On The Supreme Court, And Scalia's Vacancy.

For once, I have a lot of sympathy for conservatives.  Yes, they’re threatening to lock out Obama for his final year in office.  Yes, they’ve been a bunch of big whiny babies, shutting down the government as the equivalent of “I’m gonna hold my breath until I turn blue if you don’t gimme what I want!”
But Scalia’s seat?
That’s the first time I looked at it and went, “Yeah, that’s worth risking everything for.”
Look. Scalia’s been the only thing holding up some pretty tenuous court cases.  A 5-4 liberal court would have ramifications for conservatives way beyond what Bush did, and it would go on for decades.
If you are a conservative, finally, you have found a sword worth falling on.
…not that the hype they’re generating around it is anything but a cloud of toxic lies.  Obama is well within his Constitutional rights to appoint a nominee, and it is historically unheard-of for Congress to delay the appointment for three hundred goddamned days, and I hate that the media is treating this as “Well, both sides have a point” as opposed to “One side is doing what Presidents have always done, and the other side is rising up in an unprecedented rebellion to try to stop him.”
(As someone asked of Ted Cruz on Twitter, “If elected, when in your presidency would you abandon all power?”)
And I like to think that if the positions were reversed, I would allow the appointment to go forward but start causing gridlock if the Conservative President tried to appoint anyone but the most dishwater middle-of-the-road guy he could find.  (Who would still be rightish, of course, we all know that, but some rightish people waffle – as see John Roberts on Obamacare.)
But who knows?  I’m not in that position.  They are.  And I think what they’re doing is slightly scummy, and I disagree vehemently with the rollbacks they want to accomplish, but good God strategically speaking this is the time to pull out all the stops.
That said…
I’ve seen my conservative friends posting, “Well, Obama filibustered Alito!”  Which is true; he did.  Obama, ineffectively, tried to take part in a Kerry-led rebellion so Alito could not get on the court.
There are huge differences, though:
1) He disagreed with “a specific person,” not “Anyone who Bush might ever nominate ever ever ever.”  This is a massive change.  Idiots who are crying that they’d filibuster anyone are basically stating that “This President will never choose anyone I agree with” before the process has begun, and my God I hope he chooses Elizabeth Warren just to piss you off.
2) This was in 2006, not in 2008, and Obama was not claiming – as many do – that the President had no right to appoint someone in his final year in office.
3) At the time, Obama acknowledged that the merits of a filibuster were arguable, and – my words, not his – this was a moral choice he was using to promote an edge rule, not some grand tradition he was carrying on.  (He voted on Roberts, though negatively.)
Those three things make his actions very different from what the Republicans are doing now.  Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

I'm Busy Fixin' THE FIX, So… Ask Me Anything?

Right now, on my laptop, I have a book that is not quite yet awesome.
I have six weeks to inject all the awesome into it.
So every night after work, I am descending into the basement to bash my skull against my laptop for four hours, attempting to end the family ‘Mancer saga in a way that honors everyone in it.  But that leaves me little time for thinkin’ about blog posts in the evening, which is when I usually write these suckers.
So!  As is tradition here every four months or so, ask me a real question I can answer, that you’d like to know the answer to. On any topic: novel or kink or bees or otters. I’ll do my best to answer honestly.
(Fake questions like “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?” are neither clever nor useful. You can do it; it marks you as the kind of person who doesn’t realize the joke is so obvious it’s been done a hundred times before, and I’ll think less of you for being tedious. Hey, I told you I’d answer honestly.)
(And the bees are alive last we checked, but we have become bee-havers, not bee-keepers, and as such they’re pretty much on their own.  Two years of cancer pretty much pounded our beekeeping out of us, alas.)
Anyway.  Ask!

