You Can't Make Mistakes.

And so it begins.

In case anyone missed this yesterday (it was evening for me), you can download the audio here.

President Obama’s Inaugural Address

It was a good speech. I, for one, am glad to have a President again who can string words together in a meaningful way. Enjoy.

It always comes in the most unlikely packages.

WARNING:This blog post acknowledges the existence of pornography, free-speech and, well, sex between people older than 25.

This morning, I read this article about Larry Flynt’s appeal to the U.S. Congress for a bailout of the porn industry. At first, I laughed. Then, on further consideration, I decided that this was more than a prank.

Larry Flint—while maybe not the most savory of characters in the minds of most—is always ready to bring us down a peg in our conceit as a nation. Some would call him a smut-peddling, degenerate lowlife. I would refer to him as the 20th century’s champion of free-speech. Some might say that he corrupts the minds of American children. I would say that anyone who thinks that American kids aren’t going to find their way to porn one way or another is an idiot.

Besides, Americans are prudes, right? Puritannical on the outside, and all sublimated rage, lust and envy on the inside. We must keep up appearances, just don’t look between the mattresses, on the top shelf of the closet, or in the nightstand.

Honestly, if Americans were a bit more open about sex, people would probably have lower blood pressure, or at least be a little less cranky.

I was in Germany for Christmas—more to come on that topic as well—and stayed with a friend’s family. We were in a guest room which apparently was also used as a laundry sorting/ironing facility because it contained an ironing-board adorned by a rather large picture of a nude male model. The matron of the family just laughed and said that her daughter had gotten it for her years ago. Apparently, he used to have underwear on that disappeared as you ironed.

There was no embarrassed silence, no blushing, and the ironing board did not suddenly disappear. It was just not a big deal, because sex is just a thing, and nudity is nudity. Shrug.

In a typical American household, this scene would have ended in blushing embarrassment and the swift removal of such an object. Not to mention that if child services ever got hold of this information…

Why are we such prudes in the States?

Well, for one, we are unrealistic. Ask any of your American friends if they think that their parents have a healthy sex life. Do it, right now. Whoever is around. They don’t even have to be a friend.

If you can even bring yourself to ask that, it probably means that you weren’t just crippled by mental cinema of our parents having sex, and that makes you different. If you got an answer other than groans of disgust, nausea, or a slap in the face, then you were probably not talking to an American born between 1975 and the present. In my anecdotal experience, the Americans of my generation typically never conceive of their parents as sexual beings. Never. To do so brings on the aforementioned nausea, mental images, and so forth.

But you know what? Your parents did have sex. Probably lots of it. That’s why you are here. That’s how it works. Grow up.

If we were a little more realistic about sex, we might tend to be more realistic about other things as well. Sex is one of those things that we can’t talk about, right? What does this silence breed? Well, ignorance, for one. Then there is repression, and its inevitable partner in crime, neurosis. None of those are very good things. That is how it is in the States though: if everyone is not talking about something, then everyone had better not talk about it.

Unfortunately, no one has been talking about this last act of our president to bail various industries out with nonexistent government funds either. Perhaps if we had been, the Senate wouldn’t have been so zealous in their padding of the original bill to bail out the bank giants. Perhaps the auto industry would be forced to make changes in the structure of their enterprise which would save the industry rather than just placing a bandage on a severed arm. Maybe.

The point is, we don’t know. We don’t know because no one talks. This is not unlike: “We had no idea that Jimmy was a rapist. We didn’t know.” Granted, we also didn’t talk to little Jimmy about sex, and we told him that it was dirty, but you never get to hear that in the tearful interviews of parents after the FBI excavates their basement to find the bodies of all of little Jimmy’s girlfriends.

So I say “Bravo!” to Larry Flynt. Larry is the one guy who is not going to lie about what he and others in the industry are going to use their bailout money for. You can’t say that for the automakers, because they are going to use their bailout money for the same thing that Larry would, they would just have you think otherwise.

To the losers.

Hot on the heels of my last post, Tim Krieder, cartoonist and the brains behind “The Pain” comic series, posted this piece, which reflected my very strange dream quite a bit. The comic itself is not the important part of that link, however. Please make sure that you continue on a read the article below it.

This guy, Krieder, is an obvious cynic, and with any likelihood a total asshole—I don’t mean that as an insult, some of my best friends are assholes—but sometimes he writes things that touch me in a way that I am not expecting. I got a little choked up and teary reading this article, for instance. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a total sap. I cry while reading sci-fi, I give money to street kids and widows, I talk about love and friendship in a non-ironic way. Usually though, I am typically a realist—read: pessimist—with regard to government/political/social stuff. It seems now with all that has happened, I have fallen into the camp of sad, sappy, suckers—as I might have previously viewed them—who believe that everything is going to get better.

