Men In Office, Crying
Doonesbury was my first indication that men should never cry.
It didn’t tell me directly, but rather through a punchline that I didn’t get. I was reading through the pile of Doonesbury comics at my favorite teacher’s house, and one of the punchlines was, “And who can forget Ed Muskie’s ‘melting snowflakes’?” Like much of Doonesbury, I didn’t quite get it – I was nine, for Christ’s sake – and I’m not quite sure why I asked about that punchline when so many others flew over my head.
But Mrs. Montlick explained to me that there was a politician called Ed Muskie, and some people were saying some very mean things about his wife, and while he was giving a speech defending her, Muskie broke down and cried. In front of everyone. And this was viewed as such an awful thing that he lied and told everyone his tears were just snowflakes from a blizzard, melting on his cheeks. But no one believed him, and after that he wasn’t fit to run in politics any more.
I thought that was pretty awful.
Then, when I was ten and got lost on the new bus system and got off on the wrong stop, I walked for hours until I finally found a familiar landmark: the diner where my grandmother worked. I was hysterical at that point, a small boy with snot-wet cheeks, and when I got in the owner was exceptionally kind. He gave me a free soda, and called my gramma, and explained that everything would be all right, and was so kind and comforting that soon my terror had been reduced to a few sniffles.
Just before Gramma showed up, though, he gave me a serious look. “A piece of advice, kid. Never cry. Men don’t cry.”
I don’t, usually. I get ridiculously upset, sometimes enough to cut myself, but when I cry it’s often this thin trickle, a leaky toilet. I do it in private, hugging a pillow; I hate for Gini to see me weep. I have no problems sharing the emotions with her, but the tears are hard to come by.
Then there’s last night’s speech, where Obama thanked his supporters, and he started to cry:
And I thought, in a sort of terrified wonder: he’s crying. The President of the United States is crying.
And I don’t know. I’m sure Presidents have cried before on camera… or maybe they haven’t. It’s terribly unmasculine, is all. We all know crying is the sign of a nutcase out of control, it’s what insipid women do when they’re breaking down in the face of hard choices, and you can’t respect a crier. I know. I’ve been friends with a lot of very tough women who cry easily, and they all hate it, scrubbing the tears from their face and furious that this happening at work, it makes them look bad, why does their stupid body have to respond this way.
The President is crying. And why wouldn’t he? This has to be the most emotional thing of his life. I mean, when he got elected, that was momentous, but he couldn’t really have had any idea what was at stake until he was in the Captain’s Seat and being brought every insoluable decision for four years straight. He, more than anyone, knew how much would be lost for him and the people he loved if he had lost. He, more than anyone, knew how many people believed in him, and how many people didn’t, and to get the mandate that yes, it was narrow, but we sided with you must have been shattering.
Why wouldn’t he cry?
Why wouldn’t that be okay?
Just Putting This On The Record: Yes, We Could Still Fail
It’s easy to see what I thought back in 2004, when the only public face I had was LJ. You can see all my posts running up to the election (and the scathing condemnation I eventually uncorked after Kerry lost), and as such I’m pretty on the record of what I thought, going in. Before I posted yesterday’s plea to Republicans, I went back and looked over my October posts to ensure that yes, I was pretty positive Kerry was on the losing side.
Today, however, I’m scattered all over – I make maybe one blog post a day on average, and most of my updates are on Twitter, which is like throwing confetti into the wind. There’s no history to it. And so, just to immortalize myself here, let me say this:
We could still fail big-time.
Look, it’s not that I thought Obama was my superhero savior, ready to erase our debt and heal our boo-boos with the might of his Presidential kissyface – it’s that presented with two options, I thought Obama was more fiscally responsible than Romney. (Mainly because Romney never actually bothered to get into the details of what he’d cut.) If there had been a choice who I thought was better than Obama (and who could potentially win), I would have enthusiastically voted for him.
