Now that something significant has finally happened with it, I’ll go ahead and say something here.

What has happened that is significant? Rush Limbaugh opined on it, and it’s the first thing I’ve read that makes sense. Video with recording of the broadcast behind the link.

Politico, you failed. You attempted, along with others in the mainstream media, to take the guy out, and you failed. Your influence isn’t what you thought it was. Alana Goodman at Commentary magazine writes, “Basically, the entire Washington media could have collectively called in sick all week, and it wouldn’t have made a difference – at least not for 70 percent of Republicans. The latest Washington Post/ABC poll, one of the first to be taken post-scandal, reports: ‘Seven in 10 Republicans say reports that [Herman] Cain made unwanted advances toward two employees when he was head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s — allegations which have been stiffly rebutted by Cain’s campaign — do not matter when it comes to picking a candidate.'”

Don Surber bottom-lines it:

Politico blew it by not showing any patience on the story. Instead of developing the story, they rushed headlong with basically nothing.

Liberals cannot press the issue. They have no credibility. They blew it by standing by their man in 1998. I knew this day was coming. Surprisingly, I am nether happy nor satisfied. It is what it is.

Karma.

A “scandal” is supposed to be an event, or rather a series of events about an event. Not a procedure. So is it possible to have such a thing as a “botched scandal”?

Yes it is, I say, and yes that’s what we have here. An honest and valuable media tells us about things that happen, a dishonest one makes them happen. An incompetent one tries & fails.

Generations from now, when the history of the twentieth-to-twenty-first century turnover is written, something is going to have to be said about how we learned about things happening as they were happening. It’s obvious, to us, that this has been in a state of change, but I think there won’t be any getting away from it later, when people look back. I think it will be unavoidable. There is too much happening now that can only be explained by: Loudmouths are accustomed to the position of unilaterally dictating what the rest of us will hear about something, and how we will hear it, and they’re slowly losing this status and not adjusting to it too well. There isn’t any other way to sum it up other than to ignore it, and I don’t think our great grandchildren will enjoy the luxury of ignoring it even if they want to.

It’s already started to happen, really. This is one of many reasons why this scandal hasn’t taken off. Think about it; what’s the story? Herman Cain did something that someone back in those days managed, maybe, to make into a big deal. Well even now, people are responding to it with “Uh yeah…people managed to make a big deal out of lots of little deals back then, and it’s good that things aren’t like that anymore because that was wrong. Those were bad things we were doing.”

It’s easy to see that on Main Street. Not so easy in the offices where Politico operates, I think.

It has come to pass. Parker and Stone have finally found the situation to be ridiculous, and therefore worthy of ridicule. Who can ridicule better than they.

From The Daily Caller.

Thomas Sowell, “Democracy and Mob Rule”; were you under the impression that a proper “zing!” could only be laid down over the course of a snappy “zinger” sentence, and couldn’t unfurl over the course of a few paragraphs to unleash its purifying punishment?

The Professor shows how it’s done.

In various cities across the country, mobs of mostly young, mostly incoherent, often noisy and sometimes violent demonstrators are making themselves a major nuisance.

Meanwhile, many in the media are practically gushing over these “protesters,” and giving them the free publicity they crave for themselves and their cause — whatever that is, beyond venting their emotions on television.

Members of the mobs apparently believe that other people, who are working while they are out trashing the streets, should be forced to subsidize their college education — and apparently the President of the United States thinks so too.

But if these loud mouths’ inability to put together a coherent line of thought is any indication of their education, the taxpayers should demand their money back for having that money wasted on them for years in the public schools.

Sloppy words and sloppy thinking often go together, both in the mobs and in the media that are covering them. It is common, for example, to hear in the media how some “protesters” were arrested. But anyone who reads this column regularly knows that I protest against all sorts of things — and don’t get arrested.

The difference is that I don’t block traffic, join mobs sleeping overnight in parks or urinate in the street. If the media cannot distinguish between protesting and disturbing the peace, then their education may also have wasted a lot of taxpayers’ money.

Zing.

We seem to be facing some kind of “quickening” here. It’s as if some massive hourglass were up-ended the day they stormed the Bastille, with enfranchised order placed at one end of a spectrum and revolutionary chaos at the other, the two points slowly coming together as the sands ran out of the hourglass. With city governments and retail suppliers of mens’ business attire openly declaring “We Stand With the 99%,” indications are that the two points have met.

