Singing the 2007 American blues
Why voting conservative in 2008 will prove we haven't learned our lesson
By Eric Rollins
You think the 2008 presidential race won’t be hot? Consider this: our current president has consolidated so much power that a resolution by Congress, you know, that legislative branch of the national government that is supposed to have some pretty thick weight, won’t affect his decision to send more than 20,000 Americans into “The Suck,” a la Anthony Swofford’s novel, Jarhead. And that’s just what it is, an atmosphere that sucks you dry physically, psychologically, emotionally, etc.; the place is a vacuum of hope.
I genuinely mourn the plight of the people who were born and raised there and have had little opportunities of escaping, but for the past five years or so now, too many American soldiers have been put through it, along with their families and a decent percentage of Americans who see it for what it is. I agree that generationally we lack a bit of hardening; we’re pretty spoiled. Sending us to Iraq isn’t exactly the best medicine though; I kind of thought that at the beginning, but now I don’t.
Seeing documentaries made by soldiers, I get the feeling that even these men who have gone through Army boot camp are subsequently tougher than most of their fellow cohort (Late Generation X-Generation Y), but they are handling it not like something to be proud to die for but something that injects confusion and frustration across the board.
In WWII, the public knew the enemies: Hitler and Pearl Harbor were very obvious threats that needed attention before the country fell to fanatic Eurasians. Vietnam was supposed to be the same thing, with communism a supposed obvious problem for the continuation of the country, even though communism was an ideology of non-invading enemies (Russia, China) as opposed to the violent and backstabbing Germany and the equally hell-bent Japanese. Death in war is always honorable in this day and age, details permitting, but to be acknowledged as truly honorable, a perception that makes warfare almost worth it (which Iraq and Vietnam are and were not) the danger has to be severely imminent.
Mohammed Atta, the main 9/11 hijacker, said in his diaries as per the 9/11 Commission Report, that he believed Saddam Hussein was an American puppet in power to give America an excuse to get involved in the Middle East. He, unsurprisingly, cited the financial power of oil as the reason there was nothing humanitarian about it. He ironically (and I am always very careful when I say something is ironic) became that very excuse. What he said about Saddam being a puppet to get involved can now be said about him; he became the excuse to get involved in 2003.
Our involvement in Iraq was the result of a very clever marketing plan to sell terrorism as a true threat to your life. Terrorism can kill you tomorrow driving to Dunkin Donuts, and it will definitely kill you in twenty years as you again drive to Dunkin Donuts, if we don’t squash it now. It worked, and now the American people regret it - buyer’s remorse I think, and Georgie Boy and friends are laughing all the way to the bank.
9/11 was this generation’s Pearl Harbor. It gave the government a reason to declare war and start sending deployments of troops and bombs overseas. Except what George and Dick did was use 9/11, and its power as an event, to convince us that invading the Middle East was the only way to stop the war. What war? There was no war even close to the scale of World War II going on before 9/11. It was the natural amount of fighting via ethnic hatred that has always happened in the Middle East. Research the Persians vs. The Byzantines and all the tribes they had under their respective control; there hasn’t been peace in that area since humans could throw rocks at each other (and that goes for all humans not just Persians). But we had to get involved because they were going to take that fight to our backyards, where your kids are driving their RC cars and you play fetch with your dog.
The whole country, the general public and Congress included (Congress, by the way, folded like a lawn chair when the initial vote come up with respect to denying George money and validation), wants a refund. Well, George is smiling his filthy little smirk while we try and take back some of the power he shrewdly took, and there’s little we can do about it now. We can protest and demonstrate, but as long as the media fights with itself about covering it and making it national news every night, like they did in the 60’s, it won’t be very effective.
Bush will now manipulate Iraq here on out in a way that makes whoever he backs in 2008 to be the best man or woman to inherit it. In 2008 please be wary that there are other problems with this country besides terrorism; it just seems like it’s the largest problem because of the loss of life and the loss of money. In the middle of George’s regime I was scared that no one in 2008 could change the country. I have hope now because there couldn’t possibly be someone as narrow-minded and naive as our current president. That’s of little consequence now; it’s on to 2008.
