It's called bias toward reality

Death and Taxes: Mourning in America

Watching and reading reactions to Margaret Thatcher’s death reminded me of this heavily paraphrased exchange from about 10 years ago:

Me: “Ronald Reagan was a popular president, but he did a lot of things that weren’t so good.”

Her: “You can’t talk like that about Reagan! He’s sick and can’t defend himself.”

That’s right: I was a meanie for criticizing Reagan’s conscious and oft-trumpeted decisions as president, which was exactly the same thing as cracking jokes about Alzheimer’s in Nancy’s bedroom. It was apparently cheap of me to tarnish Reagan’s legacy then, unlike that time in 1987 when the president successfully justified his dismantling of the air traffic controllers’ union at my friend’s barbecue.

And this dialogue went down before he died. Afterward? Forget it.

Reagan’s 2004 death raised an interesting question that the death of Thatcher has resurrected: Is it OK not to mourn the death of a polarizing public figure?

Most people will say it’s an issue of time and place, and said time and place is not in the immediate aftermath of that figure’s death. That’s classy enough. But how many of us declared a moratorium on criticism when Osama bin Laden died? And who among us can’t think of living notorious figures we won’t miss when they kick it? Let’s be honest — we all want to be decent human beings in the face of mortality, but we all have our cap. Anyone who claims they don’t is in denial.

I believe it’s always appropriate to hold people accountable for their actions. Death may remind us that they’re people too, but one’s passing should never lead to a whitewash of their scorecard — especially when the people involved are political leaders. More than anyone else, they deserve to be judged by their deeds.

For my part, I neither mourn nor hail Thatcher’s passing. Being prime minister of the UK from 1979 to 1990, she was a blip in my burgeoning political conscience. I knew who she was as a child, but mostly I confused her name with Heather Locklear’s. (For example, at 9 I told my dad about a Frank and Ernest strip where Frank had a steamy dream about Locklear, but I said Thatcher’s name instead. I’m sure that left Dad perplexed.) Later I knew of her tenure as the Iron Lady and her legacy as an icon of conservative politics. Later still, I learned of numerous incidents that tarnished that iron.

So when I read that Thatcher’s death had touched off street celebrations in parts of England, I wasn’t particularly surprised (nor was I surprised at the praise from most corners). I would never dance in the street over anyone’s death, but I don’t blame people when they refuse to respect someone in death who didn’t respect them in life. To suggest that they must, is more insulting to the living than respectful to the dead.

Which brings me to Bobby Jindal. With his tax plan circling the drain, some are declaring his political career every bit as dead as Thatcher.

It’s a tempting diagnosis. Jindal rubbed many of us the wrong way long before he became governor — not just because of his unabashed neoconservatism, but also because he seemed to believe that the road to the White House was paved with scorched earth. He came off as that kid who fed the homeless to score points with the college admissions people, except for the part about feeding the homeless. And then Jindal got elected and proved he meant every word. The state I left in 2007 was far worse for the wear when I returned in 2011, and has continued to plummet exponentially since his baffling re-election that year. Even many of Jindal’s most ardent supporters can no longer justify the horrific cuts, the hostility toward public education and the naked greed behind his agenda. Once a favorite as the next Republican president, Jindal now polls lower than President Obama in Louisiana. That says far more about the fall of the former Golden Boy than it does about how highly Louisianans regard Obama.

Still, don’t draft the eulogy for Jindal’s career just yet. Even on life support, Candidate Jindal’s vitals remain: his incumbency, his intelligence, his roots, his fact that the GOP has no one else to parade in 2016. American memories are reliably short — even shorter when fear of a third Democratic term compels people to eagerly forgive and forget. Declaring Jindal finished is the fastest way to guarantee his resurrection. Those of us who have witnessed his decisions and their effects firsthand can never forget, nor let anyone else forget, just what a disaster he’s been for Louisiana.

But if time proves that this was indeed the end of the road for Jindal’s ambitions, I won’t be too upset. Just like Thatcher and Reagan before him, Jindal has cemented a polarizing legacy. We may mourn people when they die, but we shouldn’t mourn the death of bad politics.

Because you know someone will say it

Today's stabbing at a college in Cypress, Texas, has left at least 14 injured. I've heard no word of any deaths or catastrophic injuries, and I'm hoping it stays that way.

Regardless, I'm sure that there will soon be snarky commentary about how liberals are hypocrites for not wanting to ban knives (or pencils or whatever it turns out the assailant used in the stabbings) in the aftermath. After all, that's what those people say about guns after mass shootings!

Wrong. Again. On every level.