I understand that City Hall and retail shops are just trying to appear hip, and plugged in to this newly discovered fountain of youthful energy. But there is danger in this. A line, in geometry, defines things that a point does not define. Enfranchised order carries with it certain powers. The power to subsidize, to tax, therefore to preserve and destroy, the power to create assemblies and break them up. Once we separate the powers again and come up with some “good” laws to thrust upon the enfranchised order with the duty to enforce, they can pick & choose which laws to enforce.

Anarchistic chaos, on the other hand, thinks in terms of us-versus-them. Friends and enemies. Gettin’-even-with-’em-ism. My point is, perhaps it is vital for the continuation of a civilized society, along with the public safety, that these two extremes should not be meeting like this.

I wonder if, to the kids who weren’t alive at the time, these ads look the same way they do to the rest of us. It’s almost elegant the way it seems to come off as something not quite stupid:

Without researching the facts and figures, I can assure you this ad did exactly what it was supposed to do: People talked about the ad with the beer crossing the road. At school, in class, at church, at movies, it was advertising magic.

I just don’t know how you pitch that one in a meeting of ad men. “Hey, I got this idea for a commercial, a bunch of beer cross the road like they’re deer or something.” Were they drinking large amounts of the product? Rainier did not have that kind of intoxicating effect.

But Rainier’s greatest contribution was Marlene:

Daily Caller, via Weasel Zippers:

From the article:

Across countless American living rooms, as Mom and Dad take in the 6 o’clock news with their above-average children playing on the carpet, they wrestle with how to frame the nascent “Occupy” movement to their children. As anchors cut to footage of tear gas scattering masked protesters, parents face the political equivalent of the dreaded birds and the bees talk — about capitalism. And now they have a coloring book to help them.

A new “grown-up coloring book novel” has hit Amazon and Barnes & Noble, chock full of Occupy-related drawings, songs and texts.

They shoulda asked me to design the coloring book. I’d have drawn it up as a description of a mental illness. “Let’s say you run a lemonade stand, your friend runs a lemonade stand, the lemonade at your stand tastes better and so you sell more…and he says that’s not fair, so he stops selling lemonade and occupies your lemonade stand so neither one of you sell any lemonade.”

Charleston Daily Mail, via Surber.

The University of Charleston will slash tuition rates by 22 percent next year in an effort to bolster enrollment.

The tuition decrease is one of several changes that UC President Ed Welch and a committee of stakeholders at the private school have been considering.

In an economic climate that caused public colleges and universities across the state to increase tuition last summer, Welch said he realized that the move to decrease UC’s $25,000 yearly tuition to $19,500 was a bold move.

“It’s a gutsy thing to do, but we know it’s the right thing to do,” Welch said.

While incoming freshmen will pay no more than $19,500 per year, current students still will be charged the $25,000 rate, but with a guaranteed $6,000 in financial aid to lower their cost.

Surber adds:

It may be a local issue. West Virginia’s population flatlined 30 years ago and remains level only because longevity continues to rise. This is a state of old people and the pool of local college material is shrinking.

But I am hoping that it is a sign that colleges nationally will at least halt their rise in tuition. A few brave men question the value of some degrees. Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott said: “You know, we don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here.”

He later caught flak for it, but he stood by his guns:

Q: Have you heard from any angry anthropologist?

A: Well one of the funniest things, my second daughter, my younger daughter, she’s 26, called me the next day and she said, ‘dad, do you realize that because I got an anthropology undergraduate degree, I was one of the top stories on yahoo?’ She was not very thankful for that.

But I said, well Jordan, what was it like? Did you get a job? ‘Well, no.’

So she got a masters in education after that, and now she’s back getting a masters in business.

Hey, UC has an MBA program. Just saying.

If this is the pop, Prof. Reynolds deserves the credit for endlessly repeatedly reciting Stein rule: Whatever cannot continue forever, won’t.

You’re a triple-a grade asshole, Bruce Crumley.

From Robert at Small Dead Animals…where they have it right: “Pleasing your enemies does not turn them into friends.”

That’s me. Today. Somewhere there’s an old “Dissolutions Sought Snohomish County” newspaper clipping with my name on it from 11/3/91. I don’t have it and I can’t fill you in on the details. I remember very little from late 1989 to late 1991. I remember work and home life were both filled with an abject hopelessness. I remember the boss very often didn’t meet payroll, or met it late, and when the check came in the wife spent it all. I remember the divorce started to happen when I meandered off that “husband gives paycheck to the wife” plantation. I told her for the next few months, it would probably be good if I handled the bills, and boom. Definitely not the right thing to say. But I was past caring about that; nothing I did or said was the right thing to do or say. The solution to the problems had always been that more control should be given to the wife, and things always came out worse, so I took a different course. Took a few years for that to improve things, but it ultimately turned out to be a smart idea. No, I don’t know where she lives, or if she does.

