Lies we Tell to Children: America is a Model Democracy

Welcome to Super Tuesday, what was supposed the be the season-defining superbowl moment of American politics, the middle turning point in the ongoing slow-motion car crash that is Fuckup 2008.

Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards have dropped out, leaving Mike Gravel as the self-proclaimed only real progressive left in the race. Regardless of whether or not Obama plans on honoring any of his promises to make a change for the better, Hillary Clinton is a preprogrammed robotic timebomb serving a cabal of military industrialists oil czars and hedge fund managers, or Mike Gravel is actually still in the race in any real sense, tonight has decided nothing.

In fact, it is appearing more and more likely that the race is going to be won by the most terrifyingly antidemocratic feature of our democratic system: superdelegates.

Superdelegates, unlike lake sharks, are not part of the lies we tell to children. Also unlike like sharks, they are things that do exist and should not. However, they are exactly like lake sharks in their supernatural ability to glide silently over the morning dew. Don't go down to the lake until the sun has been up long enough to dry up all the grass, or an ex-president will leap from the brush to tear open your jugular and elect a delegate you never voted for. (Thanks, Jeremy Hoople's father. Second best lie told to a child ever. The first may end up as another post.)

As you have probably not been able to glean from that extended whimsical comparison, superdelegates are members of the Democratic National Convention who, by virtue of having held positions of power in the past, hold a position of power in the present: they can participate in the selection process of the Democratic Nominee, voting just as other delegates do, and, unlike other delegates, they are not required to vote according to the votes of any group of normal citizens. This is why, of the 2,025 delegates needed for the nomination, Hillary Clinton had over a hundred before the first state primary had been held.

As of the time I'm writing this, the New York Times is displaying the A.P. delegate count for Clinton and Obama at 626 to 531. Of those, 204 and 99 are superdelegates. And while I'm sure those numbers will have changed by the time I finish this post, the deciding factor in the race right now is the fact that more cronyistic holdovers from bygone eras are supporting Hillary than Obama. As the state-by-state, county-by-county battle for supremacy continues, it seems more and more likely that the swing factor in the race to 2,025 will be the more than five hundred superdelegates who have yet to decide which factory-assembled candidate best represents their personal agendas.

I apologize for the dryness of this post, and the overproliferation of numbers. I apologize if you heard this somewhere else first.

You should still be angry. Somewhere, someone is making all this effort, all this organizing and arguing and aggregate motion of the human element, meaningless. The party will pick who best represents the party's interests, not the people's.

This, as Mike Gravel would say, is politics as usual.

Dread Pirate Captains that No One Has Heard Of

And so, blasting past security systems with a MAC address stolen from a wii, I return to the internets. The last week has been a blur of mental activity and far too little sleep, but I promise I won't be leaving you alone with all these other classy indviduals for so long again anytime soon.

Which is perhaps the least meaningful sentence I have ever typed.

In the distant past, I promised you to discuss One Piece (the manga. NEVER THE ANIME). In the recent past, I promised to talk more about Mike Gravel.

I am beginning to suspect that they are secretly the same subject, as all things are.

Unfortunately, explaining that cryptic comment is going to have to wait for another day. I can tell you that Mike Gravel's alternative debate begins in half an hour, broadcast live on Internet by upstream.tv, and tthat unlike John Edwards, he shows no sign of being willing to step out of the race, even if it may be argued that he was never really in it.

The man has no real net worth. I think that he owns, perhaps, a car and some credit card debt, and that he would be by far the best president out of all the candidates. It doesn't matter, but if he turns to coastal raiding after he loses the election to finance his democratic efforts, I might be tempted to join his crew of sea raiders, as they journey across the world to find the lost treasure of the last King of the Pirates, and their dreams.

I promise there is a logical, semi-litaerary reason why I am conflating Mike Gravel and One Piece, and it is not just my brain imploding after a week with minimal sleep and maximal role-playing games. However, the viking mind compels me to go and devour the flesh of hundreds of innocent chickens now, as a warrior of Elbaph should.

