Demos: Mexico 4 Life

Again, a little something stop the bleeding of no posts here. We've got a good theme week coming up, Zach, Catherine and I are just real busy at the moment.

I have recently been reading the accusation that Senator Barack Obama has been throwing down the proverbial gauntlet in his stump speeches since Senator Hillary Clinton has put into circulation her 3 a.m. phone call ad, suggesting that Clinton has the experience on the first day she takes office to answer the dreaded early morning impending doom call that Obama doesn't.

Obama, then, has responded on his stump speeches by questioning Clinton's experience. This, I understand, is proof positive of his "taking the attack to Hillary", as the New York Times said on the sixth of March. For some readers, this counts as dirty politics.

I disagree.

I have seen dirty politics, and this is not it. Obama is asking for the evidence to Clinton's conclusion that she has the experience necessary to lead the country, which, when pushed, appears to be her eight years in the White House as her husband's de facto chief of staff, and her seven years on the Senate Armed Services Committee. That's a reasonable, if pointed question. By comparison, Obama has been on the same committee for two years, and the Republican nominee Senator John McCain has been on the committee since roughly the fall of man.

If you want real dirty politics, then I have a story to tell you. This story starts in South Carolina during the Republican primary in 2000 and stars Senator McCain and then Gov. George W. Bush during their campaign for the Republican nomination. Senator McCain has a lead and has won Iowa and New Hampshire. Anonymous polls begin in neighborhoods where McCain was strong, with a loaded question to the effect of "Would your opinion of Senator McCain change if you knew that he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" (It's important to note at this point that the McCain family had adopted a girl from Bangledesh, which lent a bit of anecdotal evidence to the whisper campaign used to discredit him morally.) Not surprisingly, McCain's numbers dropped in the polls; Bush took South Carolina; leaving McCain shaking and unable to regain the advantage.

Reports from multiple sources including the National Review, the New York Times (years later, of course...) and other reputable outlets could only confirm innuendos, but prevailing wisdom awards the credit to Karl Rove, operating as Bush's chief political strategist.

That's dirty politics. Dirty politics is suggesting that your white opponent had a child with a black woman in a conservative state without putting your own name on the smear. Dirty politics is firing anyone in the Justice Department who isn't a "loyal Bushie". Dirty politics is outing a deep cover CIA agent to get back at her husband for criticizing your basis for starting a war.

Asking for evidence to a debatable conclusion doesn't even come close.

Theme Week: Hedonism.

You're right.

This is a loaded theme week. Loaded in the sense of there are quite a few negative connotations with the word we're basing our writings on, and also in the sense of illicit substances, liquids and corporeal objects.

Devotion to pleasure as a way of life is what the Random House Dictionary of the English Language calls hedonism, though the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (roughly 1070 pages, and yes, you can bludgeon someone to death with it...) defines it quickly as the pleasure as the good and I can't really disagree. (After all, they did write the books.) I always got the idea that there was a connotation of opulence in the use of the word hedonism, so with that said, I shall continue.

Behind the scenes, there is a little mantra we have, and that is reveal as much about yourself as you please, but do allow other people to reveal themselves as they please. So, we'll have to eschew a little bit of background. I hope you don't mind.

I am not terribly hedonistic in the current (and perhaps classical?) sense. I have only recently started imbibing alcohol, I still haven't used other forms of recreational mind altering substances (recorded media aside) and my sexual palate is rather limited in both scope and variety.

Despite this, I get the idea that I can speak about hedonism fairly frankly and (perhaps!) with a bit of authority. Let us consider the United States. Despite the wide, wide gap between CEOs and the minimum wage earners in large companies, the United States still consumes the world's resources inequitably, a statement which should this point, be a fact.

Much of what is bought in America is not produced here, and much of what I eat, type on and wear has been imported from around the world. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, a wise man quipped, and we're the ones with the circlets of shrubbery on our heads...

Botch continues to be right, that America has a parallel to Mediterranean history, and it ain't the Athenians. All roads lead to Rome, and if I've learned anything from my experience it is that most of the talent and material in the world is shipped here to be consumed. Consider, for a moment, the object you're using to read this with. It could be a computer monitor, your iPhone/Blackberry/Sidekick screen, or whatever else science has come up with in between making new bombs and new TVs. It was probably compiled in China, the microchip sent in from elsewhere, then shipped back to wherever here is to be sold. This also goes for your jeans, my tshirts (ah, but they had silkscreens placed on them in America...) my hoodies, my watches and my cell phone.