I do know it doesn’t matter, though. I know now, as I didn’t know as I got married the first time, that there is a vast, subterranean culture of creatures who live in the dark, just like her, people whose misery is always the fault of other people and their solution to it is to hoard more power and control for themselves — which they then wield stupidly, making more problems, blaming these new problems on others…and the cycle continues.

What was it I said a few days ago? Something like: Humanity is divided into two halves, those who make a point of being nice to people who are nice to them, and mean to people who are mean to them — and, those who are nice to people who are mean to them, and mean to people who are nice to them. So those who have it straight, and those who have it backwards. These two halves of humanity should never come into contact with each other.

Well, by this last February I made the decision that the new one and I are good for each other, and I’ve been single long enough. I gave her the ring, we whipped out our phones and updated our relationship statuses. We were going to do something cute with the wedding and make it happen just before today, or just afterward, to make it not-quite or just-over-twenty. But it’s just not working. Things are still going great but we have logistical nightmares with locating relatives to places, and such…there has lately arisen a hubbub about multiple ceremonies.

Just blegh.

Stupid, lazy, self-righteous bitch.

Yeah, I’m talking about toilet-brush-head, from 1:30 forward. The “won’t-do” lady.

She has two kids and can’t/won’t work full time anyway. No mention of the dad. Poor kids. Momma is already making it clear that if you need or want something, you protest for it, and you can’t get a job unless-unless-unless.

A hundred years ago, before people figured out where it would ultimately lead, the Eugenics movement was much more popular than it ever could be today. I have no stomach for it, myself. But there are times when I can at least see how & where some well-intentioned souls might have been led astray: People like parka-lady, who believe in reproducing and don’t believe in work.

Those kids would be better off as Sawney Bean‘s kids. You have a better chance getting hit by lightning, than those kids have of living any kind of normal, independent, capable life.

Memeorandum is silly. There’s this story up about Michael Mann, the scientist who figured out a way to graph the global mean temperature in such a way that some kind of detonation looked imminent. The “hockey stick graph” has become a visual, colorful engine to help drive the effort toward a global command economy. On a sane planet, we’d be debating whether that would change the outcome, or whether some global-climate catastrophe is a possibility with regard to, or regardless of, whatever we do.

On this one, we’re debating whether Mann has to do what you had to do in high school: Show his work.

I say they’re silly because they’re headlining Mann’s victory this way:

Of course, that’s from the ThinkProgress piece itself. But after borrowing that bit of silliness, they then supplement it with another story from Nature News Blog called “Climate scientist wins his day in court – November 01, 2011.”

Cool, so Michael Mann is right and the conservatives are wrong. A court said so. But what happened?

ThinkProgress comes to the point in the second paragraph:

Yesterday in a Virginia courtroom, Michael Mann—who is quickly becoming the Galileo of climate science—triumphed over the conservative American Tradition Institute, and ongoing attempts at scientist-harassment.

More specifically, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Gaylord Finch both allowed Mann to join the case that ATI is pursuing against the University of Virginia to get Mann’s emails, and allowed UVA to back out of an agreement with ATI to let it review some of Mann’s emails that the university is nevertheless claiming are exempt from disclosure.

Nature News Blog, to its credit, reveals it in the first:

Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann stepped out of a courthouse in Manassas, Virginia, on Tuesday with a smile on his face. After a surprisingly contentious hearing that lasted most of the day, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Gaylord Finch had granted his petition to join his former employer, the University of Virginia, in fighting a lawsuit seeking access to thousands of emails Mann sent as a professor there between 1999 and 2005.

Prof. Mann did indeed win a victory, but it is a victory for opaqueness. Contrary to what a reasonable but casual reader of news might infer from the big-font headlines, it is not the sort of victory that settles science or proves a scientist’s viewpoint on things to have been the right ones, nor does it prove his methods were even sound. Quite to the contrary: It is the sort of victory that would diminish in importance, were the practitioner using such sound methods, laboring under honest motives.

To Mann and his cheerleaders, it is all-important.