But I think there’s a very real possibility that even Obama can’t pull this off. The Republicans are all like ZOMG IT’S NOW OVER and WE’RE GOING TO DEFAULT and SAY HELLO TO OUR NEW POSITION AS GREECE, and I think that maybe we will wind up in an even worse economic meltdown. Part of that is because the Republicans are horrifically intractable (filibuster what?), and as such I don’t know whether Obama can hammer out a compromise, and part of that is that I think Obama’s slightly more likely to cut than Romney (as Republicans, despite their rep as fiscally responsible, spend like sailors whenever war comes a-knocking). But I viewed “a potential compromise” as way better than “Romney’s tactics unleashed.”
So many Republicans are framing the issue as “Oh, you think Obama will fix it all! You’re so naive!” No. I think of Obama the way I think of an experimental drug treatment; hopefully, it’ll work. It’s better than the side effects of the other drugs suggested. But none of this is a sure-shot guarantee of success, and if it all fails, then I’m confident I’ve made the best choice of the ones I had available, with the information I had at the time.
So if things do go South, here it is: I wasn’t 100% positive about Obama. Maybe, like, 70%. But that was better than the 25% confidence I had in Romney.
A Fascinating Thought That Maybe I Didn't Write
My pal Bart Calendar is a professional ad-writer, and as such you might as well call him a professional chameleon. When he has to figure out how to market something, he’s gotta speak to his audience in their voice.
As such, he’d said to me that he’d love to write an entry in “my” voice, publish it here, and see if anyone notices the difference.
I’ve wanted to do that for a while, but I don’t plan this journal all that much; I get up, see what’s tickling the ol’ blog-bone this morning – that sounded worse than I meant it – and whatever I felt like comes spilling out. I allow half an hour for bloggery; sometimes I go over, sometimes I don’t. And I’d need advance approval on the imitation-post, because it would have to be something I believed; I feel like it’d be a betrayal of my audience, having a post in my name that espoused an idea I actually thought was foolish.
Still. Assuming the content wasn’t too controversial, I wonder if you’d know. Bart’s good. Even if I’ve told you, I wonder if you could tell the difference. I don’t think you could.
It would be the most audacious thing Bart had ever done, however, if he wrote this entry and this one was the imitation, though, wouldn’t it?
The Best Video You're Gonna See Today (If You're A Blogger)
Okay. So Shelley Dankert was a conservative blogger, drunk on buttershots during election night.
She decided to YouTube what was an EPIC FUCKING RANT, berating her friends for not sharing her YouTube videos enough. The rant is twenty-four minutes long, and frankly, I’d probably watch her in a different sitcom every week, a tiny blogger furious that nobody is paying attention to her. It’s a little close to the bone, but I love it.
Alas, she’s disallowed embedding, probably because she desperately needs the hits on YouTube. Anyway, watch the first four minutes, at least. Yes, the screen is black, mostly. Part of the charm, really.
“I can make fifteen fucking posts on Facebook, and not fucking one of you will share it!”
If You're Surprised By The Election Results, You're The Reason You Lost, Or: A Plea For Useful Republicans
Dear Republicans:
I know the despair you feel this morning, and sympathize, because I’ve been there. In 2004 my stiff, robotic millionaire lost to a President he should have soundly thumped, and I was so hurt I took a week off from the Internet afterwards. I am completely sympathetic with that slow terror that the country is now in the hands of an incompetent, and the voters don’t even know it.
But I noticed a weird difference between the way Republicans and Democrats reacted to a losing candidate. In 2004, when the polls turned against Kerry and it was obvious he was going to lose, the Democrats asked “How can we fix that?” Oh, they asked in their glum, incompetent way, but when I personally talked to other Democrats both in real life and online, we were all pretty cognizant of the fact that Kerry was the underdog.
The Republicans of 2012, however, became increasingly convinced that Romney was going to win.
Everywhere I looked on Twitter and Facebook, I saw my Republican friends – not straw men, but actual people – talking about how terrible Nate Silver’s methods were, how these Rasmussen polls showed Romney’s real strength, and eventually you got the travesty of UnSkewedPolls.com, which cherry-picked the data and even today has their prediction of not just a Romney win but a landslide, Romney 311 to Obama 227. (Actual result: Obama 332, Romney 206.)