The country settled on conservative politics for the first 8 years of this millennium and now they have a chance to turn the tide with Barack Obama, who may or may not be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. According to various polls, Hilary is the current front-runner, but as we’ve seen with Democratic candidates in the recent years, anything can happen. Howard Dean was a shoe- in for the nomination in late 2003/ early 2004, but he inexplicably fell off the radar. Political nominations are almost singularly based on self-fulfilling prophecies; if the mass media predicts it will happen, it’s going to happen.
Hilary is a safe, and dare I say conservative, choice. I hope we go more radical with Obama, we really should. Charisma and camera presence mean almost as much, if not more, as favorably efficient policies. Kennedy kind of proved that in 1960 by beating the more conservative veteran Nixon. Obama will need to pull that kind of upset against Hilary and McCain. We should see the 2008 race as a chance to put the last 8 years behind us, and voting for someone with even a smudge of Bush sympathy (McCain, Hilary, etc.) should be a no-no. Things are only going to get interesting. In the future, I will say that I don’t think we need a president at all anymore, but we want one, so the institution is going nowhere for now. More on that later, for now, I need to look at how to realistically move on, cash in my chips, and try for something completely new. I hope the rest of America agrees with me.
Lance Gagnon is wrong about everything
By Ben Tansey
That title is misleading, but I figured it would grab Lance’s attention. Lance has a healthy distrust of government interventionism when it comes to civil liberties, or foreign adventurism. It’s never possible to be too critical of the state and various busybody activities, so Lance’s suspicious nature regarding these is commendable, and I commend him for it. Weirdly, however, Lance seemingly abandons this properly hesitant position when the issue is the economy.
The government that he continually accuses (perhaps not without some merit) of everything from fascism at home to deceiving the country into war abroad, is suddenly to be fully trusted in deciding our fates when it comes to exchanges of goods and services. Are we to sheepishly believe that the same government that is controlled top to bottom by corporate America is going to be a faithful agent in pursuing the interests of the citizenry in economic matters? Lance clearly doesn’t think so.
On his Facebook he lists his political affiliation as Anarcho-Syndicalist, so, by definition, he cannot believe that the State can or will perform this function. However, strangely, he also supports raising the minimum wage, something that A.) Is almost universally agreed by economists to hurt the poor, and B.) Expands the power of the very state that Lance distrusts and hates! He is right to do so. He is wrong to be inconsistent in this position.
There is a system that is capable of allocating scarce resources towards unlimited wants and needs. It’s called the price mechanism, and any interference in its operations by a coercive state is both inherently immoral (because of the violent way in which it must be done, for few would pay their taxes if they did not do so with the government’s gun to their head) and inherently inefficient, unable to respond to the desires of the people. The reason for this is because governments can’t calculate. The nature of value which human beings assign to any given thing is always and everywhere subjective. A hamburger has no objective, universal, value without a human being to assign some value to it and then express that value through voluntary, non-coercive trade. This is the nature of the price mechanism: individual human beings produce goods or services that they believe will be desired by other humans.
There is no way to get and stay ahead in a truly laissez-faire system other than making other people happy. While humans achieve their own economic advancement by producing goods and services to make others happy, the state always and everywhere gains its wealth by taking it. It only funds its programs by coercively stealing money from others, and then attempting to calculate what would make them (or others) happy, and redistributing the wealth as it sees fit. It never knows where, how, in what quantities, etc, it should invest resources because it never has a mechanism of price to tell it. This inconsistency in Lance’s position and in the position of many on the left perplexes me. A state that they rightly refuse to allow to intervene into civil liberties or foreign affairs is given a blank check to redistribute the wealth of the citizenry with or without their consent!
