B-Rock vs. McPain

Ever wonder what a breakdance showdown with G.W. Bush, John McCain, and Condoleeza Rice versus Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would look like? Wonder no more.

To the 2%

Tonight FoxyJ sent me the link to this feature on religion in the United States in USA Today. Besides being a fascinating survey of religious beliefs and demography, and on top of that a wicked cool interface, the feature was well-timed for me in that Foxy sent it while I was stewing over this article I read tonight about the LDS Church, once again, telling its members to vote for anti-family legislation disguised in pro-family rhetoric. Seeing via USA Today that Mormons make up only 2% of California's population helped me put things in perspective and calm down a bit. I'm still angry that people feel that denying basic rights to families who don't fit an ideal invented in the 1950s is somehow Christlike or even humane, but at least the impact of this particular instance is limited by demography.

As for the small portion of that 2% of Californians who are Mormon who happen to read my blog, as well as any other Californians who may have a say in the anti-family constitutional amendment that the LDS Church believes so strongly should be passed, even if I believed I had the kind of power to make people do whatever I say, I wouldn't tell you to vote or campaign against this proposed amendment based solely on the fact that I say so. Rather, I ask only that you carefully study the facts before making any decisions, which is exactly what the LDS Church tells its members to do in situations not involving gay people marrying each other.

Gay people will couple up and raise children whether or not they're allowed to legally marry. The only thing denying them marriage rights accomplishes is to severely limit their ability to give their partners and their children the legal protections they deserve. My friend Scot, who is planning on legally marrying his husband of thirteen years (also the father of his two sons) next month, has put together articles on the statistical effects of same-sex unions, arguments for marriage equality, and the "ideal family" argument against same-sex marriage.

A Little Confession

As much as I love the Foxmobile and know it was the best choice for our family, I still have Prius envy. Every time I see a Prius pass by (every eleventh car in Seattle--I counted), I think of the gas we would save and more importantly, the message we would send if we had our very own Prius: that we are tree-hugging, war-hating*, trash-recycling liberals and proud of it. But alas, even a five-year-old Prius would have cost more than our brand new Rondo, and without the sixth and seventh seats in back. I suppose I'll just have to start a blog in order to broadcast my liberal haughtiness.


*I'm not sure, but I think all Priuses come equipped with anti-war and/or anti-Bush bumper stickers.

Common Sense Wins in the California Supreme Court

(at least for the moment)


This makes me happy to be moving to California. Really, I don't see how anyone could see a same-sex marriage ban as constitutional in any context.

Hipocrisy is the Greatest Luxury

Last night FoxyJ and I watched Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars, a documentary about a group of refugees from Sierra Leone's brutal civil war of the nineties who started a band, bringing music to refugee camps in Guinea until the war ended in 2002 and they became leaders in bringing the refugees home. The story is meant to be one of hope, showing how these people used music to help them and their fellow refugees recover from the horrors they'd lived through, but as much as I enjoyed the movie and especially the music, I had a hard time getting past the horrors to the hope. It's hard to listen to a man tell how rebel soldiers forced him to beat his child to death and then cut off his hand, to see the fear in his eyes at the prospect of returning to the country he once called home, and not be left with the same sense of despair and helplessness that I've felt after watching every other film I've seen about the atrocities that happen in countries throughout Africa.

Earlier this week we watched In the Heat of the Night, and while I enjoyed the story and the acting--Sidney Poitier is amazing--I felt a similar sense of helplessness, though in this case not so much despair as anger at people whose racism leads them to treat human beings so inhumanely. Toward the beginning of the film the camera rests for a moment on a little statue of the Virgin Mary on a policeman's dashboard, and I was reminded of Crash, another film about racism that combined all those feelings of helplessness, despair, and anger and magnified them. As it turns out, I'm not the only person who has made the connection between the two movies--a review FoxyJ stumbled upon talked about how both movies are meant to make middle-class white people (read: me) feel good about themselves for not being racist.

A couple weeks ago I spent a while digging through the archives of a blog called Stuff White People Like. I laughed quite a bit as I read the satirical observations of white yuppies, as the particular brand of white yuppie parodied here, who loves diversity and gay people and the environment, is very much your typical Seattleite. The more I read, though, the more uncomfortable I became; the parodies started sounding less like parodies and more like accurate descriptions of me. I am the white guy who recycles because it's a way I can save the Earth without actually having to do much. I am the white guy who loves "conscious" hip-hop because it so vitally addresses the problems of a community I don't belong to. I am a living parody of educated, middle-class white people. I'm not very comfortable with this realization.

