Dustin M. Wax

OK, Bush won. Fair and square — or not. The last 4 years have shown that it doesn’t really matter, as long as Bush’s ass ends up warming the chair in the Oval Office. Like many, I really, really, really REALLY didn’t want to see a second Bush term. Not that I was particularly enthralled with Kerry — he was better than he seemed at first glance, but certainly wasn’t offering the kind of radical change I think this country needs. But still, he was someone I felt we linkies could work with, someone who would at least open his eyes and ears (and maybe even his heart) to the American public now and again, and even act on what he saw, heard, and felt coming from us. But — and this is strange as all hell — while watching the Bush victory speech today, I felt… I dunno, almost joyous, for a brief moment. It’s part of the ritual for the losing candidate to declare that “the fight’s not over” and that he will “keep fighting for the American people”, so although Edwards gave me warm fuzzies, I wasn’t particularly reassured. Gore promised the same thing, remember? And where has Gore been hiding for the last 4 years? But watching Bush play out the role of the gracious winner (yeah, right) I did feel this moment of elation — this isn’t over. We’ve been given a chance, at long last, to shrug off the dead weight of the Democratic Party, the way I see it. In 2000, the Dems could, rightly or (I think) wrongly, point to Nader and somehow convince themselves that their own wishy-washy politics weren’t to blame for the loss. This time around, we’ve seen an overwhelming desire for change. Bush didn’t win this, any more than Kerry did — nobody wants either of them in office, as far as I can tell. As far as I can tell, Bush stayed in office because a) he’s the evil we already know, while Kerry is the evil we don’t know, and b) in the absence of any moral core to current American politics, a lot of Americans were willing to substitute for the cheap replacement for morality offered by Bush. It seems to me that the field is now open for whoever can present a set of real issues — things that directly touch the lives of Americans in real, tangible ways — grounded in a real moral vision. Not a moralistic vision, mind you — a real sense of right and wrong and of the subtleties and difficulties involved in choosing well. More than that, though, I think it’s time that candidates, politicians, and engaged participants (that’s us citizen-types, y’know?) start addressing voters as individuals (what could be more American?) than as representatives of various voting blocs: blacks, working mothers, NASCAR dads, evangelical Christians, cultural liberals, etc. I’m not sure the Democratic Party has anything to do with this kind of future. I’ve kind of resigned myself to the impracticality of third-party solutions on the national stage, given the demands of modern politicking. So what I’m really advicating — what struck me as Bush platituded his way through his speech — is the creation of a second party, a real alternative to the Republican machine that, sooner or later, cultural conservatives are going to realize is using them as a smokescreen for the dissolution of the American government. I’m willing to entertain the notion that this is just crazy-talk. It may be that, after a brief high, alcoholism returns as the only rational response to a Bush presidency. But I don’t think it’s all crazy-talk. There hasn’t been a real issue discussed on the American political scene in a long, long time. Gay marriage is not an issue, it’s a campaign ploy! What we’re not talking about is who is making the decisions that shape our daily lives — and here’s a hint: it’s neither us nor our government. Real issues might not play well on TV — but shit, we got the Internets now, right? And I think we’ve got to take a big step back, to the early days of the Dean campaign, when the promise of the Internet seemed about to take root. We’ve got two years before the next elections, and an electorate that’s actually excited about the democratic process for the first time in decades — seems to me that we’ve got a lot to work with, no? [Continue reading]

[[image:onenationsm.jpg:Republican Flyer — small:center:0]]

It’s Swing State time here in Nevada, which means every day my mailbox is chock-a-block full of flyers from both Republicans and Democrats. Today, I got a flyer exhorting me to “Vote Republican” next Tuesday, from the party whose presidential candidate seemed very upset, during the debates, about the idea that “under God” might be dropped from the “Pledge of Allegiance”. What’s interesting is that the slogan on the flyer, the little catchphrase that’s sposed to fire up my patriotic sensibility and get me to vote for the party that aims to protect my right to impose on atheists and other non-Christian folks a particular conceptualization of a supernatural being watching over this nation and its interests, this slogan printed in big, glowy letters, says: ONE NATION…With liberty and justice for all. Where’s the Bearded One? There’s an ellipsis there to show me that words were removed, and I’m well-educated enough to know what words those are, too — those Republicans don’t know who they’re dealing with! (Though, to be fair, after what they’ve done to education, I spose they figgered they could count on people not going in for reading and all that.) [Continue reading]