Draw your own conclusions. I’ve drawn mine.

American Tradition Institute issues the following press release, which is not linked on Memeorandum:

ATI welcomes Dr. Mann to the case. Now he will have to defend his email content before a neutral court and offer more than slurs and innuendo to support his contention that he can hide his behavior and his emails from the public who paid for them in the first place.

ATI opposed Dr. Mann’s intervention, but not because ATI doesn’t “like” him. Rather, like so many other elements of this case, it gives ATI the opportunity to help the court clarify the law. Although the trial court did not state the interest Mann has in this case, on appeal the court will have to explain what basis exists for a faculty member to intervene in a FOIA case between citizens and a university.

“This is a cloudy area of law and ATI seeks clarity on the matter,” said Dr. David Schnare, director of ATI’s Environmental Law Center. “Dr. Mann now must offer to an appellate court citations to cases and statutory law to defend his position.”

So, having heard from both sides we see this has absolutely nothing to do with the science & whether it says the earth is heating up. Not that anybody quoted here, ever said it did. This is a procedural decision, with Mann prevailing in his efforts to maintain secrecy, and his opponents arguing unsuccessfully for transparency.

Hmmm…in global-warming-land, that’s the kind of victory that brings high-fives back-slaps and fist-pumps? Just weird. Progressives seem to be constantly cheering on their own efforts, for the benefit of an audience of dimwits who don’t actually read things. Across the issues, they’ve got all these bumper-sticker-slogans that, when you take the time to read further, you find are supported only in letter but not in spirit. Hey, whatever they gotta do…but Memeorandum does nothing to retain its own credibility, by joining them in the effort, even if they’re doing so only by copying these sneaky, deceptive headlines.

From Ed Morrissey.

Allahpundit sets it up:

This couldn’t be simpler: Jean Quan, the Democratic mayor of a Democratic city, was utterly intimidated by the media backlash after cops followed her orders to clear the plaza in front of city hall and ended up clashing with protesters. So now, to make amends, not only has she given them back the space, she’s giving all city employees the day off tomorrow to join the mass strike against “the establishment” — except of course for the designated scapegoat, the police. If, like the union, you’re wondering whether Quan and those employees aren’t also part of “the establishment” and why she thinks handing out extra sick days for dissent is more important than running the city, clearly you’ve forgotten an important lesson. Namely, any liberal can “speak truth to power” by virtue of being a liberal, no matter how fantastically powerful he or she might be.

This follows a link to, and precedes an excerpt from, a letter to the citizens of the City of Oakland from the Police union:

On Tuesday, October 25th, we were ordered by Mayor Quan to clear out the encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and to keep protesters out of the Plaza. We performed the job that the Mayor’s Administration asked us to do, being fully aware that past protests in Oakland have resulted in rioting, violence and destruction of property.

Then, on Wednesday, October 26th, the Mayor allowed protesters back in – to camp out at the very place they were evacuated from the day before.

To add to the confusion, the Administration issued a memo on Friday, October 28th to all City workers in support of the “Stop Work” strike scheduled for Wednesday, giving all employees, except for police officers, permission to take the day off.

That’s hundreds of City workers encouraged to take off work to participate in the protest against “the establishment.” But aren’t the Mayor and her Administration part of the establishment they are paying City employees to protest? Is it the City’s intention to have City employees on both sides of a skirmish line?

It is all very confusing to us.

The one hundred seventeenth Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award is snagged this morning by Kenneth Anderson at Volokh Conspiracy (hat tip to Professor Mondo). After three paragraphs of observation about modern America’s class struggles, he swivels his spotlight onto the Occupy Wall Street movement to reveal how they tie in…after which come an additional seven paragraphs, at the end of which we stumble across this able and percussive summary:

It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites.

Smackdown! Not even a comma to break up the rhythm. And it even explains the pricey coffee drinks, crab dinners and fancy laptops.

That rule being, of course: “If I’m going to be accused, I want to be guilty.”

