Conspiracy of Dunces

So, a few things about this year's crop of candidates.

The other night, Rachel Maddow mentioned a GOP Senate candidate who makes a point of telling his supporters that he can't pronounce names like "Sotamayor". Or "Ahmadinejad".  Or "Chu".  It's always a big laugh line for him.  To this day, Sarah Palin is OFFENDED that Kathy Couric had the nerve to ask her what newspapers she reads.

Now, there are other conservatives who at least recognize that creating the appearance of education is a good thing.  Christine O'Donnell tried to pretend she went to Princeton and Oxford. But, I can tell you for a fact that there are no mice with human brains running around the Evolutionary Biology department at Princeton.  Now, Glenn Beck is trying to create his own university, with classes on Faith, Hope, and Charity.

I think about the creationists, who've now retreated into the realm of "intelligent design", which basically breaks down like this: a lot of really complicated things happened to create the universe, and I don't understand it, but since it all works, there MUST be some intelligence behind it.

I know studying and reading and learning aren't exactly easy.  But, since when did willful ignorance become a virtue?

Why are people now PROUD to proclaim that they don't know things?  Why are people ANGRY when you suggest that they should read more?

I know I'm weird, right?  Because I'm an obsessive researcher.  I love to know, well, everything.  So I study like crazy.  But I'm not asking people to be like me.  I'm just asking people to, I don't know, learn something.

I mean, if you got on a plane, you wouldn't want the guy who is proud that he doesn't know anything about aerodynamics or flight controls or, well, flying, to actually pilot the plane, right?   I mean, no, I don't know how to fly, but I'm not insisting that the pilot be as ignorant as I am about flying just so I don't feel, what, inadaquate as we're soaring at 30,000 feet.

So why are we so ready to vote for "the guy I could have a beer with".  Christine O'Donnell says "vote for me because I'd do what you'd do".

No!  I want someone who'd do what someone who knows more about these kind of things than me.  At least it gets done right.  My pride is not so fragile that I need to see the country go down the tubes just so I can say to my congressman "I could do your job".

I remember reading Bill Bradley's book, "Times Present, Times Past", where he talked about his involvement in the US Senate with water management legislation in California, which is a stupidly complex thing involving land rights, aquaduct construction & management, and a ton of other things I know nothing about.  The end result is that clean water comes out of my tap.  I WANT someone smart about these issues in there making the decisions.

Representative government means representing my interests, not replicating my own stupidity.

Wake up, people!

But the reality is that all of these GOP/Tea Party loons are just a big distraction.  There are people who fundamentally don't believe in government who support these clowns, because the government is all that stands between them and a state of nature, which is what they really want.  There are some economically powerful people who want all of the laws to go away so that we're returned to a world where only the strong survive, because they figure they're strong and they'll win.  They want you to think that government doesn't serve a purpose, or is only worthy of clowns, charlatans, and con men.  And, frankly, I think those people are just fundamentally unAmerican, because the end result of such a world is feudalism.

A conservative I greatly respect is David Frum.  I don't agree with his philosophies or political agendas, but I admire his firm faith that government is a place where the country can be made better.  And he's commented on his blog several times that many of these so-called candidates from the GOP lately actually have no interest in running the country.  Mike Huckabee and Palin and O'Donnell are only in the race so they can get their own TV shows later on some network that pays them a lot of money.

Serving in public office is a privilege that carries a heavy responsibility.  If you believe in your principles, you should want to be the sharpest, smartest, most logically & legislatively sound public official you can be.  Frankly, I wish there were more David Frums.

Mirror, Mirror

As I've mentioned in the past, one of my favorite episodes of the original Star Trek is entitled "The Enemy Within" - a transporter malfunction creates two versions of Captain Kirk.

One is intelligent, wise, compassionate, yet indecisive.

The other is....

Well, see for yourself:



Forceful? Yes. Decisive? Yes. But also crazed, lustful, paranoid.

And yet, as Spock points out, while separated, neither one is capable of surviving without the other. In the end, as much as the two repulse each other, they're forced to literally embrace each other to both survive and lead.

So, I've been following the coverage of the growing lynch mob qualities of the Palin/McCain rallies over the last few weeks.

And let's be real about this: McCain may be the official party nominee, but Sarah Palin is really the standard bearer for this particular facet of the Republican party these days. Given the choice, I'm sure many of them would prefer to have her at the top of the ticket simply because they trust her more. In their mind, she's one of them, through and through. McCain is, sadly, just someone who's hitched his carriage to them on the vain hope that this pony will carry him all the way to the Oval Office.

Honestly, I feel sort of sorry for both of them.

