Julia and I watched the election results with Beeman, Kirsten, and Driscoll over at Emma's place.
I was surprised by how early things were called for Obama — I'd forgotten that presidential elections don't always go late into the night or require haggling over voting irregularities. Or that they don't always involve deep disappointment.
Julia and I decided to walk home, since it was a nice night. We talked about the election, the past, the future — all while listening to cars honking on Belmont and Hawthorne. Here's a video of what we saw:
the highlight of my evening was the dance of joy performed by my offspring at the announcement of the outcome. it involved jumping, spinning, arm-waving, squeaking, giggling, mid-air toe-touching, and falling down. it pretty well reflected my own feelings, but i was pinned to the couch by too many cheese enchiladas.
Robert, I'm pretty sure they were largely obeying the traffic laws, given that they only crossed (okay, mobbed) the street when the light changed. And all within the crosswalk, more or less.
pretty awesome night, i must say. so strange to feel pride/optimism/joy like that. then in the morning i heard prop 8 (ban gay marriage) & some other shit passed. this country, it's always 1 step fwd 2 steps back. but no matter how you look at it, last night was all about dancing in the streets.
They say as you get older, you get wiser. Well, I don't know about that — as I write this at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning, I am snacking on a Hershey's Miniatures chocolate bar. And not even the Special Dark kind!
But I do know this: as you get older, you get lamer. And by that, I mean: the only people I know who dress up and go out and have fun for Halloween anymore are my friends' kids. Time was, we adults would all put on costumes and go to a great party. Well the times, they have a-changed.
However, don't think that this is going to be a costume-less blog entry! No! Because, for whatever reason, it is acceptable (at least where I work) to wear a Halloween costume to the office. (Perhaps especially when Halloween is on a Friday, which we all know to be the most casual of the weekdays.) But I'll get to that in a second.
Now, the last time I actually put some serious effort into making a Halloween costume was four years ago. Which, as you other old people will remember, was an election year — as I recall, it was John Kerry versus ... hmm ... the other guy, whoever.
Anyhow, during the debates that year, there was a lot of talk about Canadian medicine. Kerry had a health care plan that had something to do with importing drugs from the Great White North, which would save us all money. The other guy ... um, his opponent ... didn't like Kerry's plan, and tended to make scary pronouncements about how:
When a drug comes in from Canada, I want to make sure it cures you and doesn't kill you ... and what my worry is that, you know, it looks like it's from Canada, and it might be from a third world.
Well! Halloween costumes are traditionally supposed to be scary, and what could be scarier than something that could kill you? And/or is from "a third world"? (I believe Mars is the second world.)
It also helped that I had recently taken a trip to SCRAP, the School and Community Reuse Action Project (for the acronym's sake, I'm glad that schools are involved), where I'd cheaply obtained a rather large amount of foam pieces that, I'd decided, bore a resemblance to pills of some sort.
So I found a t-shirt the color of a prescription medicine bottle, trimmed the sleeves off, painted on a white label, and hacked a piece of foam I found in the basement into something resembling a childproof lid. (For the record, this is exactly why we store all sorts of seemingly useless crap in our basement: you never know when you'll need it for a Halloween costume, I always say.)
The design on the label was really the only way I had to convey that the medicine I was portraying was Canadian (or Canadien, if you will, and if you love freedom, you won't), so it had to be in both French and English. And pretty much had to have a red maple leaf somewhere on it. After playing around with Google Translate, I came up with a label that read (for those of you who can't see it in the photo below):
CanaDrogue
123 Fake St. Ottowa
Dr. Pierre Bûcheron 815-366-4211
100 Sildenafil citrate 50mg
TAKE ONE TABLET DAILY
UNE MEILLURE SANTE ICI
10/31/04 Refills: 07
And yes, I was, in fact, a bottle of Canadian Viagra. Four years later, I'm not sure why I thought that was funny. Or why I offered a French phrase that, no doubt awkwardly, translates as "a better health here" as the alternate language rendition of "take one tablet daily". I do know why I used a doctor's last name that translates to "lumberjack" in English — because it's funny! Dr. Pierre Lumberjack! Ha!
Fig. A: Ironically, when I Googled to find the correct area code for Ottowa (yes, my costume research is that thorough), I accidentally found the one for Ottowa, Illinois, which my friend from Joliet pointed out to me, to my embarrassment. Thanks, Aaron.
Anyhow, fast forward four years to this week, and some people at work were discussing wearing costumes for Halloween. Feeling lazy, I trumped down to the basement, where, as you know, I store nearly everything, including old Halloween costumes! Since I hadn't worn it to work, I figured it qualified as newish, so I wore it yesterday, figuring it's my election-year Halloween costume.
However, as Canadian medicine has not so much been a hot debate topic this year, I decided to tell people I was "socialized medicine", which certainly taps into the scary (or at least fear-mongering) topic du jour. Sometimes the creativity required for a costume isn't in making it so much as in justifying it after the fact, I say.