On this point particularly, I think that Krieder is spot-on when he says:

“that the last eight wretched years had occupied so large a chunk of our adulthoods that we’d forgotten that nothing lasts forever, we’d thought that this was just how the world was: mean-spirited shitheads would always win and we would always lose. It was hard to believe it was really over.” [Krieder, link]

It is hard to believe that it is over. It is hard to shift gears into thinking that things might work out. I’m not so naïve as to believe that everything will change overnight, or that President Obama will change the world single-handedly, but I do feel like I am rubbing the sleep out of my eyes after a really terrible dream. Not a nightmare, per se, but just a really bad dream where nothing works and nothing makes any sense.

Maybe that is what is happening. It does feel like everyone woke up all at once, not a little pissed-off, and took action. If that is so, then I raise a glass and a still-angry fist in toast and say again, “Here’s to you, and here’s to me, best of friends we’ll ever be. But, should we ever disagree…”

Well, you know the rest.

And now the real work begins.

Well America, as a collective, we chose well. We were faced with the most important set of decisions that we have made in a long time and we made the right ones. I, for one, am thrilled. I actually cried out of relief this morning.

While President Elect Obama is positioned to be able to effect change in a significant way, what with being backed by a Congress which will support the directives of the new administration, there are a few things which didn’t go so well.

Michigan passed the stem cell research and medical marijuana ballot initiatives, both of which are positive things for people who suffer debilitating and painful diseases, and their respective ratifications are a step away from maligned points of view that these things stand in moral opposition to goodness and rightness. They will hopefully help many people.

I said above that we chose well and we did, for the most part. However, in this time of celebrating immanent changes for the better and positive steps forward, it is important to point out our failings, lest we forget ourselves. I would like to point out, for instance, that—at the time of writing—in Florida and Arizona have decisively banned gay marriage, and Arkansas has decisively banned adoption for gay people. California is still uncertain at this time—with only 20% of the polls reporting results from their ballot initiative—though it doesn’t look good there either, which saddens me.

Update 21:51 EET: With 95% of the precincts reporting, California has passed the gay marriage amendment ban. 52% Yes, 48% No.

Why are these things important? First, they indicate that even in seemingly liberal or progressive places, conservative/bigoted rhetoric is still very powerful in convincing people to make decisions about social issues. Second, at a time when things are looking up and we have a new golden-boy—who actually speaks in a positive way about gay people in his rhetoric—we obviously still have some work to do.

What do I mean by this? I mean that we have reached a new echelon of civil rights issues. We now will have a President who is part of a formerly legally disenfranchised—currently practically disenfranchised, in many ways—section of the American populace. This being the case, we now have an even greater chance to chip away at the bigotry which still lives in our law code. This was less possible over the past 8 years during a time when the dominant political thread was busy pandering to the very people who support that bigotry in their daily lives.

We have a chance now to rectify the mistakes that were made in the past 8 years, and in some cases 16 years—let us not forget that it was President Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage act into law. The current President Elect is quite a bit more progressive than President Clinton was, but it won’t mean a hill of beans if we don’t actually progress. We can only hope that in the coming years, we will be able to overturn these bigoted state constitutional amendments and have a new kind of civil rights revolution in which people are treated equally again under the eyes of the law.

God Damned Right It’s Time

Well, if you haven’t voted already, since there seemed to be a great trend toward voting early or absentee—likely because Americans are leaving the United States like rats from a burning ship: it’s time.

The Economist finally published their endorsement for a U.S. Presidential candidate this week. I will let you guess who they chose. Or, you can read it for yourself.

I have to say that, in all honesty, I was thrilled to read it. I think that they made the right decision, so now maybe you all can make the right decision. Jeff and I voted via absentee write-in ballots, which don’t even get counted unless there is some electoral problem—which wouldn’t shock me in the least. So, if you haven’t planned on voting, or if you feel like you are too busy, or some other thing: please go and cast your vote for Barack Obama on our behalf. If you can’t vote for Obama, then Bob Barr is a good second choice.

Anyway, those are my two cents on the matter. I don’t have a whole lot of words for you right now as most of my words are being given to my papers and coursework. But I will say that I would greatly appreciate if you went and did your part and set the ball in motion for the United States to right itself a little bit. I’ll thank God one way or another when this is over, but I hope that it is thanks that I will be able to come back to the United States someday because it is the place that I remember, rather than having to stay away from it because increasingly resembles places that I would never want to go.

Thank you.