Well, thank God for underage laborers for making everything on my body including my underwear. It allows me the free time to bemoan this, while also getting an education that costs more than half the world will ever get paid for a lifetime of their work. And yet, I continue to worry about girls more than my own work.

To include my own missteps into this week's lexicon of hedonism: There is hardly ever silence in my waking hours, and that's probably the most direct form of hedonism, since I far prefer to listen to music than people. If we're going for a textbook definition, then that is the best way I can show of pleasure as a way of life. I have more pleasure listening to music than interacting with people, and that's my hedonism. Pleasure ought to be pursued above all, right? Well, there you go.

To tie this back into the rest of the post, evaluative hedonism I think is the one that I (and most of America) are guilty of. Evaluative hedonism is defined as "pleasure is what we ought to desire or pursue". The pleasure, in this case, is the unknowing of...oh, to hell with it.

Ignorance is bliss, motherfuckers. Let's revel.

Introducing: Demos

Eleven Names and my campus' newspaper occupy a strange place in my head. Both are repositories for my coalesced thoughts on a given issue, and frequently, they overlap. I could publish something on Eleven Names before it goes to the newspaper, but when it was originally written for the newspaper, it feels a little bit like cheating.

In fact, I wrote something that was originally written for the school paper, but I published it here when I realized that it would be a month or so before it was published in the school. That gave me an idea that I sat on for a couple issues. The editors tend to screw up the column when they don't check what they're putting on the page, which made me think, I'll take my own mistakes so long as I can do the final spell check. My columns will be be great!

So, I'll publish my first drafts here, a couple hours after they appear in the campus' paper to be digested. I hope this is a fairly stable new feature, where you all will get the demo version, what I sent to the paper for them to supposedly improve, and in fact, foul up with not catching the notes on the edits they were making.

Enjoy!

I wrote in recently about videogames and about the ease that journalists can dismiss them. But now I’d like to focus on why, with a couple reasons stolen outright from Wired’s Clive Thompson.

Why don’t videogames have the same kind of in depth discussion associated with them that recordings or movies do? First and foremost, I would imagine is because they simply aren’t good material for a daily feature or column. Just speaking about the time invested in (or expected from) a video game, the sweet spot being anywhere between 20 and 40 hours, depending on the kind of game, there’s no way that columnists could play a third as many videogames a year as they write columns or articles and expect to maintain a readership. They wouldn’t be saying anything useful. To make a quick comparison: If my college’s DJs had to sit through 3 10 hour CDs a week, they’d give up.

That is one of the primary reasons why videogames as a medium and form of communication do not get attention or care from newspaper media, the investment of time is too great as compared to other forms of communication and entertainment. In other words: Videogames take too long to digest for effective daily or weekly publishing material.

There’s also the monetary cost. Keeping up with the latest videogames is expensive, since the technology shifts every so often (PCs and consoles), in addition, the games themselves usually cost between $50 and $60 before tax. Unless, of course, you’re still playing last generation systems, in which case, it just isn’t newsworthy enough for further explanation in a paper or professional magazine.

Right now, video games occupy the same position that the “God-forsaken rock and roll noise” and “that awful rap garbage” did years ago, as the corrupter of children. How were those art forms absolved of their blame for being the worst thing to happen to morality since Original Sin? It was only through exposure to the music and an in depth discussion of the themes contained in the words that the form was acknowledged as legitimate and not as some kind of artless, puerile endeavor.

Pioneering political and social artists Public Enemy and NWA were bitter pills to swallow for Tipper Gore and Co., this is true, but almost two decades worth of distance from the outbreak of hip-hop music from racial boundaries, most serious critics acknowledge, at the very least, that those artists were writing about what they knew. (For that matter, “Fear of a Black Planet” was inducted into the Library of Congress in 2004 alongside the Beach Boys and Dizzie Gillespie.)

The easy comparisons end there. Because video games today combine text, audio and an interactive portion with a controller or mouse and keyboard, games are judged in terms of a seamless interactive experience, which must be intimidating to players who don’t understand the vernacular.

With Grand Theft Auto IV coming out this year, gamers of all stripes can expect a storm of faux-controversy and hours of babbling from ignorant commentators who don’t know the vocabulary, but have no trouble proclaiming it as another murder simulator, peddled underhandedly to mentally unstable, titillated, teenage boys with predilections for school shootings.

Hopefully, you’ll know better.