McCain, because, after the abuse he suffered at the hands of Bush & Co. back in 2000, could not get over his Presidential fixation and has debased himself over and over again by cowtowing to Bush, Falwell, et. al., hoping that these people that he once scorned will finally let him in the club. Frankly, much of his career has been spent seeking acceptance from the "cool kids". Originally, he hoped that by being a rebel Republican, he'd be popular among the Hollywood & press elites. And it worked. But it wasn't enough to get him elected, because as far as most Democrats are concerned, he's still a Republican. One they might want to have a beer with, but a Republican, nonetheless. So he did a switch, seeking favor from within his party. But, by then, it was too late, he'd pissed too many of them off. And the only reason he's the nominee now is because everyone else in the GOP field proved to be unacceptable to at least one sizable faction within the party (Rudy's too liberal and Romney's too Mormon for the cultural conservatives, and Huckabee was too much of a policy lightweight for the neocons and finance conservatives). In short, everyone else's constituencies killed the one guy they were the most offended by, and none of them were paying attention to McCain, leaving him the last man standing.

Sarah Palin's just like McCain in that her ambition consistently overrides whatever better judgment she may have about her career. I get the sense that when she was approached about taking the VP spot, she must have said to herself "well, how hard can it be?" My sympathy for her comes from the fact that she'll probably go down in the annuls of presidential election history in the same breath as Admiral Stockdale or Dan Quayle as a figure of national ridicule. But don't be misled. Even if McCain loses, we've probably not heard the last of Gov. Palin on the national stage.

Of course, there are limits to my sympathy.

And I suspect that McCain didn't fully appreciate the Frankenstein's monster he'd created by turning Palin loose to stoke up her base with the notion that Obama might somehow be a member of some fictitious joint Black/Muslim sleeper cell.



And, for the record, I'd just like to say two things:

1. If I were Obama, I would stand up during that prime time speech he's going to give the week before the election and say "Yes, my full name is, in fact Barack HUSSEIN Obama, and I have about as much in common with with Saddam Hussein as Bill Clinton has with George Clinton. Think, people!"

2. "Muslim" != "Enemy". My family was all raised in Protestant, Methodist traditions in the country churches on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Yet, my uncle converted to Islam some 30 years ago. And I can tell you that he, his wife, and his six children are among the most thoughtful, considerate, compassionate, disciplined, spiritual people I have ever known. His Islamic faith has given him a core of inner peace and personal strength the likes of which I feel I have almost never seen among even Christian clergy. And the VAST majority of Muslims are like that. Blaming all Muslims for the actions of a man like Bin Laden is like blaming all Christians for the actions of Hitler. Or Jim Jones. Or Timothy McVeigh.

But my point is this:

Even if Obama wins in a landslide next month (which, according to FiveThirtyEight.com, has a better than 50% probability of occurring. Hope springs eternal), these people who are currently literally screaming for his head aren't going anywhere.

The fearful, the paranoid, the hateful - these, too, are very much part of America. Always have been.

And yet, in these very same parts of the country, you probably get the highest recruitment ranks from the military. The highest church participation and activism. These people love this country. Many of them have wildly different, and, in some cases, mutually exclusive view of what this country is supposed to be.

And, as long as no one is picking up a pitchfork or a rope, that's actually OK.

It's called democracy.

I know Kos likes to talk about "breaking their spirits" and Karl Rove was renowned for seeking a permanent Republican majority, the fact of the matter is, short of straight up genocide, neither side can ever get rid of the other.

No matter how much it disgusts or repulses us, that other America is still America. And we could not have what we have without it.

That's not to say that it's a good thing. Far from it. The provincial hatreds and prejudices and fears are, in my mind, a part of our national shame.

And the generational times are changing for the better. But I don't think any of us on either side of the divide should delude ourselves into thinking that we can ever be rid of the other completely.

So, with that in mind, we have to look for the common ground, where it can be found.

And, where it cannot, and it comes to a point where we have to lay hands on each other in a non-Christian way to resolve our differences...

Well, just the thought of that makes me sad. But I have to acknowledge that there may just be some people who are beyond reasoning.

At which point, like Jill Scott said, we just have to take off these rings and deal with it.

It's ALL America. The good and the bad.

But, personally, just like J.J. Abrams, I'm encouraged by the fact that Star Trek is making it's return in the same year that a transformative, hopeful figure like Barack Obama potentially becomes the new leader of the free world. It's no accident that Star Trek's Final Frontier was the projected future from JFK's New Frontier. I mean, who can dispute the Kennedy-eque qualities of a character like this:



Yes, it's always been a challenge. But I, for one, am filled with hope.

The hope that this country will have leadership again who will once again make us proud through their actions at home and abroad. The hope that we will find the means and the will to resolve our most pressing problems while capitalizing on our most golden opportunities.

I believe the cultural zeitgeist is changing. I believe the sci-fi worlds of "Blade Runner" and "Mad Max" where an outgrown of our sense that The Future was dying. But now, people have hope again. The future looks bright again.



There will always be serpents. But that doesn't make the fruits of the garden any less sweet.

Before Sunrise

I love logic.

That comes from my training and natural inclinations towards math, science, and the rational process. I like to know how and why things work.

I have also always been a creature of faith.

Perhaps it's the rural roots of my family and our own brushes with the esoteric and unseen.

And I don't consider these to be mutually exclusive.