Because this position is puzzling to me, I would like to invite Lance to a debate. The medium and the time will be of his choosing, though I would suggest it be on Torch Radio. He (or anyone else that would like to talk about the subject in a civil manner) can even contact me through AIM if he wants; my screen name is Ben7735. I would also like to challenge him to read a book by Murray N. Rothbard,entitled Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays. I will be more than willing to provide him with a copy free of charge. Similarly, I will read any book of his choosing. We can then each write a review in the pages of the Torch, explaining whether or not we were convinced by the other’s argument, and why. Lance, I await your answer.
All signs point to Turner
By Thomas Gibbs
On Friday, February 2, the Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) took responsibility for the disaster marketing campaign that took place in the many sections of Boston. The “campaign,” which was meant to promote Cartoon Network’s late night show, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” was created when a local artist built three dozen LED light screens that had pictures of characters from the show. However, their placement alongside the bridges and streets of Boston caused a few of the locals who either were unaware of what the characters were, or suspicious of the lack of information through text, to report to the police, no doubt believing that they were bombs for some sort of terrorist scare. While all the highways, subways, bridges, and part of the Charles River were shut down immediately following the reports, it was up to the SWAT team, as well as members of the bomb squad to take down all the screens.
The mayor of the city, Thomas M. Menino, made sure that the company would pay up to $500,000 for the effort that it took to defuse the “bombs.” While TBS was not putting up the screens themselves, an executive at Interference Inc., an advertising agency working for TBS at the time, hired the artist Peter Berdovsky to create the LED screens for promotion of the show’s movie which comes out in March. Sadly, this corporate catastrophe has also lead to the resignation of the head of Cartoon Network, Jim Samples. His reason for leaving was that he felt “compelled to step down, effective immediately, in recognition of the gravity of the situation that occurred under [his] watch”.
Now I’m not going to say who was in the right and who wasn’t in this tragic situation. Some will believe that the law enforcement took the little screens too seriously, and that shutting down the highways and bridges was a bit premature considering the lack of information about what these screens actually were. Still, with terrorists being the archetype villain of the 21st century, those who saw the screens could have easily been both confused and scared of them. It definitely did not help that the locations were peculiar for promoting a show, and that there was nothing but a picture of a cartoon character flipping the bird towards the viewers. There’s definitely a lesson to be learned from all of this, and TBS will most likely make sure that they carefully inspect their advertisements in the future. However, in a sense of bittersweet irony, the bomb scare that took down the ads promoting the show was featured in so many newspapers and websites that the whole situation, in itself, ended up being one big advertisement for Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
W.I.L.T.
Throw off the headphones of oppression
By Brian Kaminske
Music is great. I love it. I think I would be hard pressed to find someone who disagrees with me. Even someone who has horrendous taste in music still loves the gurgling bilge they listen to. Even so, there are different levels of admiration for music. Some people are fanatical collectors while others are merely casual listeners. I am very much about the music I listen to. I have hundreds of dollars worth of CDs (Probably thousands of dollars, now that I think of it. I have a little bit of a compulsive CD buying habit that I’m not too proud of. Jesus, why didn’t I just buy a car?! Hello? Jesus? I’m asking you a question, dammit! dah well, I’ll get back to you) and records alike (most of which I inherited from my parents). What I’m getting at is that I’m really into my music and I have a LOT of it.
...And yet...I don’t feel the need to wear my headphones on a 10-minute walk to class. With all this music at my fingertips, I am still periodically completely bored with everything I have (usually a result of a temporarily negative mood). So what compels everyone else on campus to plug their heads all day? I honestly don’t believe that what you’re listening to is so good that it deserves to be playing at all times. Wow, music all day...doesn’t that get exhausting?