First off, most items can be used to stab, or turned into implements that stab. I could remove the circuit board from my laptop, break it in half and slash someone with the rough edge. That doesn't mean we should ban all laptops — or knives, utensils, pencils, etc. Unlike guns, all of those items serve a useful purpose outside of their potential lethality. If they were banned, any of an infinite amount of resources could take their place.

Second, very few people called to ban guns after the rash of mass shootings; the criticism was over accessibility. Should mentally disturbed people have access to implements whose sole purpose is to inflict violent, rapid death, and which have no civilian alternatives to cultivate such bloodshed?

Third, it's highly likely that most, if not all, of today's stabbing victims will live. Certainly there was no pile of torn-apart, dead bodies lying around campus, who had no chance. Similarly, the suspect is allegedly in custody — while it's possible that person could have stabbed themselves into suicide, such a move would require more forethought and commitment than swiftly pulling a trigger. Stabbing yourself requires overcoming your visceral urge not to plunge a knife in your heart. And that's pretty much what you'd have to do, too, to instantly die and avoid realizing you didn't want to do that after all. A bullet to the brain or heart isn't conducive to such reflection.

At least in this case, we're likely to learn what made the stabber go screwy. We almost never have that luxury with our deranged, dead gunmen.

Shootings and stabbings are barely comparable. They're not even apples and oranges — they're mushrooms and oranges. Keeping toxic mushrooms out of the wrong hands is important to keeping people alive. That effort shouldn't be compared to oranges, which at worst could choke someone to death or serve as an annoying projectile, but otherwise are vital fruit. Does that make sense?

Reading much into Roger Ebert

"I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it." — Roger Ebert, saying how he really felt about North (1994)

So Roger Ebert's dead now. Physically, at least.

I don't think that fact has completely hit me yet. Perhaps it will the next time I get on Twitter and realize my feed's not quite as awesome as it's been for the past three years.

Ebert was easily in my top 20 list of living people I most wanted to meet. Not for the obvious reasons, though. As much as I enjoyed his movie reviews (a niche he will own forever) and enjoy watching / reading about / writing about / being in movies myself, I don't consider myself a cinephile.

It's not because of his outspoken liberal politics, though he and I would no doubt have preached to our respective choirs for days on end. 

It's also not because he wrote a book called Your Movie Sucks, but that's getting warmer.

It's because Roger Ebert was the kind of guy who would write a book with that title. He was the Howard Cosell of print journalism.

Cosell, like Ebert, was a rare breed of journalist. It was once said of Cosell that he wrote a column on the air. If he thought a boxing match was a charade or that a football referee made a terrible call, he'd say so, as it happened. Not because he wished to court controversy, but because it was the truth. Cosell was an old-school journalist, the kind who didn't care about toeing any corporate or company lines — he called it as he saw it, and his vision was sharp. He gave praise and compassion where they were due and hurt feelings where they deserved to be hurt. He unflinchingly addressed politics and other current events as they related to games and athletes, making sports relevant to everyone. And most of all, he was hugely entertaining in the process. That's why he's still very much in the public consciousness 18 years after his death and nearly 30 years after his final broadcast.

Ebert embodied that very same don't-give-a-crap attitude. Journalists are so often drilled to be neutral, objective and narrow — qualities necessary in many aspects of the craft. However, in recent years especially, this has led to blander copy even in entertainment and sports venues. Even writers who have more leeway to inject creativity and opinion into their writing exercise excessive caution, and not always for the noblest of reasons. This cautiousness bleeds into the rest of their output, such as social media (of which many journos have a love-hate relationship). What pundits we do have often go overboard, and lack serious journalistic training. It's almost as if we have one extreme or the other nowadays — the staid, rote journalist who squelches their personality entirely, or the four-alarm, professional opinion-monger. The middle ground is where our best journalism has historically emerged. Ebert, perhaps as a holdover from a freer era, continued to embody that spirit long after it became the exception in America's pages.

These days, journalists and editors debate furiously over where the media is headed in the age of the Internet and social sites. I submit that Ebert had it right — he brought tremendous expertise to his particular beat, writing informed (yet accessible) reviews, and was just himself online. He was simply an articulate human being, who saw the world as compelling a spectacle as anything on screen. He succeeded not because he reviewed movies, but because he reviewed life. And like Cosell, Ebert called it as he saw it. Every word he wrote was a conversation with us, a 24/7 dialogue that the loss of his jaw and the ability to speak never silenced. Above all, he was a personality — something painfully missing from so much writing today. As it turns out, the future of creative journalism is the man who, as of today, is part of its past.

