House of Eratosthenes

My girlfriend has a habit of turning on the teevee the instant she wakes up, and leaving it on until she goes off to work. A lot of women do this for the sake of having the background noise. In my case, this means I receive a daily education about Idjit-News, that stuff which purports to be “news” that throws itself at us across the room from the Idjit-Box.

I don’t think of it as news, because it isn’t stuff I need or want to know. It’s stuff someone else needs or wants me to know. It’s as if someone called up the teevee station and said “we need to have the dumb masses told about this” and the teevee station said “okay, alright.”

A great example of what I’m talking about is holiday speed traps. We have one coming up don’t we? Leading up to the three-day weekend, the Idjit-News will tell you “law enforcement will be out” and I had better be on my best behavior. So we all start behaving out there. Laudable goal. But this isn’t news I can use. News I could use, would be “they will be out, with a motorcycle cop on Highway 50 about halfway between Prairie City and Bidwell Road exits heading westbound.” A deliberately-vague “they’ll be out there” is a bit of communication for someone else’s benefit, and just because I’m on the receving end does not mean I’m that someone. See, I don’t mind that they’re working for someone else. Just say so fer cryin’ out loud.

For the past several weeks now I have been hearing something else that is to someone else’s benefit and not mine.

I’ve been hearing a whole lot of it.

The President is angry at BP.

Isn’t it funny how the emotion of anger is used to send messages in politics? We want to discredit the Tea Party movement, we just call them “angry.” But President Obama uses anger as a soothing balm, to take the pressure off Himself. There is a pattern to this, it seems: I hear of some hardcore lefties who are Obama’s “base,” becoming restless with Him because it seems He is not doing enough about the oil spill and it’s starting to turn into His Katrina, the next week I can count on the prediction that He is going to become blisteringly angry. And His “base” will be palliated.

It’s just like the three-day-weekend traffic stops. Someone called up the teevee network and said “get the word out, He is pissed.” I saw this before. When He was first anointed as Our Savior and began to “rule” over us, I was told He just found out about the “Wall Street bonuses” and got unbelievably angry about them. This drama, now, seems to be a reprise of that.

I never did hear much about George W. Bush getting angry. When I did, it wasn’t because President Bush was ducking responsibility for something. It was more like he was taking it on; I’m thinking specifically of taking the fight to the Taliban after 9/11. Can’t think of too many other examples than that.

And it isn’t that I think there’s too much difference in the frequencies by which President Bush got, and President Obama gets, genuinely angry about things. If I had to guess, I’d say behind closed doors if you had a way of measuring it they’d be about the same. But only one is using anger as a political tool. As if to say “Look, I’m still relevant! Grrrr!”

I shouldn’t be finding this too discouraging, although I do.

It isn’t telling me anything about what’s going on, that I didn’t already know: That as of this moment, our nation is being governed by children. Immature little whelps who think, when you have a job to do, the outcome is somehow affected for better or for worse by how angry you get. In the case of the Tea Party movement, anger says something derogatory about your worthiness as a human being. In the case of His Eminence, that anger is some harbinger of wonderful glowing achievement to take place in the near future.

Remember that Saturday Night Live skit with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? “The Rock” Obama? It seems to be a common Manhattan-moonbat Daily-show narrow-purple-necktie fantasy: Oh, if only Obama would get more angry!

I just see these people as people who go through the motions of doing some kind of “work,” and have no idea what it really is. I’ve spent my working life, for the last quarter of a century now, on computer networks…or on things that could have passed for being computer networks at the time, and maybe wouldn’t nowadays. Computer networks are all about having your work connected to the work someone else is doing. People are not as good at communicating as they think they are, and believe you me, I have seen some things over the last twenty-five years that have really cheesed me off.

Does it affect my output? For good or for ill? Nope. The only effect is that whatever pissed me off in the first place, delayed my delivery by a few hours. Does it mean I’ll deliver something I otherwise would not have? No. I just mutter something about “you fucking douchenozzles” and grind onward, as adults do.

What if I was waiting on someone to deliver something to me, and they got angry about something that was supposed to be delivered to them, and it became very important to them that I knew how angry they were? It didn’t take me long to figure out what that meant. It meant they weren’t planning to deliver their stuff to me. They didn’t have the creativity to explore alternatives, were not interested in developing it, and if I was going to deliver my stuff I would have to show the resourcefulness they didn’t have. Also, they were not too terribly concerned about coming off being incredibly, unbelievably lame. Their anger could be distilled down into two words: “Got nuthin’.”

That’s how grown-ups look at it. Because grown-ups divide their work from the emotions that rise up around it from time to time. I’m sure the emotions that rise up when you find out someone is getting angry, are powerful emotions. How do you make a movie-bad-guy really scary? You have him kill off another movie-bad-guy. But when it comes to getting real work done, these emotions are quite useless.

Obama seems to know who His supporters are, and He doesn’t seem to think they’re in the “working” camp. The camp of grown-ups who get work done. He must think this, because obviously He thinks His anger is going to get Him somewhere.

I think overall He’s probably right about that.

Update: Oops, they’re starting to catch on it looks like.

President Soetoro, You’d better get angry about something right quick.

Nice observation about the O man.

One thing about the speed traps, why would you need to know where they are, do you speed? Since the answer is obvious I’ll ask another question, if it’s OK to break the speeding law why not other laws such as…say…unlawful possession of marijuana?

Sorry, Morgan. The thought wouldn’t be denied.
- tim | 05/25/2010 @ 13:43
Nice catch, small-tee.

No, I never speed. My last speeding ticket was in August of 1989, on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge between Bellevue and Seattle. I was showing Bessie, then a brand-new model, to a friend and he wanted to see what she could do. So I showed him. Then I got showed something.

But of course this is a double-edged sword. Since I don’t speed, that makes me a poor audience for the other message doesn’t it? Morgan is told “cops are out there, watch it”…or Morgan is NOT told this…the outcome is the same. So I’m not the intended recipient. In fact, I didn’t cover the other obvious point that if this PSA serves its purpose — let us just call it a PSA, because that is what it is — its beneficial effect must be diminished over time. In other words, the overlap between those who need to see it and those who do see it, must start out picayune, and then it must wane.

So, to whatever extent these are supposed to service the consumers-of-news, they don’t.
- mkfreeberg | 05/25/2010 @ 14:14
Damn, it still works for your point. Thought I had ya’ there.

“So, to whatever extent these are supposed to service the consumers-of-news, they don’t.”

I’ve come to realize teevee news is little more than pap at this point. The exception being the News Hour w/Bret Baur(?) on Fox News at 6. Listening to Krauthammer eviscerate the O Team is educational.

For the record, one speeding ticket myself, unintentional @ 7/8 yrs. ago. My only moving violation to date in fact.

Carry on.
- tim | 05/26/2010 @ 09:44

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On Obama Getting AngryTuesday, May 25th, 2010

On Obama Getting Angry
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010