’s go ahead and lower it again. You know it’s a slippery slope. When’s it going to stop?”

I have no idea who everyone is pulling for in this primary season, and I know a lot of people were probably watching the speeches on super tuesday. But I just had to share this video if others out there were Obama fans. The Will.I.Am video is making the rounds more, but this video is why I am more excited about Obama than any candidate in my lifetime. He has an uncanny ability to capture the emotions of so many years of settling between uninspiring and misguided.

For the past few months, I’ve tried to avoid engaging because I didn’t want to just be disillusioned again. But somehow, because of the hoards of people Obama continues to draw and the words he speaks that seem so unlike a politician, I’ve become hopeful again.

And even if I’m headed for a huge fall as the primary season or general election ends, it feels pretty good.

A few days ago, a friend of mine sent out an email with this year’s List of Banished Words, as deemed thus by the language lovers over at the Lake Superior State University. The premise, for those of you who haven’t come across it before, is simple: you know the word that gets used any which way and people throw them around like a gold coin in Scrooge McDuck’s vault and you go from noting that hey that’s not what that word actually means to wow that word sure does get thrown around to irritation at the tendency to overuse and incorrectly at that this word to feeling the vein in your head about to pop the next time you hear the word? Well, this is the list that actually tries to “ban” it. Once LSSU has decided which of those words are most pressing.

There are some words on that list whose placement there I agree with wholeheartedly. Like “organic”– I think my brother-in-law (who apprears on this blog as either Steven Koski or Steven Kiosk) first pointed out the silliness of identifying some foods as organic, since, c’mon, they’re always going to be carbon-based. Which is exactly what someone at LSSU points out. Plus, things happen organically, people belong to certain families more organically than others, intellectuals can be organic if they represent of the class they were born into, though do class-mobile intellectuals become inorganic?

Or the phrase “X is the new Y.” I heard a few years ago, for instance, that green was the new pink. I imagined that meant that baby girls were being wrapped in green blankets at the hospital– because where else does pink have any value?– but I’ve checked. Pink is still pink.

But then, I came across “sweet” on the list. That one, I’m not so sure about. Of course, people don’t mean that when a gadget is sweet that it tastes like sugar, but were we ever in danger of assuming that they did? We are, I think, capable of understanding that people are speaking figuratively since we’ve had plenty of practice. We know that not everything that is cool is icy to the touch, or not everything that rocks has a compelling back beat, or, for that matter, not everything that is awesome actually fills us with childlike wonder.

This ties in to an earlier post about words that mean little in themselves, but have a great deal of currency in the work place. Cliches. Personally, I would be happy if we all stopped using “counter-” everything. Counterintuitive, counterproductive, etc. though I really like counterpontal. Maybe we can keep counterpontal. what do you think?

Kris has been kindly nudging me to contribute to 12 Apostrophes for quite some time and I have held out till now. I thought why not give recognition where recognition is due and post something about the man who gave this webpage its name, one James Joyce. And what better day then Bloomsday, June 16^{th   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday)} to celebrate the work of the man and give a shout out to one of my favorite authors.
 

Now, I could be mistaken and Kris and Donnie please correct me if I am, the name for the webpage/literary movement came from a random flip and point through Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and chance, fate, the hand of God drew your hands to this quote:
 

“The echo is where in the back of the wodes; callhim forth!                   
    (Shaun Mac Irewick, briefdragger, for the concern of Messrs            
Jhon Jhamieson and Song, rated one hundrick and thin per                    
storehundred on this nightly quisquiquock of the twelve apos-                
trophes, set by Jockit Mic Ereweak. He misunderstruck and aim           
for am ollo of number three of them and left his free natural ri-               
postes to four of them in their own fine artful disorder.)”
 

An apt quote in my opinion since there is nothing quite like “fine artful disorder” to make a creative venture work.
 

So, here is a first entry of sorts. Drink some Guinness and celebrate Joyce and his work.