Entries from September 2007 ↓

I just saw Christopher Hitchens — author of God Is Not Great — give a pretty amazing answer to a question about why the US is so much less receptive to atheism than Europe:

I think it’s hugely exaggerated. Everywhere I go, I find that everyone who comes to the meeting thinks that they’re the only other atheist, and they’re amazed to find that everyone else is one too.

Whereas if I’m in … my country of birth, in England, the queen is the head of the church as well as the head of the state. You have to pay for both. And when she dies, her slobbering weak-chinned dauphin of a son will be the head of the Church of England … and in Germany, you have to pay a tithe to a church, whether you want to or not.

We are very lucky in this country, we have a better tradition: we have Jefferson, we have Thomas Paine, we have the first amendment, we have the Virginia statute of religious freedom. We are the only country in the world that says that the state can’t back religion. We should appreciate it more.

I do a lot of bitching about Bush and his cronies, and with good reason. But the fact remains that all of their criminal insanity obscures a pretty amazing system of government. I’m not big into the cult of the Founding Fathers, but there’s no denying that they laid a foundation that institutionalized levels of freedom and tolerance that the world had rarely seen before. And that the constitution they wrote still reads very well, two hundred years later.

Yes, that original vision has been systematically subverted over the years — but it has always survived its batterings, more or less, and occasionally done better than survive. When the old dudes with the wigs said that all men are created equal, they may have been whispering “Except for black people, of course” under their breath — but what survives in our document is the original, unblemished proclamation, and the civil rights movement grew up and triumphed¹ under its aegis — despite the efforts of all the evil bastards who struggled to circumvent the constitution’s mandate, even as they claimed to be upholding it.

But even a framework this enlightened is only as viable as its executors allow it to be. The constitution has certainly survived some pretty terrible caretakers in the past. My fear is that it won’t survive Bush.

Update: In comments, Carlo tells me that Hitchens’ allegation about tithes in Germany is untrue — you only have to tithe if you’re officially Christian.

It’s got to be hard being a Senate Republican these days. You’ve basically spent the last six years keeping your country embroiled in a ruinous, pointless war, despoiling the environment, sanctioning torture, and installing the apparatus for a police state. You’ve been as evil as you can possibly be. You’ve reached the pinnacle of nasty. Where do you go from here?

Perhaps recognizing this, the Republican mean-machine went into overdrive yesterday, and blocked three bills that would have:

1. Granted congressional representation to the residents of Washington, DC — 600,000 taxpayers in the heart of the cradle of democracy who, as punishment for the sin of being mostly Democrats, will remain disenfranchised.
2. Restored basic habeas corpus rights to enemy combatants — where an “enemy combatant” is anyone our president decides is an enemy combatant.
3. Given our long-suffering troops more time off from their grueling tours in Iraq.

Not bad for a day’s work. On the agenda for next week:

1. Pass the McConnell-Brownback Baby-Eating Act of 2007.
2. Introduce a statute that mandates the issuance of tiny AK-47s to toddlers in all public schools.
3. Declare September 23rd National Puppy Clubbing Day.

You’ve got to hand it to these guys. They’re overachievers.

I was watching baseball highlights on ESPN the other night when I had an epiphany.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. There are lots and lots of ways to waste the precious, fleeting, unrecoverable moments of your life, but watching a couple of snarky guys in suits spew tepid wisecracks over baseball replays is probably one of the worst. It’s about the equivalent of watching Golf Channel outtakes from The Great Cincinatti Putting Tournament of 1973, say, or a Fox News analysis of Barak Obama’s suspiciously terroristy-sounding last name. But if I’d done either of those things, I wouldn’t have had my epiphany.

Here’s my epiphany: highlights are killing baseball.

This is what a typical baseball highlight looks like:

• Begin highlight. An overweight dude in a frumpy uniform is standing on a mound of dirt.
• He grabs his crotch, looks intently at the catcher. He nods.
• He throws the ball.
• The batter hits the ball.
• The camera follows the ball as it sails up into the air — a slow, slow rise into the sky. Sometimes you can see outfielders at the bottom of the screen, just sort of standing there, watching.
• After a very long time, the ball disappears into the stands.
• End highlight.

Take that sequence, repeat it five or six times (with slight variations in the uniforms and the corpulence of the pitcher), and you’ve pretty much got your typical major league baseball highlight reel.

You can see why they do this: the home run is the sine qua non of the game: it’s the best thing that can possibly happen, pretty much, and baseball’s dwindling corpus of fans pray ardently for it. But here’s the thing: from a purely mechanical, replay perspective, it’s probably the least exciting event on the field.

That’s not true of other sports: a good 50-yard hail-mary pass into the end zone is always fun to watch, no matter who you’re rooting for; long, arcing three-pointers are delicate and lovely and breathtaking, and penalty kicks have a queasy, exciting vertiginous quality to them.

But homeruns are just boring.

The annoying and tragic thing here is that there’s a lot to get excited about in baseball: shortstops diving for a hard grounders, clinch double-plays, runners sliding under tags.

Show us more of that stuff, snarky announcer people. Because there’s a name for sports that give us nothing but replays of tiny white balls dwindling into the horizon.

Golf.

I’m in the middle of having my mind blown by Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen. It’s kind of ridiculous that I’ve gotten this far in life without ever encountering this book — because it’s an amazing accomplishment, creepy and lovely and riveting and beautifully, beautifully written. And right up my alley. This is the kind of novel I want to write, one day.

And there’s even a movie — a short impressionistic deeply disturbing piece about some terrible event in the history of Ambergris, based on the sequel to Saints and Madmen, Shriek. Check it out.

The furor over the iPhone’s $200 price drop continues. Now, there are all kinds of reasons to be mad about this if you’ve already bought one. I imagine I’d be pissed. But Gruber makes a good case for why you can’t really consider this unfair, and Lord Jobs did the right thing by offering a $100 rebate to all the early adopters he burned. So, really: this might be kind of bad for Apple in the short term, but I’m sure it’ll blow over soon. Coolness and beauty trump all, in the long run.

No, what I’m most worried about is the resurgence of the old “iSomething” trope. It’s seems to have risen from the dead and found its way into the op-ed pages of the Post. Today’s paper has a article called Poked in the i, with this subheading: If I were an iPhone owner, I’d be hopping mad. I’d be iRate.

Good lord people. The iMac was released in 1998. Haven’t you worked all of the iJokes out of your system yet? They’re not funny, ok? They were never funny, but they’ve now entered a realm of post-not-funny that we like to call Annoyingstan. Anyone who makes any fucking iJokes in the next couple of weeks gets instant citizenship in Annoyingstan. You’ll get a little bungalow next to Paris Hilton, right down the road from Suze Orman. You’ll have a weekly tennis game with Doctor Phil.

You don’t want that, do you? No, of course not. So please. Let’s try to weather this storm without calling it an iStorm, or referring to anyone’s iBalls, or having any brilliant iDeas. Ok? We can do this. We really can.