He gets paid how much?
DAVID BROOKS: I actually think the fight is interestingly between Dean and Kerry who are both quite liberal audiences but the Kerry is a veryconventional liberal, a very party stalwart type whereas the Dean crowd is not the Starbucks but it is more granola, more alternative consciousness. We are talking about these aesthetic differences because of the policy differences are so small.
And what Edwards and Clark bring to the table is an aesthetic sense of connection. First they both grew up poor. They both grew up in the South. They have some cultural send-off, some emanations that seem centrist even if in a policy sense they're almost indistinguishable.
Ever consider leaving the United States? If so, what was the reason?
This isn't idle nattering for some of us, at least the capability to leave makes it not idle.
I have dual citizenship, or more accurately, I have US citizenship, and I have Irish citizenship by descent that is not recognized by the United States as I have not renounced my American citizenship. Hence, the duality of Dave.
How does that make any difference? Well, it means I can get an E.U. passport, and legally work anywhere within the European Union. The rest of you have to get work permits and all that jazz.
Hence, not idle.
Now, I have considered moving to Ireland, or another EU country. Not for anything trite like I don't like the current batch of people in charge. I almost never like who's in charge, and that strikes me as a particularly callow reason to flee. No, my reason is considered probably the most heretical thought an American can have.
I think the US is played out. There, I said it.
I've had the impression for quite a few years that we may have seen our best days, and I don't particularly feel like watching the rest of the country figure that out. It seems like it will be ugly, and probably maddeningly drawn out process that will have people and institutions flailing at top speed, and all to change nothing.
Oh, I suspect the US will still be a fine place to live, and probably will become more aligned with the rest of the civilized world's attitudes and policies regarding public institutions, but in the end, it will suffer from starting behind those other places, and will be full of people boiling from a life of forced diminished expectations.
I predict the American psyche will not handle this change gracefully.
So it pops into my thoughts, sometimes quite often, other times when I least expect it; what's the lunch special at Breen's Seafood on the Dingle Peninsula?
Spalding Grey is supposedly missing.
I can recite great chunks of "Swimming to Cambodia" from memory. Hope he's just on a long bender, and not lodged under a bridge support in the river.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden quotes Andrew Northrup on the new found legitimacy of the theory of the usefulness of kicking someones ass as a reason to invade Iraq.
The interesting thing is that to prove we are capable of opening a can of whup-ass we actually defined the outer parameters of the capabilities of the US military as it is comprised today. By that I mean we are in a state right now where a large percentage of the active military and the reserves and Guard is going to rotate at least once through Iraq, and we are currently restricted in our military options because Iraq has consumed a greater percentage of our military resources than would have been believed possible.
Before the Iraq war the idea of the US military being capable of operating at frightening levels on two fronts was firmly believed by tin-pot dictators around the world, let alone other more competitive nations in scale and power. Now that seems like a fanciful delusion, and everyone knows the exact capacity of the US military when it comes to putting boots on the ground.
Air strikes and naval power, sure, we'll deliver that same can of whup-ass anywhere, but boots on the ground? That capacity now has a definition, and it is turning out to be much less than most countries thought we were capable.
That was a useful illusion, diplomatically and militarily, but now we have spent it.
Also, I was out of the country in the wilderness during September 11th, and as a result did not spend the day watching on TV as apparently the rest of the world did. I have to say that based on what I saw in people's eyes when we got back that, for political purposes, and as a shorthand description, the current administration could count on being given quite a bit of leeway in their decision making process due to a national case of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In five years a majority of the American citizens will look back on our own actions and ask themselves "What were we thinking?". That this theory of "we needed to blow something up" is being treated as a legitimate argument strikes me a symptom of a neurosis, and further evidence of the brittle state of the mental health of the nation.
We seem to be, as a populace, twitchy enough that we are easily stampeded, and once stampeded seem willing to delude ourselves as to the legitimacy of the reasons for stampeding. Since stampeding seemed like a good idea at the time, it must have been justified.
And finally, I don't think that all this running around flailing at threats, real and imagined, is actually helping the afore-mentioned PTSD populace get any better. It's having about the same effect as if we were an individual and decided to address our problems by drinking and getting into bar fights.
So, I've switched to using OS X as my primary desktop operating system since about July of last year. It was a fairly succesful transition, and I'm happy with the lack of daily updates for security reasons, as it is getting ridiculous on the Windows side. The Aqua interface isn't totally to my taste, but it's definitely easier to use than getting something like KDE functional on a laptop using FreeBSD. So I consider it a good compromise.
Now Apple has come out with a new G5 XServe, and I'm finding some parts of it intriguing.
We've converted from NT 4.0 to FreeBSD in the pas two years, and have been generally happy with the stability and the availability of software tools and applications. I even like the ports system.
But the thing that caught my attention was the Netboot feature, when combined with the XRaid. The idea of storing our MySQL databases on the XRaid, along with our mail directories and user home direstories, and then storing operating system images that can be run on standard servers like the Cluster Node XServe. This strikes me as an appealing setup.
Having a Netboot volume that defines a mail server would be extremely useful to help kill a single point of failure aspect of network architecture. Having a hot spare server waiting to boot off of a Raid protected Netboot image for different servers(database, mail, web server, whatever) would make life a lot easier for response times("It's not working? Heat up the spare, using the fill-in-the-blank image, and we'll look at it when we get a chance").
I'm certain that I could get this working with off the shelf parts and FreeBSD, but the fact is that the XRaid and the XServes just aren't that expensive.
So, yeah, you could say intrigued.
So, Paul O'Neil is ratting out the current administration as lying weasels. They in turn claim O'Neil is obviously bitter, and possibly irrational.
Dean is the frontrunner in a race that hasn't had a vote cast, and has great herds of people who will not be running in 30 days attempting to drag him down.
Iraq is either getting better or getting worse, and no one is really sure whether they can tell the difference. Certain people are proclaimed to be not serious because they are said to want to cut and run from Iraq, even though they don't, but the accusers are planning to turn Iraq over to a non-existent Iraqi government this summer, to make things look better before the election, but they are serious people, not those other guys.
The economy is improving because people stopped looking for work. The stock market is up almost exactly the same amount as the dollar is down.
And the media is apparently eternally bored with everything.
People spend a lot of time arguing about whether things are getting better or getting worse, and who gets the credit or the blame.
But no one seems to be discussing the glaring fact that all of this stuff that makes up modern American public interaction is mostly just crap. By that I mean it's not very competent, and doesn't have qualities that would define it as having value.
Crap movies, crap TV, crap media, crap politicians, crap jobs, crap products of every variety imaginable, obviously pale lies in defense of weak policies backed by facile theories and promoted by clueless employees that just do as they are told.
What the hell are people fighting with each other for? Winner gets to be king of the Wal-Mart parking lot RV nation? Money? Well, the dollar just ain't what it used to be.
The United States is starting to smell like an old widowers apartment.