The Stories We Tell After Death

A relationship dying is like a person dying, in some ways: a unique thing has vanished, and can’t be recreated. Even if you manage to get back together again, you’ll both have been changed by the experience of walking away.
And I think of the stories we tell ourselves after death.
After a relationship dies, we enter the “grave dressing” segment, where we ask ourselves the question: *What did that person really mean to us? Where did things go wrong?* And we look down into the coffin, bringing our friends over to help us conduct the autopsy, asking, “What have we learned?”
Sometimes we learn that your lover was the enemy.
Or – more accurately – that you can’t survive without turning your ex-lover into the enemy.
And what frequently happened was that the ex had the wrong communication style – which happens. Two people often speak different love languages, but hardly anyone talks about how bad translations can wreck your self-esteem. There’s a reason they call them “toxic” relationships, because what you need is nutrition and what you keep getting looks like healthy food but you’re getting poison.
This relationship is killing you.
And what people frequently need to do is to turn an unwitting provider of bad food into a poisoner. This couldn’t have been a mistake: They knew you were strong, and were trying to destroy you. They were unhappy, and you were happy, and they made you unhappy so they must be bad.
The ex attains near-mythic status, a supervillain sent to ruin your life. What had once been a troubled relationship between two equally fucked-up people becomes the shining beacon of What Must Never Be Done Again. You think about how you’re done with that person’s bullshit, and you’re glad, because you’re never falling for *that* again.
They led you away from the One Truth.
And like all grief, I can’t condemn someone for working through it in their own way. People change inevitably change facts in the aftermath of a breakup – I know I do it – and I think, Whatever you need to get through this. And there are definitely people out there who are purposely trying to undermine your well-being to foster their own comfort.
But sometimes, what happened is this:
They were happy, and you made them unhappy too.
You didn’t set out to make them unhappy as part of a nefarious scheme – you simply had a well-defined set of habits that you needed to function properly, and your needs were at odds with theirs.
That happens all the time. Someone needs financial stability to function while another could live happily in a slum so long as they felt like a priority. Someone needs their partner to act independently, while the other needs guidance to feel good about where they’re going. Someone needs to never open up because they can only feel strong if they conceal their weaknesses, while the other only feels comfortable when they lay all their concerns out in the open.
There’s all sorts of personalities that unravel each other.
And when those two get together, they slowly pick at each other, because their fundamental needs are in conflict. It looks like a purposeful undermining of their One Truth – but what’s actually happening is that there’s several One Truths, a.k.a. “Whatever gets you through the night,” and sometimes those two realities cannot coexist.
And bad things happen.
Then you’re staring down into that casket, looking at the shards of a relationship that cut you deep. And it’s useful to make supervillains out of that, sometimes: if you learn the lesson that ANYONE WHO WANTS TO HIDE THEIR FEELINGS FROM ME IS EVIL, then hey, you won’t date the sorts of people who undermine your self-esteem. And it works.
But there’s another lesson you can learn, sometimes: this person poisoned you, and it hurt, but they had a way that worked for them. Their crime was that their way didn’t work for you.
Some days, people ask me, “How can I stay friends with my exes?” And I think that’s a terrible question, because often that question is a variant on “How can I keep myself wedged into their life until they agree to fuck me again?” and yeah, the answer to that is “Don’t.”
But if you really want to stay friends, recognize that supervillains do exist – but they’re much rarer than, say, people whose fundamental chemistries don’t allow them to survive in your environment. What they offered was poison to you, but it’s manna from heaven to others.
If you can keep that in mind, you can remember what not to eat. And you can be friends. Maybe. Some day.

