Push and Pull

Here's an interesting article. Darryl Cagle, the author, attempts to classify humor by political persuasion. In some cases it's direct, but I'm most fascinated by his deductive approach:

Jay Leno is a liberal humorist. Jay walks down the street and gives everyday folks the opportunity to demonstrate how stupid they are, while Jay laughs at them. David Letterman is a conservative humorist. Dave treats everyday folks with respect, giving them the opportunity to laugh at how silly Dave is, as he has fruit dropped from a rooftop, or when he visits his stoic neighbor, Rupert Jee, at "Hello Deli," with another goofy contest. Both Leno and Letterman are funny. Liberals and conservatives can both be funny, but it is easier to be funny by laughing at others, rather than laughing with others. Most humorists take the easy road.

What's interesting here is that I agree with his observations but not his conclusion. I see Jay Leno as conceited and easy-going; I see David Letterman as troubled and self-deprecating. Leno is the ring master, marshaling entertainment for the crowd; Letterman is still, psychologically, a weatherman on local TV:

To be totally honest, I don't think I could say how either man votes. The article was written in 2005, but both Leno and Letterman are every bit as inscrutable now as they were then. For people who talk so much, it's amazing how hard it is to tell what they think. The only thing I can say for sure is that both men want very much to be Johnny Carson, and now, late in their careers, they have to admit they aren't. Which makes one wonder who Johnny Carson wanted to be. Everybody wants to be somebody, to wear the cape or the crown.

In politics, it can be said that virtually everybody would like to be able to think like Abraham Lincoln, quite possibly our greatest president. But who did he look up to? George Washington? Then who did Washington look up to? It's turtles all the way down. I think we look to the past because the symbols are more powerful than the facts - not just because of fuzzy history, but because the circumstances now aren't what they were then.

Much of what both the "diagram" cartoons in Cagel's post say are correct, but the key is inflection and context. The liberal doesn't think "people should pay more taxes" so that the money can be dumped into a hole somewhere; he has a reason. Maybe he wants to know where the Republicans are going to get the money to repave the roads from.

Likewise, the Republican doesn't think that it's okay to expand government when you're a Republican just because you're a Republican; he just trusts Republicans to expand government when necessary, and for the right reasons - reasons he believes in.

The truth is that no ideology is going to be a cure-all, and both sides know it but they don't tell each other because they fear doing so would portray them as weak. As a result, the two sides are essentially wearing masks around each other - which reinforces their mistrust.

That leads us here. As Sean Munson attempts to show in a chart the lone commenter described as "pretty," bloggers tend to talk with people who think like them. In the age of the Internet, it's possible to narrow your focus market to a degree not possible before, for two reasons. One, it's cheaper to run a blog than anything else - Blogger, for instance, is free - and two, it's easier to search. At the very height of broadcast analog television, there were only 83 channels to go around, with each one confined to a market as large as the broadcast tower could reach.

This, in turn, led first to hegemony (due to cost, it was easier for local stations to ally themselves with either ABC, NBC or CBS than produce all of their own material) and then to neutrality, as each station tried to wring the maximum number of viewers from the people living inside the broadcast range of the transmitter. It was quite simply more cost-effective to try and appeal to both liberals and conservatives than to pick one side. And that, I think, is why Leno and Letterman are so opaque. They're zeitgeist jockeys, riding popular opinion from one day to the next. It's good business.

That's what troubles me about blogging. I can reach any computer with internet access anywhere in the world, for free, so I can say exactly what I think with no moderators at all.

That's not a power every human being should have. It may well not be a power I should have.

Modern Times

It is worth noting that sometimes something is viewed as a good idea, and then set in motion, and sometimes something is set in motion and not agreed upon until later. Whenever a fight flares up about something - either one of today's hot-button issues or any of the myriad unknowns which shall visit us in times to come - think with perspective and a grain of salt. Progress takes shape in either Creeping Normalcy or the Short Sharp Shock - or any combination of the two.

Said Mr. Jones in 1910:
"Women, subject yourselves to men."
Nineteen-Eleven heard him quote:
"They rule the world without the vote."
By Nineteen-Twelve, he would submit
"When all the women wanted it."
By Nineteen-Thirteen, looking glum,
He said that it was bound to come.
This year I heard him say with pride:
"No reasons on the other side!"
By Nineteen-Fifteen, he'll insist
He's always been a suffragist.
And what is really stranger, too,
He'll think that what he says is true.
-Alice Duer Miller

The right thing isn't always obvious, and when it is obvious to some it may well not be to all. No prescribed psychological nostrum can prepare us for every dilemma, and we must instead take the harder but more worthy route of considerate approach.

