Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

After thirteen years of driving, I have received 1 (one) ticket. Yesterday, that number was 0 (zero).

I’m still deciding whether to contest the ticket or not. I allegedly missed a no-U-turn sign before making such a turn. Where I come from, no-U-turn signs are posted in the middle of a street, not on the far right side of it. You know, where you might be able to see such a sign if you were contemplating turning. But the statute in question reads as follows:

Turning on curve, grade or place where view obstructed or State highway marked with “no U turn” sign. The driver of a vehicle shall not turn such vehicle around so as to proceed in the opposite direction upon any curve or upon the approach to or near the crest of a grade or at any place upon a highway as defined in R.S. 39:1-1 where the view of such vehicle is obstructed within a distance of five hundred feet along the highway in either direction; and no such vehicle shall be turned around so as to proceed in the opposite direction on a highway which shall be conspicuously marked with signs stating “no U turn”.

The “highway” in this case is a commercial block of Nassau Street in downtown Princeton – hardly a highway by any reading, even though it apparently doubles as a state route. Additionally, I think emphasis on the word “conspicuously” might play prominently in my examination of this statute. It obviously wasn’t that conspicuous if I could drive for months on the road without ever noticing a no-U-turn sign… something the cop himself thought was dubious.

As any rational driver in the United States, I couldn’t care less about the actual ticket itself, though I do kind of mourn my unblemished driving record. But all that really matters is the potential impact on car insurance payments, which are based on something I’ve only heard in mythical strange terms before – license “points”. Points seem to be some sort of demerit on the license that can accumulate toward larger penalties, which never seem to get around applying to that guy on the highway whipping around you at +40 mph from the speed limit. In any case, there’s a list of all violations and the number of points assessed by the state of New Jersey at this website.

I naively thought that an improper U-turn violation would be relatively nominal in the points department – perhaps even no points, as Emily and I briefly surmised. After all, U-turn regulations have nothing in particular to do with safety. If one checks that one has the time and radius to make a U-turn, they’re among the safest driving actions one can take. And the fact that they’re a time-consuming maneuver makes a driver all the more likely to check to ensure all the right conditions are in place. There’s nothing innately wrong with a U-turn and generally their prohibition is more about the arbitrary judgment that usual traffic patterns will not allow them. But at 8:15 PM in a sleepy college town, usual traffic patterns are wide-open to U-turns. The law should reflect this, right?

Wrong. New Jersey assigns 3 points to U-turn violations, placing them above the standard violation. This seemed bad on face, but preposterous as I started reading through some of the 2-point violations.

So, for the record, here are selected driving violations New Jersey considers less problematic than making an improper U-turn (truly amazing ones in bold – emphasis added):
-Moving against traffic
-Failure to yield to pedestrian in crosswalk
-Passing a vehicle yielding to pedestrian in crosswalk
-Failure to observe direction of officer
-Operating a motor vehicle on a sidewalk
-Failure to observe traffic signals
-Wrong way on a one-way street
-Failure to yield to overtaking vehicle
-Failure to observe traffic lanes
-Failure to yield at intersection
-Failure to yield to emergency vehicles
-Destruction of agricultural or recreational property
-Exceeding maximum speed 1-14 mph over limit
-Failure to stop for traffic light
-Failure to stop at flashing red signal
-Leaving the scene of an accident – No personal injury
-Failure to observe stop or yield signs

Yes, kids, the mighty sanctity of not U-turning is all that is keeping New Jerseyans safe. Apparently the state would rather I had sped up to 44 mph or run a red light or hit another car lightly and fled the scene than make a U-turn with no cars in sight in either direction (the cop was parked at the time he saw me).

It’s almost no wonder that I came to this state just 8 months ago with a perfectly clean driving record over 13 years in 3 states (plus countless visited states) and have since collected my first accident and first ticket. Jersey, you’re just as bad as everyone says.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

This would be a good week for me to be living almost anywhere I used to live.

Here’s the Mariners’ schedule starting later this week:

Fri, 2 April: vs. Colorado @ Albuquerque
Sat, 3 April: vs. Colorado @ Albuquerque
Sun, 4 April: @ San Francisco
Mon, 5 April: @ Oakland
Tue, 6 April: @ Oakland
Wed, 7 April: @ Oakland
Thu, 8 April: @ Oakland

Strangely, they won’t be entering the state of New Jersey, uh, ever.

But even if I won’t be in my old hometown or by the Bay to celebrate, baseball is almost upon us. And the M’s will be somewhere nearby, though perhaps not returning to ABQ or following Emily to Africa or Atlanta or wherever she ends up for the season. However, if you will be having the M’s near you on this seaboard, perhaps now is the time for us to start planning a day in the sun.

To wit:

May 11-13: @ Baltimore
Jun 29 – Jul 1: @ New York
Aug 16-18: @ Baltimore
Aug 20-22: @ New York
Aug 23-25: @ Boston
Sep 21-23: @ Toronto

Take me out to the ballgame. Or I’ll take you.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Things are a lot better than they were Friday and even better than they were before. And while I can attribute a lot of that to the passage of time or mental adjustments or even a variety of positive events (including having a relaxing weekend that included two fireplace fires and two visits to Waffle House), a disconcerting amount of it seems to be about winning.

I have long been a competitive person and this combines rather extremely with being both emotionally expressive and emotionally turbulent. Thus I not only fluctuate wildly between perceived highs and lows, but my actual gestures and body are likely to do the same as I flail about in victory or defeat. Fortunately this competitive streak tends to apply most pervasively to things that don’t actually matter, such as loosely organized sporting contests, board games, and video games. I tend to be slightly less expressive but more overtly invested in larger pursuits such as, most currently, the debate team I coach and the success or failure of the books I’m writing.