I’m not lambasting portable music. Im all for it. I’ve had two iPods (both broken) and I have a Walkman (had it since early high school). I just believe that there is a time and place for it. On a long car ride with the fam, on the bus, trains, an airplane, in the library, in your house, while you’re painting, while you’re working, whatever. Use it when appropriate. Listening to music all the time cheapens the music you listen to. Everything wears with time. Even the most decadent of dishes is only good in moderation. It’s that moderation that makes them so special and decadent in the first place. The phrase “Too much of a good thing” wasn’t coined just for shats and gaggles. I love a good meatlover’s pizza, but I sure as hell don’t want to eat it three meals a day for the rest of my life. “But Brian, that’s silly! Eating pizza all day, everyday, is unhealthy!” Point taken.
Sealing off one of your most important senses (easily in the top 5) is perfectly healthy. I’ll remember that when I’m with the coroner identifying your remains because the garbage man who has been up all night snorting cheese balls and drinking paint thinner because he found out his wife has porked every janitor on campus decided to hop into his trashmobile and go for a joyride through the quad and you didn’t hear him coming right before he plowed you over because you were hypnotized into a euphoric trance by Korn’s angelic guitar wailing, infectious beats, driving bass-lines, and soothing vocals.
There are certain degrees of obnoxiousness to this little way of life (not to be confused with trend. This is how people choose to live. We have definitely seen a spike in recent years thanks to the birth of the iPod, but the truth is that people have been walking around like this since the inception of the portable listening device). What confuses me are the people who don’t only wear them to class, but wear them through the ENTIRE DAY. I’ve seen many a student wearing headphones in class, while the teacher is talking. Pay $800 for a class and don’t listen to a word the teacher has to say. Good plan. “Oh, they’re not on.” Then take them off, dipshit. That’s like wearing a plastic beer-can-holding helmet without any beer cans in it.
I have seen people walking down the sidewalk with someone, talking with them, and they STILL feel the need to wear headphones, and it drives me up the wall and across the ceiling. Why on earth would anyone put up with that? You clearly have nothing important enough to say to these people that would pry them away from whatever masterpiece they are listening to. I’d like it to be known that if you engage in conversation with me (or anyone else, for that matter) with your headphones on and keep them on, on the outside I might seem polite and cordial, but in actuality, I have already decided that you’re a douchebag and just another pulsating pimple on our society’s already pockmarked pizza-face. As long as you are wearing those things, I will not take a single word you say to me seriously. It is the height of rudeness and incredibly insulting to boot.
Some of you are just socially awkward, I’m sure. I’ve been told by some that wearing headphones is a way to avoid talking to people you don’t want to talk to. (“You said hi to me yesterday? Oh, I’m sorry, I must have not seen or heard you. For shame.”) Well, maybe if you were more personable and less self absorbed in your sealed auditory world and built up some people skills you wouldn’t have so many enemies. Actually, I’m kind of a hypocrite when it comes to this point. I hate people. Even so, I’ve learned to fake it, and you can too.
I have walked around with my headphones on myself, but only a handful of times, because hey, everything is worth doing once. I recall listening to either Ennio Morricone’s “The Good the Bad and the Ugly” soundtrack or the “Song of the Plains” by the Russian Red Army Choir, both of which can transform even the most mundane everyday task into a grand and epic achievement. Not a good excuse, but a creative use of an otherwise useless action.
On top of the aforementioned, and my biggest problem with this audio fetish, is that it can also be mentally unhealthy. Are you really so insecure that you feel the need to block out your own thoughts with music? What’s wrong with flexing the ol’ gray matter once in awhile? Think of the thoughts you could think if you weren’t drowning in a sea of sound waves! You could think of a cure for AIDS! You could devise a method of skinning animals for their skins while keeping them alive with a permeable, skin-like formaldehyde and change the clothing industry forever!
You could remember how many licks it actually took you to get to the center of your Tootsie Pop! Think, damn you THINK! Let your mind wander! What am I going to have for lunch today? What if Thomas Edison never invented wax paper? What would I do with my life if we discovered a wormhole not far from Earth that could easily transport humans into space or possibly the future? What am I going to do with my life NOW? Have I chosen the right path? The right major? Should I have chosen a field of study with better job security as opposed to merely something I enjoy? What if I fail? Will I have any regrets? Am I wasting my only chance at life?