I'm in the midst of reading Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama's memoir about missing the chance to get to know his father and the resultant disconnect with his Kenyan roots. I feel a connection--and at the same time feel like I have no right to claim such a connection--to the teenaged Obama who felt as much like an outsider among the few other black students at his high school in Hawai'i as among the Asian, Polynesian, and white majority. I had a similar experience when I went to college and related neither to the white students that surrounded me nor to the other students from Hawai'i. In the former case it was my own pride in my island upbringing that prevented me from acknowledging that mainland white culture was not that different from my own; in the latter it was the color of my skin that betrayed me--despite the fact that I'd never lived anywhere but Hawai'i, I felt like an imposter claiming the islands as my home.

I like to think it is my own experience as an outsider--whether for my race or my sexual orientation--that leads me to feel a sense of connection to the victims of racism and to the residents of a continent recovering from centuries of European colonization and American slavery. The fact that I like to think this reveals just how ridiculous I am. I have a nice home, food, and nearly two master's degrees. Technically I believe my family's income is below the poverty line, but that's by choice, not by necessity. I am not a victim of anything. I have never been discriminated against for my race or my orientation. I live in a country where I can reasonably assume that rebels are not going to come to my village and kill or mutilate me. No matter how much hip-hop I listen to or books about racial identity I read or documentaries about Africa I see, I will not know what it is to be oppressed.

What then should I do? Should I stop trying to understand because I will never succeed, because even if I did that wouldn't solve anyone's problems? I don't think so. I can't solve the problems of the world, but I can't ignore them either. I'd like to end here on something pithy like "Perhaps trying to understand is all I can do," but honestly that feels like a cop-out. An excuse for the privileged intellectual elite to feel smug about recognizing that people everywhere are suffering, but not really do anything about it that would require more effort than buying a "Save Darfur" t-shirt.

I remain in the comfort of my perceived helplessness because anything beyond that is overwhelming.

A Battle Won for Myface

A few years ago, Myface was invaded by foreigners from the Basal Cells of Carcinoma. The Carcinomans quickly claimed a victory in the prominent capital city of Forehead, but it wasn't long before the natives revolted, calling in reinforcements from neighboring country Dermatologistan. The Dermatologistanis swooped in and broke up the hold the foreigners had in Forehead, but unfortunately these foreigners weren't so easy to get rid of. With time, they spread like, well, like cancer. Within a few months they'd attacked again, this time on Mt. Nose, but thankfully again the Dermatologistanis were able to break their stronghold, despite all the propaganda labeling Dermatologistan as a country of terrorists.

Things were looking better for the Myfacis for a while, but in the last few months the president of the BCC managed to send a surge of Carcinoman soldiers into the ongoing war, leading to two new attacks in as many months. First in January and then this morning, though, Dermatologistani troops used guerrilla warfare tactics to cut out the foreigners' last remaining bases, freeing the native people of Myface to govern themselves as they see fit. They'd be celebrating, but at the moment their country is looking a little war-ravaged.

Here's hoping the Carcinomans elect a new president who doesn't send more soldiers...

Mr. Fob on the Issues: The War

One of my sisters posted on our private family blog last week sharing some of her thoughts on the three presidential candidates still in the running and soliciting opinions from the rest of us. While busy working on other things over the past week, I've been thinking of what I'd say. I've mentioned here that I support Barack Obama, but haven't really gotten into why (beyond all the love he's getting from the hip-hop community), so I figured I might as well kill two birds with one stone and reply to my sister's request here where the whole world can see and mock my reasoning. This is quickly becoming a monster of a post in my head, though, so I'm going to split it into a few posts on the issues that matter most to me.