Why You Want To Listen To Donald Trump

Obama’s former Director of Speech Writing just wrote a victory speech for Donald Trump.  But there’s a trick:
90% of this speech is lifted from things Donald Trump has already said.
And it is frighteningly appealing to moderates.
“No!” you cry.  “Trump is the guy who talks about Mexican rapists and Megyn Kelly on her period and – and all that offensive stuff!  I don’t need to listen to him!”
And you know what you are?
You’re Republican voters in 2012, so outraged by your friends’ portrayal of The Other Guy that you forgot there’s a reason The Other Guy is popular.
And if you were a Republican in 2012, you got the highlight reel of Obama saying stupid things about bitter people needing guns and religion and Obama lying about “If you like your health care, you can keep it” and all sorts of vaguely misinterpreted stuff spun in the worst way.
And when he went into the 2012 debates, he got the exact same boost that every Democratic candidate gets, simply by showing up.  All a Democratic candidate has to do these days is not arrive with a set of devil horns breathing fire, and they’re automatically ahead of the curve by what most voters expect to see.
Do I agree with Donald Trump?  Fuck no.  But it’s good to know your enemy by your enemy, instead of his worst sound bites. There’s a reason Donald Trump is currently swinging a big stick, and it behooves you to try to figure out what’s so damn appealing about this.  And if you shrug it off with “Well, it’s xenophobia!  His voters are stupid!” and move on without listening, then you’re gonna be the inverse of that Republican who is shocked when he trots out all his standard anti-Obama lines that sell so well in The Land Of People Who Know Obama By His Worst Sound Bites and discover that, in fact, most people aren’t buying it.
Look.  We’ve got to the point in this country where Richard Dreyfuss showing up at a Ted Cruz rally to see what the hell Ted Cruz had to say got him pilloried.  Listening to your opponent to see what’s appealing is not a betrayal, it’s smart business.
If you really hate a politician, it’s still worth listening to them to figure out what sorts of aspects they’re appealing to.  Because it’s usually not entirely what the sound bites would have you believe.
So even if you can’t stand to listen to Trump directly, go read this pastiche speech and imagine that delivered at the Republican National Convention.  Imagine how it’d go over with your politically-unaware friends, how it’d sound to someone who’s not been paying meticulous attention to the primaries – which, may I remind you, is a comparatively rare trait even among primary voters.  For most of the country, the race hasn’t even started yet.
And if you’re politically active, prepare some arguments that will work against the Donald Trump that people see when they listen to the whole speech, and not just the highlights reel arguments.  Because they are different things.
Now.  Go read.

Brace Yourself. Bitterness Is Coming.

Valentine’s Day is arriving this Sunday, which means the usual tide of snarky hatred should be rolling across our doorstep. So watch for the “Greatest Hits” of bitter posts that say:

• I’m single, and unless I’m personally content, I don’t want anyone in the world to be happy!
• Valentine’s Day is a commercial holiday, and if you have to be reminded to be romantic to your spouse, then your relationship is clearly a fraud and should be disbanded!
• I had a bad experience on Valentine’s Day, and therefore I’m going to shit on everyone else’s attempts to enjoy themselves!

To which I say, quite seriously:
Maybe you’d have better romantic experiences if you spent less time being angry at other people for enjoying themselves when you’re not.
Look, I get that you might not be happy about Valentine’s day because you’re single. The world’s a little lonelier on those days, and for that I console you. (Especially if you just had a breakup, in which case I’ll personally deliver a hug to your doorstep.) If you don’t want to join in the festivities and instead band together with a bunch of single friends to drink wine and razz bad romantic comedies, go for it.
But angrily trying to piss in everyone else’s Cheerios because this holiday isn’t working for you personally?
Come on. Look, Valentine’s Day is commercial, but there’s nothing wrong with giving people a reminder to be nice to each other. And clearly lots of people do enjoy being given this space to reconnect with each other, so screaming LOOK AT ME AND REMEMBER HOW HOLLOW THIS ALL IS is kind of a dick move.
Not everything in life is going to be for you. And I think, quite honestly, if you’re looking for romantic love, you’re going to do a lot better if you learn to cultivate this compersive idea of “Let me allow other people to have a good time even if I’m a little saddened.” Because frankly, the relationships where you’re only allowed to be as happy as your partner currently is rarely end well.
For me, there were songs that were absolutely wrecked for me when my goddaughter died of cancer, songs that make people happy and get played at football games and make people dance. Yet when they come on the radio – and they do, a lot – I don’t stand up and remind people of my loss; I excuse myself quietly and let people have their happy dance.
Because the answer to inconsolable happiness is not to rip down other people’s joy, but to protect it wherever you can. Happiness is fleeting, ephemeral, and it’s so easy to shred someone else’s nice moment.
It sucks to be single when the world is dating. I get that. But let the world be happy for a bit.
And I hope when you get your happy moment – because I hope you do get your happy moment – nobody will be there cynically sneering at you.
Happy Valentine’s Day, three days in advance.