What if I get out of school and I can’t get a job and I don’t make any money and have to live day by day in the street? When’s the next time I’m going to get laid? Possibly never? Will I ever find true love? Will I be damned to live the rest of my life lonely? Does anyone really like me anyway, or are they just pretending to avoid an awkward situation? What if I step on a forgotten land mine and I become a quadriplegic? What if the sun burns out tomorrow? What if I die and there is no afterlife and there is only black?
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of a galaxy beyond Earth that reaches into infinity, never ending and never beginning. Is there really any point to any of this? Should I just commit suicide? Or should I just put some headphones on and forget any of this? Because it’s starting to sound rather appealing.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Where has all the love gone?
I read in the Torch last week (Feb. 8) that the campus is to be visited on February 14 by two sexologists who will give a presentation on the female orgasm. Emphasis will be on profound subjects like “Multiple orgasms, the G-spot, first timers.”
The worst thing is that it’s on Valentine’s Day. Whatever happened to romance? In the future will we send Valentine cards with a red heart and the words “Be My Valentine” or will they have a visual of a vagina with the words “Have a Happy Orgasm”?
Sincerely,
Chris Waleeth
SOUL SIGHTINGS
February honors and memorials
The month of February is a time to honor many people. On February 3 at the Martin Luther King Drum Major Awards breakfast, Dr. Robert Waxler and Mrs. Dorothy Lopes were honored for their service to the community. Both educators have made a difference to the students they teach and are very accomplished. The speaker at the breakfast also reflected the ideals of Martin Luther King Jr., for he too made contributions to his chosen profession of teaching. Dr. Salome Thomas-El spoke about his dedication and commitment to his students at the Vaux Middle School in inner city Philadelphia. All three individuals have certainly made a difference in the lives of others.
In a few days we will celebrate Presidents’ Day and remember two of the greatest presidents of our nation. I remember observing their birthdays separately when I was growing up. February 12 we remembered the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President of the United States, and many of us learned the Gettysburg Address to honor Lincoln. Then on February 22 we observed George Washington’s birthday and read about him as the Father of our country, chopping down the cherry tree, never telling a lie. It is important that we remember people in history and people in our own community who have made a difference, for it is these people who inspire us to help others.
Today, on February 15, I remember the 97th birthday of a Polish woman who also made a difference. Her name is Irena Sendler, a Polish-Catholic social worker, who saved 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. These people are truly heroes whom we honor and remember. It is wonderful that in the month of February we take the time to have a community breakfast to recognize a professor and a teacher who have brought excellence to our community, to bring in an educator from another part of the country to inspire us, and to remember birthdays of American Presidents and of individuals who have truly dedicated themselves for the good of the nation and the world. The Talmud teaches us: whoever saves a life, saves the world, and the people who are honored this month certainly live up to this motto. They truly embody Tikkun Olam, mending the world, and have inspired us to help others.
As Hillel director, I am dedicated to helping students and bringing Jewish culture to the UMD campus. I am again offering informal Hebrew lessons on Thursday mornings at 9:30 a.m. at the Religious Resource Office, 210 of the Campus Center. Students who have never been to Israel have an opportunity to go to the Holy land on the Birthright Israel program which is open to Jewish adults between the ages of 18 and 26. Applications are now available online for summer registration.
On February 27 at 2 pm in the Claire T. Carney Library Browsing Area, all students and faculty are invited to hear two Israeli authors, Yehuda Koren and Eilat Koren. They will be speaking about their latest book, “Lover of Unreason,” the story of a Jewish woman, Assia Wevill, who was the lover of the poet Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s rival.
Finally, Chava Alberstein, the noted Israeli folksinger, will be performing at the Zeiterion theatre on Sunday evening, March 4 at 7 p.m. UMD students and faculty can purchase tickets at the Religious Resource Office for $10. Following the performance will be a reception at the Crapo Gallery of the Star Store sponsored by UMD Hillel.
B’shalom,
Cindy Yoken
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