Last week we noted that ReelGirl had launched a failed campaign. There is much to suggest it was in fact a successful one, but it’s all predicated on the notion that feminist campaigns are inherently insincere. If it was about the stationary stanza of feminism — “Oh, look everybody how much I hate this thing over here, come gather around and help me hate it” — it was a wild fantastic success. Margot got lots of traffic and lots of comments on her post. Chapstick stopped running the ad, so there’s a victory there. The ad prominently displays a female’s rear end as she rummages in a couch for her lost Chapstick. But if you believe everything feminists tell you about the protest, it must have been a fail. Womens’ rumps are not banished from advertising, I don’t think. Women do not look stronger. They look weak, delicate, like hysterical creatures that fall to pieces if they see a butt in a magazine. The “don’t screw with the feminist movement” message was communicated loud and clear. But ya know, that just makes them look irrational. If it reinforces some notion that women are powerful, it does so by reminding us that some among them possess a destructive energy. You need not browse too much ancient mythology and literature to realize that this is not a new idea. And, of course, it is antithetical to the notion that a more civilized and better-functioning society awaits us if & when we reward females with greater power & privilege.

Margot’s biggest mistake, however, is to accuse. She accused Chapstick not quite so much of something factual, which would be displaying a female rump — but speculated and imagined, which had something to do with degrading the fairer sex by viewing its bodily appendages through a sensual lens.

And now she has to sound the clarion call, once again, of “How I hate this thing, come gather around and help me hate it.” Maybe that’s the whole point.

Now in celebration of their new tag line ‘Never Let Your Lips Go Naked’, Chapstick Australia have signed Australia’s Next Top Model winner Amanda Ware as the face (and body) of their new ad campaign. We say body because Ware will star in a series of cheeky ads wearing nothing but her Chapstick.

Don’t like it when we show a woman’s butt? We’ll show you her whole bod! Take that!

I got a feeling this decision has nothing whatsoever to do with ReelGirl. But I also got a feeling, if Margot permitted herself the luxury of thinking she caused this, it would be a fun idea for her to have. I know we’re getting a kick out of thinking it. I’m all for a grassroots protest that is well-thought-out and has some real nobility to it, aggravated into action by a worthy cause, but when they start to get silly it gives me pleasure to see the big company tell them to stick it. I like it even better when they play rope-a-dope, which seems to be what Chapstick did here, assuming the naked-thing is connected in any way to the couch thing. I like Morgan Rule Number One, I like Australia, and the nice lookin’ naked lady doesn’t hurt matters either.

Lesson: If you’re going to protest everything, the end result is the same as if you protest nothing. Priorities. Restraint. Choices.

If I wanted to live forever, I’d want to be a status quo everyone hates. Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

Everyone hates the status quo, but I notice every candidate that rises up to challenge the status quo becomes embroiled by some kind of nonsense that makes them somehow “unelectable,” isn’t that strange?

Thompson has no “fire in the belly,” Palin comes off as a dingbat in a Katie Couric interview, Herman Cain sexually harassed someone with a non-sexual hand gesture — what is that?

Wow, I’d like to be a status quo everybody hates. Look at how little it has to do, to keep from being challenged…just stir up a ripple in the pond, so to speak, and the job’s done. Year after year. Amazing.

See, I’ve got something like a “learning disability” going on here: I have a long-term memory and I actually use the darn thing. And so a pattern emerges which, not only do I notice, but I find it impossible to ignore. All these little imbroglios end with a customary sign-off, like a Looney Tunes cartoon ending with “That’s all, folks!” To wit: Too bad about your candidate! Nothing to do with his reforms or his message, but [blank], blah blah blah he’s unelectable so you’ll just have to find another.

Well, maybe that’s the job requirement for United States President: Your worst enemies shouldn’t be able to find anything on you. But there’s a problem with that. That the “anythings” listed above, really are anything, is highly debatable. I have a simple litmus test for determining if a something is really worth avoiding: Once “The Big We” makes that decision, are we ultimately successful in avoiding it after the candidate has been eliminated on this basis? Well, last election, like all the elections that came before, we eliminated everyone in the running except one guy. He, um, uh, er, doesn’t have any more fire in the belly…uh…let me be clear…than Fred, uh, er, Thompson. So when the rubber meets the road, we don’t care too much about that. He’s as much an intellectual lightweight as Palin has ever been on her very worst day, we saw that with the “beer summit” and plug-the-damn-hole debacles. So the brain-horsepower, in the final analysis, isn’t too important to us either. And Cain’s situation — sorry I’m still not quite up on this, what is that again?

My point is not that President Obama is a bad President. I’ll get to that some other time. My point is that we aren’t avoiding anything.