Interesting find from Slate

The key thing to remember, in whatever you do, is which way is true north. Lose your bearing and things become awkward:

Sarah Palin thinks Barack Obama is a wimp. She's been going around to Tea Party rallies, invoking the spirit of revolutionary Boston and castigating Obama for failing to exalt American power and punish our adversaries. She seems blissfully unaware that the imperial arrogance she's preaching isn't how the American founders behaved. It's how the British behaved, and why they lost. Palin represents everything the original Tea Party was against.

(From Slate - read more)

For the record

I'd just like to state, for the record, that I like Barack Obama.

I like his approach to things. His job tasks him with situations that variously call for the iron fist or the velvet glove, or the fabled combination between the two, and I feel he has made a sincere and effective effort to make the best of any situation. He has cut deals and he has moved forward alone; he has had the vision to promise things and the honesty to try and deliver on those promises. I do not feel I have received everything I have been told I would get, but we are less than half way through his first (perhaps, let us be honest, only) term, and I feel that he is making good time. Not that I don't want everything, and now, but I understand that his are uphill battles. I can afford a modicum of patience.

Furthermore, I like him as a person. I feel his dealings with the American people and our allies and enemies abroad have been fair. It would be hard to say whether or not the American people are getting what they want, because different people want different things, but I feel that his promises of action and transparency are being met - though he does not necessarily deserve all the credit.

He has been charged with backroom deals in regards to the health care bill, but every aspect of that bill was always front and center in the national consciousness because the Republicans made sure of it. A little partisanship is not only good but crucial to democracy because it keeps the participants honest. That being said, I think we may have too much of a good thing these days - but sooner or later somebody is bound to figure out what really works and what doesn't.

I support Barack Obama. I support health care. And if I change my mind about both or either, I'll explain why.

A Case in Point

Here's an interesting story from the Associated Press:

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.

You can read the rest here.

Two key questions to consider next time you talk politics with someone else:
1. Why is this viewed as a fight between the states and the federal government?

A key feature of the Boston Tea party (for which the current Tea Party movement is named) was that it was staged in protest of taxation without representation. This is not the case today, for any state. All states have representation in Washington. So,

2. Wouldn't it be better to work through, say, electoral means to get the desired end?

Rhetorical third bonus question:
3. Does anybody, anywhere actually make an attempt to agree without being disagreeable?

If not, who is at fault? In broad terms, the Republicans are being obstructionist and the president is trying to get things done his way, with them or without them. This is no way to run a country.

Thrilling Tales of Extra Credit

One of the most interesting lessons in humor I ever learned came from a psychology class I took in college. It was an elective for me, since I was an electrical engineering major at the time, this being either 2004 or 2005.

One day, for extra credit, the professor gave us one of those unfinished cartoons from the back of The New Yorker to complete. If you've never read The New Yorker: At the back of each issue is a cartoon image without a caption. Readers are encouraged to make up their own captions and send them in to the magazine. I have no idea what bearing this had on the class I was taking; I suspect the teacher may have just been bored.

The cartoon image was of a group of businesspeople who were gathered around a boardroom table that was located, for some reason, in a subway car. If I remember correctly, the guy at the end of the table had his mouth open, indicating speech.

In the end, only two people from the class turned in captions for the cartoon - me and one other guy. My caption - "Well, this is an improvement over the taxi cab" - was met with moderate amusement. His caption - "Who farted?" - engendered uproarious laughter, including my own. "Who farted?" is definitely the funnier of the two, but I don't know why - which actually makes it funnier.

It's worth mentioning that that's the clearest memory I have of that entire class, with dimmer secondary memories including such highlights as winning a bag of marshmallows by correctly guessing their number, and also something called "projection," in which people assign their pathologies to those around them.

So yeah, hooray for college.

Welcome!

Welcome to the test post for "Friends of Millard Rausch." Test. Test. gfreqgerqgq
Right, that seems to be in order.

And the image loaded too, which is a plus. It's television static; it's supposed to look like that. Let's do color.
Color. Color.

Okay, a link: Google.

Bullet points:

• One
• Two
• Three

Fonts a go-go!

Let's try for a quote:

We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Oh, that's like an indent. Not quite what I expected, but potentially useful. Okay, now I'll go screw with layout.