I realize it would have been more timely to have posted this blog entry yesterday, on Halloween, but don't think of it as being a day late. Think of it, rather, as being four years late!
First put forward in 1866 by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel proposed that the embryonal development of an individual organism (its ontogeny) followed the same path as the evolutionary history of its species (its phylogeny).
All well and good. Or, rather, bad, as the theory has, as Wikipedia notes, "been refuted on many fronts." Yes, babies very early on do have a tail (which later turns into the coccyx, one of the better-named bones), but other than some clever drawings on Haeckel's part, it just wasn't true.
But! I have this new theory!
I don't have any obtuse, cleverly rhyming words with which to formulate my theory, but here it is: your daily arc ... ah, recapitulates ... your life's arc. There!
I was thinking about this yesterday morning, when I woke up, silent and squirming. I couldn't see too well (due to the crud in my eyes), and I wasn't given much to speaking — only periodic murmurings. Well, grunts, really.
After squirming around for a bit, I gained the ability to walk (namely, by getting out of bed), if stumblingly. And after some time, I even decided to start talking (though, Julia having gotten up earlier than me and already left the house, my talking was mainly to myself and quite silly).
I played around for a bit (on the computer), but ultimately, it was time to get serious and go off to work. I worked for what seemed like a long time. At the end of the day, with the light getting low, I retired from my earning activity.
Then I came home and mostly sat around and talked. As it got later, I would find myself dozing a lot more. Eventually, weighed down by the events of the day, I went to bed and fell asleep.
So there you go.
In case any of you are wondering why I'm thinking about embryonic development and how my lying in bed, squirming, recapitulates the activities of infants, may I recommend to you this new blog I've started, particularly this entry or this one.
In case any of you are wondering why I've bothered to start a new blog when I can barely bring myself to post on this one once a month or so ... well, that's a fair question. I'll ... uh, I'll get back to you on that one.
And at a certain age, shortly after you get up in the morning, you put teeth in your mouth after which you can start eating solid food, and sometime before going to be and falling asleep, out they come again, sort of self-referently.
Wow, was it really only two entries ago I was determined to write something to be filed under June 2008? And the last thing I wrote before this was turned in just before the end of July, too. Hmm.
Now here it is, mere hours before the end of September, with August somehow having slipped away (in spite of my sister-in-law's warning), and I'm once again trying to cram in an entry.
All out of some dubious notion that I haven't actually given up on this blog, ignoring the evidence to the contrary.
Perhaps, then, it is appropriate that I want to talk to you about something else that is desperate. Namely, Desperate Housewives.
Well, not about the show, per se. I don't think I've seen more than a few cumulative minutes of it, and I couldn't even tell you the characters' names, much less any plot points. Heck, I'm not sure I could even recognize the main actors other than Teri Hatcher, and seeing her these days only makes me sad, since she is not, to be honest, as young as she was on Lois & Clark back when I was in college.
You might think this observation to be unfair, but if I haven't changed since I was in college — and I haven't; back then, I waited until the very last minute to write things, as well — I don't see why she should have.
So what about Desperate Housewives do I want to touch on, if not the show itself? This advertisement, which appeared in last Sunday's Parade "magazine" (please, Parade — if you're a magazine, this blog entry is an epic poem):
Fig. A: Housewives: desperate? Or merely mealy?
Yes, sorry, but that's a scan of the actual magazine, complete with a snarky comment I left for my wife penned in underneath the tagline.
That's right, not only do we read a physical newspaper, but we leave sarcastic comments in it for each other's enjoyment — although we're currently only receiving the paper because The Oregonian decided to send it to us for free for several months after we canceled it. Does that make sense? No, but it likely gives you several ideas why The Oregonian may eventually go under.
And when our free "subscription" eventually runs out, the ability to leave caustic notes in it will be one of the few things I miss. That and the crossword.
Anyhow, that ad. Yeesh. I realize that apples play a role somehow in the show's iconography (though I only know that because I have a passing interest in fellow Lutheran Lucas Cranach the Elder, whose Adam and Eve appears in the show's intro).
But listen, people. Apples are 85% water. Adult women are about 55% water, on average. "Juicier"? I'm just not buying it.
Also, while Red Delicious apples may be iconic, they are not, in fact, delicious. They are tasteless and gross, with nasty skin, and too bitter for me.
I assume this is therefore a reference to the characters on the show?
I rarely discuss politics (these days) on this blog, for the reason that I know almost nothing about politics. Sort of.
It's not that I don't care about politics — relative to the general population, I consider myself fairly wonky, and I probably read more political coverage than is good for me.
No, I like politics, but I have nothing original to say about it — I certainly don't know any more than most other people out there. I read the same blogs people with my political leanings do, and anything I could write would largely be a rehashing of the content of those blogs, along with what paltry analysis I could throw on top of it.
There's not much value in my blogging such things for the world to read. (Unlike, say, this stream-of-consciousness bit of navel-gazing, which I'm sure is pure joy for you — as always, the real reason I started typing this entry will appear in the final few sentences, some twenty paragraphs in.)