There’s another problem with it. Aristotle nailed it over two thousand years ago:

To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

I remember when we took about ten months, give or take, to pick out our next President (or hang with the current one). It wasn’t that long ago. But nowadays, depending on your definition of when a campaign starts, we’re taking more like twenty months, thirty months, maybe more than that. There are those who say, and they have some facts on their side, that the campaign season is starting the day after the election or inauguration that ends the previous cycle, and we’re now living in a full-time presidential election situation whether we realize it or not. Hey ya know what? I have a big problem with that no matter what. If we’re putting in all this time and effort to elect a nothing, I have an even bigger problem with it.

But if the rules of the game are, that anyone who’d upset the applecart is to be summarily ejected and all the hubbub is about just finding the proper excuse for doing that, then we might as well come to terms with the fact that that’s our deal. We’re using up all 48 months in useless arguments to elect or re-elect a nothing. Aristotle’s nothing.

The “[blank] is an insurmountable problem, too bad, so sad go find another” argument seems to be for people who are lacking in my learning disability. People who can’t or won’t remember things and live strictly in the here-and-now. Like that guy you keep busy all day by handing him a card with “turn this over and obey instructions on the other side” on both sides.

You know, it occurs to me: Maybe that’s what the Occupy Wall Street protests really are. We vote, nothing changes, we end up frustrated — so people take to the streets desperate to find some way to express themselves, that might actually make a difference? From where I sit, it looks like voting is unsatisfactory because it has too much of a potential to change things. After all, it’s only become an ineffectual exercise because we made it that way. Right? Are the protests about “give us some decent candidates so things will change”? I don’t think so. You see them out there protesting against Herman Cain’s non-sexual sexual-harassment hand gestures? No…they’re protesting instead of voting, because protesting is more visible in its appearance, and — key point here — more futile in its substance.

Maybe what we’re really deciding is that elections aren’t for us anymore. The guy in charge, who it is, that’s just something we find to be an unwelcome distraction. That’s a dirty little secret about revolutionaries: They don’t really care who’s running everything. And from living in interesting times and observing what’s happening and learning what I can, I’m forming a realization that revolutionaries don’t care too much whether their revolutions succeed. In this way, they are close cousins with the establishment types who are supposed to be their enemies: Both kinds of people are simply craven scavengers, searching for refuge from any individual decisions that might alter the outcome. Yes, the revolutionary “demands” change. But if it happens, one time out of fifty or so, his role will be passive: “I was there when it all went down, I was a part of that thing.” It isn’t really his change. The mob owns that change, which means of course that nobody does.

Voting gives us a chance for real ownership. Mark Twain is supposed to have said, if it made a difference they’d never allow us to do it. I think the same could be said for protesting, though, and the thing about voting is the accountability. Of course, you don’t have to tell anyone how you voted, maybe what I should say is the association of your identity with an actual decision. People remember how they voted, decades after the fact. Just bring up Nixon or Humphrey or McGovern around someone who was old enough to vote. They’ll tell you how they voted, and why. They’ll wax lyrically about it. Now talk about those guys around someone who didn’t vote, but attended Woodstock. Nuthin’. Well, maybe a diatribe about “Nixon was a bad bad guy,” but nothing more definite than that, nothing about the direction this country should have been taken, other than “Get out of Vietnam” or something non-committal like that. He’s all about Woodstock, but you’ll have to ask him specifically about Woodstock to hear anything about Woodstock. Any difference between Woodstock, with him in it, and an alternative-universe Woodstock in which he didn’t participate? None whatsoever. The same could be said of the 1968 elections and the voter, of course, but with these populist uprisings and mass-crowd expressions — these “go through the motions of storming the Bastille without actually doing it” shows — the insignificance of the individual is the whole point.

Is that our future? We just can’t handle the responsibility of voting, so we’re rejecting it on that basis? Maybe so, maybe not. Perhaps the thing to do, is have an election to decide that. Make it our last one. If the motion carries, then from here on, we just keep one guy in charge forever. And then we all march around in front of the White House, with signs, to show everyone how unhappy we are with this guy.

It’s a reasonable request on my part, I think: Just stop doing things halfway. Stop having elections…or…have them, and use them as occasions to discuss ideas about what to do differently, and weigh the ideas on their merits rather than finding these feeble excuses to dislodge people who are promoting them. And if we opt to keep our elections, and you happen to like the status quo, or if you hate it but you’re missing the balls to change it, then vote that way. It’s not as exciting and you don’t get face time on the cameras and there’s not quite as much drama involved. But that’s the whole idea. It’s a civil duty, an obligation, like serving on a jury. It’s not about your ego, it’s about something much bigger.