Among these is the war in Iraq. Remember the one George W. Bush triumphantly declared was over like five years ago? Yeah, that one. It boggles my mind that the only thing that so many Christians--and Mormons particularly--remember about Bill Clinton is that he had sex with Monica Lewinsky, and they accuse that one act of rending asunder the moral fabric of our nation, and yet they continue to stand behind Bush. Don't get me wrong--I believe that adultery is a pretty horrible thing, especially when it involves the abuse of power like that of the president of the United States, but I'm pretty sure most people agree that murder is worse than adultery. According to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, nearly 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq since March of 2003. That's nothing compared to the more than 40,000 Iraqi soldiers and citizens who have been killed just since January of 2005. And yet George W. Bush, the man responsible for these deaths, is somehow a stalwart of moral integrity because he likes to mention God in his speeches?

What does George W. Bush have to do with the current election? Well, the only reason Bush was able to muster up the support to invade Iraq is by capitalizing on the tremendous tragedy of 9/11 to convince Americans that they should be shaking in fear of those evil terrorists in the Middle East with their weapons of mass destruction--the weapons he never found in Iraq, by the way, and the terrorists who had nothing to do with Iraq until George came in and screwed the country over.

Now, I really don't hate John McCain. He seems like a genuinely good person and I like a lot of his policies. What terrifies me about him, though, is that he seems to have every intention of continuing George W. Bush's "War on Terror" and is already using the very same scare tactics that Bush has been using for the past seven years. He reminds voters frequently of the constant threat of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the need to "secure the American homeland." Something cartoonist Aaron McGruder pointed out in an interview a few years ago (sorry, no link) is that, just like a "War on Drugs," we can never win a "War on Terror" because there will always be terrorists and the second we say we've won the war and then terrorists blow up another building, we look like idiots. And when people like Bush and McCain are using this so-called "War on Terror" to "temporarily" take away Americans' rights, that means our loss of those rights isn't so temporary after all.

Along with John McCain, Hillary Clinton voted in favor of the Iraq invasion in 2003. I would be willing to forgive her for that, as she now claims to see the error of that decision, except that now she's indulging in "War on Terror"-like scare tactics in order to convince voters that she will do a better job than Barack Obama of protecting our innocent sleeping children from those evil terrorists who go bump in the night.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, has been opposed to the war from the beginning and he recognizes scare tactics when he sees them. He did not vote for or against the invasion because he wasn't a U.S. senator at the time, but he did speak at anti-war rallies, making his position clear. Whereas McCain seems to think that sending more American troops will somehow fix Bush's little snafu, Obama recognizes that enough people have died already and sending more troops to kill and be killed won't solve anything. Certainly the U.S. owes it to Iraq to not leave them high and dry, but there are better ways to support them than bombing them.

Caucus

When I found out that the Washington State Democratic Primary is basically an opinion poll--that all the delegates to the national convention are determined not by the primary but by the caucuses--I was a little hesitant. I'd never been to a caucus before and I was intimidated by the potentially in-your-face nature of the process. I felt strongly enough that Barack Obama should be the next president of the United States, though, to force myself to face the unknown and go to the caucus.

It ended up being a lot of fun and more satisfying, I think, than a simple vote-and-go election process. As with a lot of other areas of the country, my precinct had a record turnout this year, helped by the fact that I live close to a university and Barack Obama is able to achieve the impossible: get college students to vote. Taking that into account, the results ended up about as I expected, with Obama getting seven of the eight delegates my precinct is sending to the district caucus (who will in turn elect delegates to send to the county caucus, who will in turn elect delegates to send to the state convention, who will in turn elect delegates to send to the national convention in August).

I had an interesting moment when signing in. There's an optional field on the form where you can mark "GLBT" if it corresponds to you. I hesitated. If I check "no," am I a closet homosexual hiding my true identity? If I check "yes," am I claiming an identity that I don't deserve because I live in the social and political comfort of a heterosexual marriage? I ultimately decided to check "yes" because it seemed appropriate, in an election where a half-Black man raised by his white grandparents is being labeled the Black candidate, for a half-gay man in a straight marriage to label himself a gay voter.

Barack Obama Endorses the Fobcave

Here's how it happened:

Barack read my post about McCain almost winning me over by being a Lauryn Hill fan and he was all like, "Whoa, I need to do something to win Mr. Fob back, and fast." And he heard that will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas was making this little music video thing for him, so he called up will and he was like, "Dude, you totally need to get Lauryn Hill in that video" but will was like, "Dude, Lauryn Hill is a few tracks short of an album lately, if you know what I mean. Are you sure you want to be connected to her?" and Barack was like, "Ooh, good point. Maybe we could find out who Mr. Fob's second-favorite rapper is?" So will did some asking around, then called up Common and explained the situation and Common was like, "Well, I do like Obama, but I was kind of thinking of swinging over to the Huckabee side... Okay, I guess I'll do it for Mr. Fob."