Complicating the matter of my political knowledge is that most of the sources (blogs) I read are clearly biased. Now, I prefer a point of view that is honest about its bias rather than one that hides it, but it still means that I'm never sure of anything that I've read — is it a frank appraisal of things in contrast to other sources' spin, or is it merely a piece designed to sway me to one candidate or party, regardless of the truth? I don't necessarily mind reading the latter, but I'd hate to have it inform my overall opinion.
Perhaps more key to why I eschew political blogging is that I rarely feel like I truly support any given candidate, much less any given party. I'm an evangelical Lutheran with left-wing ideals but I am suspicious of big government — in short, I am nobody's base. I'll vote for people, of course, but rare (or possibly nonexistent) is the person that has my unwavering support. So it is that I find it easier to criticize candidates than to praise them.
Fig. A: On the good ship agitprop
To get to the point, several months ago, I started seeing posters for Barack Obama that were highly stylized and bore only the word "hope". I've since asked around and found that I'm the only person I know who has seen these posters. I'm not sure why, though it probably doesn't hurt that I live fifteen blocks from Obama's Oregon state headquarters.
Anyhow, this particular poster was made by Shepard Fairey, whose name will ring a bell with some but, for others, will prompt the question "Shepard Fairey? Really? That's his name?"
You can read his Wikipedia entry to learn more about him, but, in short, he's the guy famous for the "Andre the Giant has a posse" stickers seen all over the backs of urban stop signs. This later morphed into a whole line of work involving a highly stylized picture of Andre the Giant and the words "obey" and "giant" (the two words that form Fairey's domain name).
But that's not important. The point is that Fairey offered to make a poster for the Obama campaign, and, to his surprise, they accepted. Like most of his work, the Obama poster he made flirts openly with design themes from totalitarian posters of the past.
It also, like much of Obama's campaign (okay, like anyone's campaign), relies heavily on so much pabulum: a picture of Obama gazing thoughtfully into the future, and a promise of "hope" or "change" or "progress" or "free kittens" (er, strike that last one). Do you like hope? Vote for this guy!
Yeah, if I vote for Obama, it won't be for such vague concepts, much less for their depiction by hip, ironic artists, especially when they are depicted, ironically, with such an utter lack of irony. Sorry. (I mean, I'm sorry about that sentence, as well as the likely abuse of the concept of irony. No, I still haven't gotten to the point yet.)
The point (maybe?): what I wanted was not some fawning "Obama=Hope" poster, but rather an image critical of something, one more in line with my sentiments.
Fig. B: Agitprop, agitprop, oh lolly agitprop!
And, in keeping with the "cheap potshot" mentality, I also decided to make an obvious riff on Fairey's "Hope" poster by taking a news photo, tracing it in Illustrator, and thinking of one word to describe the person in the poster.
Thus, my John McCain "fear" poster (see what I did there — it's in contrast to "hope", right, and ... I know. It's dumb).
I don't know if Obama really embodies the idea of hope, but I do think that McCain is campaigning pretty heavily on fear — fear of terrorists, fear of Iran, fear that Obama may not be experienced enough, fear of free kittens, and so on. Are you scared? John McCain will be there for you!
But I'm tired of politicians campaigning on fear. We've had that for six years now, and all we've learned from it is that scared people make some really horrible decisions ("I don't care if you put a chip in my neck and restrict where I can travel and torture certain people that look guilty anyhow, just keep me safe! Oh, George Bush, hold me tight!").
I'll admit, it's not difficult to find a photo of McCain that looks like he's modeling for the concept of fear. In addition, playing with Fairey's palette with bright red patches really plays up the anger in McCain's glare.
Anyhow, there you go. I made a hack political poster based on another hack political poster, and I told you about it in several thousand words. How clever of me.
If you want to print out one for yourself (oh, I know you're really tempted) on letter-sized paper, I made a PDF of the poster.
[Update] Okay, in light of the comments about t-shirts below, I have added the design to my Cafepress store, so you can buy a shirt with the "fear" image if you want. I think it looks particularly nice in black. Have fun.
Comments on "A political foray (a poster for John McCain)"
for a person who doesn't think they have anything new to say on politics, you sure have written a thoughtful post! that mccain poster is rad (and double true).
Written by: jfouts
Written at: 09:01 01 Aug, 2008
It is indeed a thoughtful post. You should be selling that graphic on a t shirt. Very expresssive of how many feel.
Written by: John McCarthy
Written at: 10:14 01 Aug, 2008
Thank you. Where can I get the t-shirt? Would it be ok with you if I asked someone to make one for me on Etsy, using the Etsy Alchemy feature?
Very amusing . . . you're quite an observer of the political scene . . .my claim to fame is that I'm Morgan Kunze's aunt (favorite aunt, I might add, probably incorrectly) Of course, I've printed out your McCain poster and plan to annoy my Republican friends with it . . . what could be more fun?
Written by: sarah
Written at: 12:37 05 Nov, 2008