I often struggle to articulate who my role models are, or the direction I want to take with my life. But when I look at Roger Ebert, that vision suddenly becomes clearer. I don't want to just be a distinctive voice; I want to be a better human being. Also, wittier on Twitter. 

R.I.P., Roger. May both of your thumbs point toward the heavens. (I know you would tell me that line sucks. It does.)

"Making out at the movies is wonderful." — Roger Ebert

Sue Everhart watches dumb comedies

In yesterday's blog, I asked how marriage was natural in any sense. My question was inspired by Sue Everhart, chairwoman of the Georgia Republican Party, who said that it was "not natural" for same-sex couples to be married.

Everhart is also worried that granting benefits to same-sex couples would compel roommates and/or buddies to hitch up to share insurance. 

Well, not only is that fraud, but it's also the plot of I Love You, Man and an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, so that cat's been out of the bag.

Also, who's to say that hetero couples don't do exactly the same thing? I suspect it happens more than people think. And just like with quickie Vegas hitches, celebrity stunt marriages and reality-show Bridezillas, the bond through insurance has failed to cheapen the institution of holy matrimony. I guess only gay marriage could accomplish that, based on what Everhart and Co. tell me.

What Everhart fears isn't entirely imagined. In fact, it's something we should consider. Why would anyone willfully adopt the trappings of marriage with someone they don't love just for the insurance? The short answer is, because of the insurance. Many people who need it, don't have it. The reason for that is that access to decent insurance is often elusive to people — it requires money, which requires a job, and both can be hard to come by these days. Meanwhile, the risk of being sick always remains, along with the companion fear of being wiped out as a result. In light of that, I can fully understand why a handful of desperate people would consider marriage just for this purpose. That doesn't make it right, but how right is the alternative?

If Everhart really wanted to curb fraudulent marriages, she'd stop watching silly comedies and get to work on reforming health care. I'll be over here holding my breath.

A good question about matrimony

What is natural about any form of marriage?

I'm asking because in point 1 of this article, Georgia GOP leader Sue Everhart is quoted as saying, "it is not natural for two men or two women to be married."

Well, that's technically true, I suppose. There's nothing natural about proposing, announcing an engagement, purchasing artificially expensive rocks on rings, sending out invitations, establishing a gift registry, holding a wedding and reception, sharing legal rights and all the other trappings that come with the institution of matrimony ... when two men or two women are involved. But all of that is encoded in our primal DNA when it involves a man and a woman, obviously.

True, some species mate for life. OK. But how many of them have churches? Or courthouses?

Marriage is not natural. And that's perfectly fine. We have a lot of artificial, societal constructs. They serve a variety of purposes that make people happy and make life as a citizen more smooth. As such, it is an institution that should be open to any consenting adult couple who desires it and is free to enter into it.

To suggest that gays can't be married because it violates nature shows ignorance of both marriage and the prevalence of homosexuality across species. It is, in fact, as unnatural an argument as can be made.

Gaffes like these give racism a bad name

"Listen, Cavanaugh, it's not KITE, it's KIKE. K-I-K-E, kike. You know, you're too stupid to even be a good bigot." — Brian Schwartz, Porky's

This movie quote immediately sprang to mind when I read that Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) had used the term "wetbacks" to describe the cheap labor his dad employed on his farm. Even Carlos Mencia had to palm his face on that one.

"Wetback" is such an ancient slur for Mexican that I didn't hear it until I was 14, and only then as part of a George Carlin routine. And might I add I was raised in south Louisiana, where the racial-slur beer flows like Dumb and Dumber wine? That's serious stuff.

But even if the term wasn't the remnant of Joe Arpaio's father, it's still not cool. Don't today's bigots know that you couch the hatred? Today's siren Stormfront song is the dog whistle. No longer do you use direct epithets to describe minorities — you talk about "welfare queens" and "illegal immigrants" who "take our jobs" and from whom "we want our country back." You joke about tacos and monkeys, then insist that the jokes are something entirely different than racism. And of course, you abhor racism, even as you blame "the PC Police" for keeping you from saying what you want. Couch, then deny. That's how you do prejudice in the 21st century!

The saddest thing is, Young picked the worst possible way to make his point. All he had to say was that they used to have 50-60 laborers to pick tomatoes. It takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. That last sentence wasn't even paraphrased! He said "people" one second after saying "wetbacks." One word change and his unfortunate racial tendencies could have remained under wraps. 

It's as if someone said, "Men make more money than broads for the same work." It practically takes effort to slip that in.

Too stupid.