Why are telecoms so behind the curve when it comes to the web? AT&T Wireless’ website is a horror — mMode services are handled separately from other wireless services, a query I once made on how to access my voicemail from a landline got dozens of separate results for how to access voicemail wirelessly from every model of phone AT&T services (this despite the fact that the phone I actually use is recorded in my profile — and despite the fact that on every phone the answer is “press and hold the ‘1’ button”), and so on. I ended up googling up the answer, which I found (fairly easily) on a non-AT&T site. Right now, I’ve been up all night transferring services from my current address to my new address, or starting new services. I’ve started Cox cable high-speed Internet and Southwest Gas services (my current place is electric-only), and I’ve transferred my Nevada Power account as well. So all that’s left (other than change-of-addresses with my bank, renter’s insurance, and wireless) is to transfer my Sprint local service and cancel my DSL (which my new landlord tells me will interfere with the alarm system in the new place). So I head to Sprint’s website (which doesn’t work with Opera, so I have to open IE) and look up FAQs on customer service. The answer to all FAQs involved with moving, changing, or cancelling Sprint services online is the same:

This feature is currently not offered online. Please call the Sprint Local business office at 1-888-723-8010 for assistance.

So while the power utilities totally get the web, not one but two telecommunication companies are totally lost. Which isn’t very heartening, is it — after all, the Internet is a freakin’ telecommunications application!!!!! Sigh. [Continue reading]

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things A collective of uber-geeks brings us a daily dose of the neat, weird, sexy, sassy, and just plain awesome. The daily gossip sheet of the techie counter-culture. Better living through technology. If you’re turned on by toasters, this is the place to be. BoingBoing always seemed a little familiar to me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, until sudenly it dawned on me that somewhere I have a book of articles collected from the magazine of the same name. Some post or another suggested that the website and magazine were one and the same, and I had a lightbulb moment. But it really doesn’t matter — BoingBoing is on my daily visit list, and it’s updated often enough that I often visit more than once. One innovation that I’ve always been rather cold towards is their Guestbar, a sidebar blog written by a guest blogger. It never really impressed me — never, that is, until Rudy Rucker took the side stage and set the bar impossibly high for all bloggers everywhere. Essentially, Rucker bebopped a whole book for our edutainment. It’s still up, at least the last post or two (they’re much longer than the main column’s content!), and something tells me it’ll be a while before the Boingers find someone with nerve enough to follow that act! BoingBoing is just good. What more can I say? [Continue reading]

Body and Soul OK, if I had trouble with Alas, a Blog, imagine the trouble Body and Soul is causing me. Let me illustrate exactly how I feel about Jeanne d’Arc’s blog: about a year-and-a-half ago, if I remember correctly, Jeanne added my site to her blogroll, which meant, to me, that I had arrived in blogdom. I don’t always agree with her — and have disagreed quite strongly, and quite publicly, on some issues — but nobody, nobody writes with the pure humanity that Jeanne d’Arc brings to even the most off-hand post. To take an almost random example (her most recent post):

But nearly two months ago, I expressed some concern about the tendency on the left to feed the myth of the noble soldier, and it’s bothered me for a long time that Kerry takes justifiable pride in his service in Vietnam, but rarely talks about the courage he showed when he returned from Vietnam and spoke up about what he witnessed, trying to stop a brutal and insane war from taking any more lives unecessarily.

Almost all of us have our schtick — the right-wingers and nearly-con liberals are prone to chest-beating, Tarzan-style; others to cooler-than-thou hipness or techier-than-thou geekness; others, like myself, to satire and absurdity and (in Steve Bates’ case) doggerel — but Jeanne just says it. A more cynical person might claim that not having a schtick is Jeanne’s schtick — even if that’s the case, it works. There’s not many blogs that can bring a tear to your eye — Body and Soul is one of them. And the crowning factor is this: if Jeanne happens to read this, I have no doubt that she’ll deny everything I’ve just said. [Continue reading]