One of my all-time favorite books is "Fire In The Mind" by George Johnson. In it, he examines a pair of seemingly mutually exclusive systems of thought in Santa Fe, New Mexico - the nuclear physics labs in Los Alamos and the traditional religions of the local Native American tribes - and shows that, in many ways, they have much more in common than the average person would think. After all, whether it's a sky god or an electron, they both use a series of instruments and tools to predict the behavior of things we cannot experience directly with our 5 senses, but which they both assume have a direct impact on your everyday life.

So, let's start with a somewhat lazy logical argument:

I'm an enormous believer in Arthur C. Clarke's so-called Third Law of Prediction:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

And by "technology", I'm pretty much in agreement with Wikipedia's initial definition that it is "a broad concept that deals with a species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt to its environment."

Now, if that's true, than the logic student in me would also posit a corollary - that anything that appears to be magic is simply the usage and knowledge of a series of tools and crafts that the observer does not fully understand.

In short, magic is simply a science you haven't figured out yet.

Which is why I'm a big fan of John Dee.

For those of you who don't know, Dee was, officially, the queen's surgeon, as in Queen Elizabeth I of England, way back in the 16th century. Not only was Dee a scientist and a mathematician of the first order, he was also a specialist in mysticism and the occult. So, not only did the queen turn to Dee for his scientific acumen, but she relied on him to interpret her dreams, to check the path and influence of the stars, etc. Because, of course, back in those days, if you were a scholar, you studied everything and treated it all with equal weight based on the actual results, without having a bias to one system of thought over another (e.g. rational science over mysticism).

But, you'll notice, individuals in positions of power almost always have someone next to them, just behind the scenes, who is doing.... something that the average layman doesn't quite understand.

Every King Arthur has a Merlin behind him to "work the roots", as they used to say back in "the country", to help him stay in power.

Now, I'm sure some of you have read this and said "wow, Day really hides his insanity quite well. I had no idea he was such a madman."

And that's OK, because I needed to put what I'm about to say in some context first.

I want to talk about Karl Rove.

I know what you're thinking.

And, yes, you're 100% right - I AM saying that Rove is to Bush as Merlin is to King Arthur or Gandalf is to Aragorn and so on and so on.

And it didn't fully click for me until today. Here's why.

Right after the 2004 Presidential election, I wrote a post called "The Sun WILL Rise", in which I said the reason why Bush won was because he was, literally, The Candidate of Fear (tm). The entire electorate had bought into the fear paradigm - Republicans were afraid of what might happen to them if Bush lost, and Democrats were afraid of what might happen if Bush won. But the fact of the matter was that everyone's attention and emotional energy was all focused on Bush. Our collective national fear put him in office.

So, as I wrote in a 2006 blog called "The California Democratic Party Sucks", I was no longer going to vote out of fear ever again, even if the absence of my vote for Phil Angelides meant that Arnold would get re-elected governor. I was only going to vote FOR what I believed in, not AGAINST anything.

And, yes, Arnold was re-elected, but, if you look at his record since then, for all intents and purposes, he may as well have been a blue-dog Democrat for the last two years.

Now, consider what's happened this year - there had been a tremendous amount of positive energy flowing in Barack Obama's direction. He figured out that it wasn't enough to have good policies. You also had to inspire people and activate their hearts. Luckily, he also has the skills to do that. The Democrats were on their way to a landslide victory.

Until McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Oh, wait - let me clarify that.

Until Karl Rove and his surrogates who are now running McCain's campaign forced him to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

And, while everyone on the left and in the media is screaming "but she's completely unqualified!!! She's a right-wing ideologue!!! She has a history of misuse of power!!!", they've all completely missed the point.

The Rovians made McCain pick her BECAUSE she's unqualified. BECAUSE she's an ideologue. BECAUSE she has a history of misusing power.

They picked her because she terrifies us.

Sarah Palin is The New Candidate of Fear (tm).

And now, instead of all this talk about hope and the future, we get Democrats and Obama supporters running around with their hair literally on fire over the possibility of President Palin.

I mean, people who've been completely silent over the course of this entire campaign have suddenly been bombarding me with crazed e-mails, sounding like Randy Quaid in "Independence Day":

"We've got to stop them!!!!!!"

The entire focus of the campaign is now on her - those who love her, and those who're afraid of her. And, at the moment, our collective national fear is putting her in office.

The manipulation of the emotional state of a group of people as large as a voting electorate is a science that Rove has employed for decades to adjust and control the political landscape to his liking. A science that the average person simply doesn't understand.

It's magic.

So, for those of you who support Barack Obama like I do, here's the plan - remember how you felt when you saw this?


Don't be misled by the news or the opposition: Our candidate gets it. He knows the power of the collective American spirit is what has propelled him this far and is what can bring him to victory.

So, from now until Election Day, stop forwarding all of those e-mails about how crazy Sarah Palin is.

Instead, tell me stories about the America you dream about.

The President and leadership you hope for.

The Future you believe in.

Write about your own faith in tomorrow, and forward THAT email to everybody in your address book. Re-ignite your belief in the horizon and pass those on to everyone you know.

There's a reason why this is Obama's logo:


To paraphrase Harvey Dent, it's always darkest before the dawn, but keep dreaming about the warmth of the sun on your face, and I promise you, THE DAWN IS COMING.

And remember to vote FOR Obama.