And you know what? It worked. Who cares about the issues? I'm voting for the guy my favorite performing artists support.

(In case you are Common-illiterate, he's the bald guy with a goatee that shows up about 25 seconds in, then again closer to the end.)

Did you know

that if Hillary Clinton becomes president, she'll be the country's first female president? And Barack Obama would be the first black president?

Silly me, I wouldn't have made the connection, if not for the fact that EVERY SINGLE news article that barely mentions either of them feels a need to point it out. Because, you know, this is news.

Batgirl the Activist

From a 1974 (?) U.S. Department of Labor Wage & Hour Division public service message:

Dear Senator McCain,

Your most recent campaign ploy, obviously done with the specific intention of getting my vote, is quite clever. I have to admit, having your daughter reveal that you are a fan of Lauryn Hill does tempt me to come over to the dark side, but ultimately I still find you even more weird than Mitt Romney and only slightly less creepy than Mike Huckabee.

I remain an Obama Boy.

Sincerely,

Mr. Fob

Curiously

Do you suppose people refer to "Hillary" while in the same breath referring to "Obama," "Giuliani," and "Romney" because she's a woman or simply to distinguish her from another well-known "Clinton"? Granted, I've seen a lot of references to "Mitt," but usually in a derogative sense, and I've seen very few references to "Barack" or "Rudy." What do you think?

My Post-Thanksgiving Brag

FoxyJ has much more to brag about than I do, as she put together an amazing meal yesterday and did so while hardly breaking a sweat, but I want to show off the very cool namecards that S-Boogie and I made:


What's so cool about those namecards, you ask? Well, since you're so fascinated by every little thing I do, I'll tell you. Knowing that I was in charge of the crafty decorative stuff, Foxy sent me a link to a website that has cool Thanksgiving crafts to do with kids. The site did have some good stuff on it, but unfortunately if you want anything bigger than a thumbnail to print you have to pay for a membership. I could have searched more for free templates, but the site had given me enough of an idea to do it on my own. So I drew the pictures, cut the cards out, and penciled in the names. S-Boogie colored the pictures and traced the names with pen over my pencil.

What I really want to brag about, though, is not the cards themselves, but rather the innate talent for literary criticism shown by my four-year-old daughter. The observant among you will notice that I followed in the colonial tradition of my white ancestors and other-ized our Thanksgiving guest, Foxy's sister SkyeJ, by representing her as a stereotypical "Injun," feather headdress and all. (I also dehumanized my children by turning them into traditional holiday food items, but that's another story.) S-Boogie, in true postcolonial form, subverted my colonization of her aunt by other-izing Foxy and myself, turning our pilgrims into a Smurf and a demonic scarecrow. She also highlighted the crudeness of my caricaturization of Native Americans by making Skye look like a black-face minstrel show performer. S-Boogie's postcolonial "reading" of the "text" of my Thanksgiving namecard pictures reveals not only the oppressive history behind the holiday tradition but also my own latent racism. In my defense, I did extensive research to represent 17th-century Native American clothing accurately; SkyeJ's dress is based on the one worn by Pocahontas in the Disney movie.

And Speaking of Sweet Potato Fries

A year or two ago, FoxyJ came across this cookbook or food website or something that suggested making fries with sweet potatoes instead of regular potatoes. So she chopped up some sweet potatoes, salted them, and baked them. They were the best thing ever. We had them a few times and wondered why restaurants don't serve sweet potato fries instead of plain old boring potato fries. So we were happy to see tonight that Kidd Valley, a local burger chain, received our psychic suggestion and has started serving sweet potato fries. They actually fry them so they're not quite so healthy, but they're just as yummy. (Possibly even yummier, if you can improve on perfection.)

I've decided that the only possible reason sweet potato fries have not already replaced crappy potato fries in the American fast food pantheon is that the potato mafia in Idaho is using its political power to squash the sweet potato fry industry before it gets off the ground. Don't let them get away with it, people! Go to your grocery stores and buy sweet potatoes, then make them into fries! Go to your burger joint and demand sweet potato fries! Boycott the non-sweet potato industry!