That brain implosion theory is looking more and more likely!

Of Sailing Ships and Ceiling Wax, of Cabbages and Kings

Blogger informs me that this post is, internally at least, the one hundredth post to exist on this site. This includes any number of drafts that were never posted, sad forgotten creatures unlikely to ever see the light of day or to serve any purpose except to make me feel like we might have accomplished something here.

To wit: in the seven months (really?) and two days (really really?) this website has existed, we have written on it. Not as much as we should have (I am exceptionally guilty) or, perhaps, as well as we might have (there is ever room for improvement), but we have written.

And we will continue to do so as we pass this largely nonexistent milestone. We are living, as the chinese curse goes, in interesting times. In order that we might survive, I think it is best that we practice being interesting people.

I didn't really have a vision when I came up with the idea for this website, beyond perhaps getting my friends and I to write things that we enjoyed and maybe, one day, being able to buy a pitcher of beer at the Penny Bar with strange coins plucked from the aether. I still feel much the same day: we are here to write and have fun, and perhaps even to better ourselves or create some content worth consuming, if we are capable of such.

In any case, not-quite-nonexistent audience: thank you very much for joining us. Next time I update, I'll try to bring some actual content with me. Would you prefer the update about One Piece I promised you a millenia ago, or would you like to hear about how I want a t-shirt declaring my allegiance to Mike Gravel in the 2012 election?

I figure it will be the last election, coming at the very end of the world. We might as well get it right for once.

Alternately, we could elect him the second Emperor of America. Emperor Norton I has gone far too long without a successor.

I suppose I answered my own question there a little. Still, if you're out there, in the dark, with a keyboard and a working internet connection, consider dropping a comment here and telling me what you would like to hear more about: politics or nerdery.

ITT: POLITICS LOL

"I took a class on Internet and Identity and you know what the whole thesis of the class was that people's identities change when their real one is shielded by the computer" - Tionna Smalls

Remember how, not five minutes ago, I stated my general displeasure with presidential candidates? Well, I am fickle and addle-brained. Cast your third eye (that's the internet eye) upon this twilight monstrosity, which is basically Ron Paul doing what Ron Paul does best, which is to say, be a crazy, lovable bastard. Mike Gravel is similar. Okay, okay. I give. I admit it that, for once, I was... slightly hasty in my judgment. We are sons of Adam - we are fallible. Let us forget that it ever happened. I endorse any candidate, any candidate at all, who is willing to basically flip the bird to the mass of the gathered republican party, dismiss them for the wastrels that they are, screams "FOLLOW ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE", and then leaps into the dinosaur-infested jungles, with a machete clutched between his teeth.

In short - hey, time travelers, if you're reading this, can you steal some kind of tangent universe Teddy Roosevelt to be our forever president? We'd totally owe you a solid.

Anyway, I bring this up not because I am suddenly ALL POLITICAL or whatevs, but because of YouTube. And to a lesser extent, Myspace. And to an even lesser extent, Fa-che-bewk. And their presence, and impact on modern culture, or whatever. You see, I was perusing this this unbelievably patronizing article about Kate Nash, a songstress of which I am fond, and the author brings up the good point that exposure is slowly becoming a substitute for quality, which, if you were able to decipher my terrible prose, is kinda what I've been saying all along. But it's cool. I mean, Sasha Frere-Jones, as an author, is at least marginally better than I am (remember when he said that indy music wasn't influenced by black culture? By citing the effing Arcade Fire? Yeah, man's not too hep, but it's not like the New Yorker is really with-it anyway) and hell, the dude can have his opinions or whatever. But on the point of exposure, he and I are of one mind. Which is partially what is so amusee about the current presidential race - that the standards to which we hold our pop star lady-types are actually quite a bit higher than the standards to which we hold the Executive Branch. In a way, the race to become president is less a matter of politics, and more a matter of simple celebrity. Whomsoever can make of themselves the most visible spectacle without being viewed as a dangerous madman (or at least a dangerous madman who won't let them queers get married) is going to be a winner. Which is perhaps why figures like Ron Paul and Mike Fucking Gravel (and, okay, I guess Obama is still kinda like this) favorites of the internet - they are identified as the underdogs. As surely as any real fan of music would spit contemptuously on a scion of Nickelback or Limp Bizkit (or Maroon Five or Daughtry or Li'l Wayne or Brittany Spears or...), so too does the discriminating voter wrathfully ponder who in their right mind would vote for Giuliani or Mitt Romney. There's just nothing there - an empty showcase of questionable achievements and corporate backing. In an age where exposure is increasingly becoming the the most important facet of any political movement (at least the non-Masonic ones), choosing the right candidate is not so much a matter of politics as it is one of good taste.