It all crystallized for me when my friend Brad Torgerson said, “Liberals and Democrats have Nate Silver and his 538 blog. Conservatives and Republicans have the U of CO guys. It’s an epic cage match of predictive numbers geekery!”
Look there. Right at that post – one not too dissimilar from a thousand other dismissals of Nate Silver and the other aggregated polls. See what Brad did there? The way the guy bringing you news he didn’t like was automatically assigned a partisan bias, and the only rational solution was to get a guy on your side with better numbers? As if reality was merely a function of getting enough guys on your side?
That’s why you lost.
Stop confusing hard reality for partisan opposition.
It’s time to step out of the bubble, dear Republicans, because we fucking need you. I don’t trust the Democratic party to run the country single-handedly. I want a Republican party I can rely on for real solutions – and you’ve become lazy, voodoo-like, dismissing any data you don’t like as partisan opposition.
Jay Lake is fond of saying, “Reality has a liberal bias.” That’s not because reality inevitably verifies liberal thinking, but because the Republican response to anything that challenges them is now to write off the data.
And let me repeat: we need you. I want a counterweight to Democratic power, not a deadweight that refuses to acknowledge the issues. I want a Republican party that will look at the numbers for climate change and not go, “I don’t like what those scientists are saying, so I’ll call it a silly liberal bias!” but say , “We’re business experts, we know how to motivate rich people to do what we want, how do we fix this?” I want a Republican party that will realize while yes, we’re spending far too much and should cut down, the results of thirty years of trickle-down theory and tax cuts won’t actually provide enough revenue, because we are at the lowest effective tax rates we’ve had in thirty years.
And yes, you can argue all my statements here. But in that, smart person, you’re like a driver with an SUV in Alaska. A person with a car in Alaska is going to get stuck in the snow eventually; that’s a fact. But if you have an SUV, you’re gonna get stuck way the heck out in the woods where no one can get at you, because you have the strength to do it and won’t stop when common sense tells you to. I had a ton of Very Smart friends dissecting all the reasons why Nate Silver was wrong, why his methodology sucked, why these pollsters who said what they liked over here had better ways of slicing the data… and all that flurry of so-called “facts” amounted to was an elaborate justification of personal biases that had no basis in reality.
It’s time to stop fighting the obvious. It’s time to stop assuming that anyone who presents contradictory data is out to get you.
You should have won, guys. You had a President with an economy in the doldrums, a guy who’d lost a lot of his electoral mojo in the realities of politics. But instead of rising from the grave, you chose a candidate who never actually gave us firm numbers on what expenses he’d cut to fix the economy. You chose a candidate who said he’d get rid of Obamacare, but never actually named the parts he’d destroy. You chose someone who, though all politicians lie, lied a lot more than almost any modern Presidential candidate.
You had a guy who should have sliced Obama to ribbons – and he lost, in large part, because he said, “Trust me” instead of giving us a plan. And you let him get away with it.
You let him get away with it because you’re indulging in a great deal of magical thinking. You let him get away with it because facts have ceased to matter; as long as someone tells you something you want to hear, you’ll find a way to justify it with pseudo-science and trust and spit and baling wire. You don’t like to hear how bad a candidate Mitt was, because you came so close this year, but it’s true; the problem is that so much of the country has abandoned listening to reality that you can get massive votes and never touch a fact.
If you can’t be honest today, in the aftermath of this great defeat, then you’re never going to see the truth.
If you seriously thought that Romney had a good chance of winning, then you’re part of the problem. Wake up. I implore you: learn from this. Look at your deepest beliefs, and see whether the numbers support them. Start thinking, maybe those people with data I don’t like are right.
If you think the lesson to be learned is “We weren’t conservative enough,” then you’re handing me a great victory in 2016. I want to have a real choice then.
Love,
T.F.