And don't bother saying that you've tried sweet potato fries and they were not the absolute greatest thing ever, anyone, because such lies will only expose your evil nature and your corrupt connection to the Idahoan potato underground.

WWJD?

He'd vote Republican, according to James Dobson and his minister friends.

Yes, I know, this isn't news. It annoys me, though, to see people taking something as personal and meaningful as religion and turning it into a political tool. The Religious Right discourages good Christians from voting for a Democrat even when the Democratic candidate might be the one who most closely matches that individual's values, and they discourage good thinking people from voting for a Republican even when the Republican candidate might be the better choice, because who in their right mind wants to be associated with the Religious Right?

I respect the LDS church for refraining from endorsing specific candidates or parties--I've never heard anyone cross that line over the pulpit, and I've had some pretty politically-biased bishops. I'm perplexed by Mormons who align themselves with the Religious Right, ignoring the fact that James Dobson, George W., and their ilk would no sooner sit down to dinner with a Mormon than with a homosexual.

I'm embarrassed to say that the first time I voted was in 2004, and even more embarrassed to admit that I didn't do my research before hitting the polls--in many cases, I didn't know anything about the candidates, so I blindly voted for the Democrat, which makes me no better than the BYU student who was quoted in the New York Times as saying that she only voted for Bush because he seemed like a good, religious person, not because she knew anything about the issues. Foxy and I sent in our voter registration forms earlier this week, and I've vowed to repent of my lazy ways. I don't know if my vote will make a difference, but at least if I read up on all the people and things I'm voting on, I can feel morally superior to those who don't.

And speaking of socialism...

The other day I was working at the information desk with a reference librarian. She asked where I did my undergrad, and when I said BYU she asked if I'd ("what's it called? I can't remember the right terminology") served a mission, explaining that she was from Idaho Falls so she had a friend who was Mormon. Later on, she asked about my career goals, and I said that I was interested in the idea of working in an academic library, but my socialistic tendencies pushed me in the direction of the public library. She laughed and said that she'd never heard someone "who's done a mission" talk about his socialistic tendencies. Her Mormon friend, apparently, was rather conservative. (Imagine that.)

We all do missionary work in our own way.

Music and Politics

Yesterday a good friend and I were in my car with my music playing. The song was "Stay Human" by Michael Franti and Spearhead, a left-wing political hip-hop group. Said good friend, we'll call him Tuberculosis Boy, looks at the CD player and laughs. "I just love political music," he says. Which led into an argument about the purpose of political music and, more generally, political art. Okay, I'll admit, on TBB's side it was a calm, rational discussion. I was arguing. I tend to get passionate and defensive about my music.

TBB wondered if political music had ever done any good. I pointed out that the music of the sixties drove the peace movement, which certainly had an impact on American politics and culture. He agreed that that was the case, but then said that today's political music tends to just complain without offering solutions.

He might be right. I don't know. The artist in question, Michael Franti, points out that you can't bomb the world into peace and that television is the drug of the nation, but he doesn't offer many solutions more specific than the vague ideas that everyone deserves music and it's not about who you love but do you love. Franti does benefit concerts to help victims of bombings and he tours in Iraq and Palestine to bring music to people downtrodden by war, but he doesn't come out and say, "This is how George W. should resolve the huge mess we've made in Iraq."

I'm not sure TBB's assumption that responsible political art needs to offer answers, though. I believe there is value in asking questions, in drawing people's attention to the problems of the world. I also think there's personal value in expressing all sorts of emotion through art, including the emotion of pissedoffedness at incompetent commanders in chief who use their power poorly.

Part of the value I find in Michael Franti specifically is that he asks questions that go deeper than pop politics. As opposed to the play Saturday's Voyeur that I saw last week, whose sole purpose was to villify conservative Mormons while lauding the virtues of liberalism, Franti manages to look at his own hipocrisy. On the same album in which he compares then-California-governor Pete Wilson to Hitler, Franti stops thinking about music and politics for a moment to muse about "what an asshole I can be."

So in conclusion, Michael Franti is good. George W. is bad. And Tuberculosis Boy is well-intentioned, but wrong.