In that, the internet has created a sort of Blogger Brahmins, an elite caste of intelligent individuals, broadcasting the refined opinion, and formed loosely into tiny coalitions of like minded thinkers (except for us - we are far too hateful to ever have a links section). Our choice of presidential candidate, then, becomes part of our online cosmetics, our intellectual appearance. So too are we able to judge others based upon where their own proclivities lie. It becomes a matter of dangerously inbred little cliques who make choices not so much based on moral duty than controlling how they wish to be perceived. I am a freak in a schadenfreud complex with the republican party. Ron Paul all the way! I can see similar reasoning behind Zach's fondness for Mike Fucking Gravel and James's's Obama endorsement (of the three, which do you think stands the most chance of making it into the white house? HMMMM!).

I am glad that I vocally disagree with my comrades. I would not enjoy the thought that myself and all of my friends think the same way about any issue (and we are also able to almost always refrain from facestabbing each other with butter knives). There is enough groupthink and cronyism at large amidst what is arguably the largest audience ever devised - having massive appeal is no indicator of actual quality, as Sasha Frere-Jones states, and in the face of a future where everyone has their fifteen minutes of YouTube fame, we have to be aware of the debasements and personal sacrifices that come alongside the glories of wtf-ever kind of new metaverse is being shilled at us this week. Ha ha, run-on sentences. Okay. I am a grump and hate the future. THOMAS CARLYLE OUT~

Mike Gravel

"[A]s a candidate, he's been a very successful avant-garde video star." -John Moe, of Weekend America

Mike Gravel has not yet withdrawn from anything, despite being briefly hospitalized with a  respiratory infection and placing more-or-less dead last in every primary so far. Nor should he withdraw from anything. It is in no way too late for him, and his strategy may yet succeed.

Which is not to say that he'll ever be President--he won't.

However, by running for President and staying in the race, he gets his name out there, and occasionally gets a chance to talk about his National Initiative, which is something that could matter a lot more than who we elect to be the next puppet of the military-medical-industrial complex and the realpoliticians.

The American political system needs to be reformed, and I don't think that even someone like Obama, who wrote a book called The Audacity of Hope, is going to be capable of doing that when the people that hold his strings are the people that benefit from the status quo. He might just be using them to get elected, but he's too streamlined, too likable, too prepackaged Pepsi-Cola Kennedy for me to be able to fully trust.

Some friends of mine like Edwards, and tell me he's a good person, but there's just something about him that makes my skin crawl a little bit. He's too much a politician. They're all too much politicians, too little like people.

Give me an honest old angry man without a hope in hell any day. Give me someone who understands, and will say, that American exceptionalism is fucking up our psychology, that we have no moral high ground left, that the time has come for honesty, humility and peace.

Give me someone who believes in personal responsibility and in using the tools you have to make a difference, and who will tell us what he really thinks.

Gravel is that man. Obama isn't. Neither is Edwards. And even though he'll never win the election, I'm going to vote for him in the primary. Maybe it'll make him feel better about the whole fucking thing. Maybe it'll make some people think that he's worth listening to. It probably won't do either, but if I'm going to cast my nearly-meaningless primary vote, I might as well do it for a guy I like.

I suspect that the fix will be in by the time Pennsylvania primaries come around anyhow.

It's called a Fuckup because it doesn't go like anyone wants. Welcome to democracy; make yourself a shiv and try not to drop the soap.