Not always is my mood impacted by the more important stuff alone or even primarily, however. This was more notable in the days when I was working in day job pursuits rather than things I feel more passionate about, like debate and writing. There was nothing, for example, at Glide to be competitive about. I might get angry about some internal office conflict that seemed intractable or giddy about some well received report, but it carried none of the competitive weight of a contest with winners and losers or the triumphs and failings of the effort to get one’s voice on important matters to the masses. As a result, I had to push my competitive energy into things like video games and following the Mariners, one of which doesn’t matter at all and one of which is both impossible to control and seems generally doomed. This was, as can be guessed, not a great recipe for joy.

Fast forward to this weekend wherein, on a bit of a losing streak (I just had to play ultimate frisbee, for chrisake), I thoroughly drub a competitive field in both Boggle and Clue, two of my favorite games, shortly before leading my team to victory in a nerve-wrenching match of trivia newcomer Know It or Blow It. Sound trivial? You bet. But nevertheless, such things fuel a perception that all is right with the world, that I have things to offer, that there is momentum building around me. It’s not rational nor particularly important to put such stock in irrelevant contests based on varying ratios of skill and chance, but I nevertheless can’t underestimate what a real impact such have on my moment-to-moment outlook. My perceptual reality is awash in the tide of my ability to prevail at things which have virtually no ultimate value.

But of course the real energy fires up when I get home from the weekend jaunt to discover that Rutgers has not only broken to octofinals at one of the largest tournaments of the year, but prevailed therein over a heavily favored MIT team currently ranked 3rd in the nation, before being ousted in quarterfinals. I actually yelled so loudly when I saw the results on my screen that Emily thought something was seriously wrong. And in some sense, maybe there was. But in another, all suddenly again seemed right with the world, like order and hope had been restored. Was I overvaluing this single performance? Absolutely. But was this also a crescendent cracking through to recognition for a hard-working team long overdue? No doubt. And does that potentially put them on a whole new trajectory looking forward, one that looks very different than where they seemed even a week ago? Of course.

And so I maintain my faith in the value of competition and my submission of so much of my will to its whims. Undoubtedly there is some tension between my competitive nature and my personal societal values of socialist communitarianism, just as there is a strange dichotomy between my desired global cooperation and my personal individualist, separatist tendencies (especially, as also highlighted this weekend, around food and taste). But perhaps it is my manic-depressive core, my fundamental commitment to ride the ever-bobbing waves of emotional authenticity and fervor, that drives my passion for spirited strife. I am certain that this unstable jetsam gives birth to much of my creative ability, and even more so to my desire to pursue it, distill it, and dry it for future observation.

And yet, in moments of reflection and observation like this, it can’t help but strike me how fragile it is. How it doesn’t take many spills and misfires to resemble the local NBA franchise, winning just nine times in 74 tries, spinning out of control toward a destiny that feels like determined self-destruction. How a boat on the seas that refuses to ever dock might eventually turn under the waves.

Next time that happens, though, and the deck starts compiling a salty mix of sealife, perhaps I just need to play another game of Boggle.

In the meantime, I’m off to the races.

So I’m having a pretty rotten time of things generally, for a host of reasons I don’t have time to discuss. Feeling pretty debilitated overall, spiraling downward, and so on. Nothing at a panic-level, but perhaps arcing toward reasons for concern.

And then a long-lost friend from grade school in Oregon contacted me through Facebook. And I saw on Facebook that Rutgers Today finally got around to posting their video about the Rutgers University Debate Union:

And I’m not going to say it saved my day or anything, but it’s a start. It’s nice to see us on the board, getting a little recognition. Thanks Facebook.

If you need me, I’ll be on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I’m someone who is fairly accustomed to winning things. Debate rounds, scholarships, jobs, contests. Not NCAA March Madness pools, perhaps, but a lot of other things.

Late yesterday, it was announced that I will not be winning the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. American Dream On missed the cut of the top 250 books to proceed to the quarterfinals.

It feels like a bigger setback than it should. Until I found the contest, shortly before the entries were being accepted, this was never even on my radar. My approach was going to be to try to find an agent. Of course I got complacent about that process once I was chugging along in the contest, starting to feel a sense of destiny or serendipity about the whole thing. So now I’m back at the drawing board and not getting a gift feels like a loss.

Of course there’s also the sting of the rejection, although I don’t know yet the grounds for said rejection. The pitch that I threw together on the last day somehow was deemed in the top 20% of pitches, which fueled my confidence that the actual excerpt, which every reader so far, even the person who hated the book overall, have found to be exciting and something that draws the reader in, would be deemed in the top 25%. Didn’t happen and I want to know why. The pain of anything negative is reduced greatly by understanding its source reasons. It is not knowing why something goes wrong that will drive a person crazy. So I’m a bit in the throes of that until I can grapple with the reasons.

At that point, the reasons will either make sense and give me direction for reworking things, or they will be things endemic to the contest (for example, I do have a bit of a fear that the first 2.5 chapters make the novel seem like it should have been entered in the “Young Adult” category, even though ADO is certainly not a Young Adult work on the whole), which will not bug me too much, though I will regret that such technicalities kept me from a shot at getting someone to read the whole book for this contest. It’s impossible to speculate. It’s even possible I got one rave review and one pan, which would likely not have been enough to put me in the top quarter of books. In which case I can use both the pitch and the rave review to move forward.

Moving forward. That’s the main thing. Getting to a mindset where I don’t even remember this contest as anything other than confirmation that I wrote a good pitch statement, the thing I was least sure of in this whole process. It will take some time, like getting over anything, but I’m not too concerned. The main thing is to not generate a series of misgivings from this process, to not take the opinions of one or two people as more serious than everything else people have confirmed about the quality of the book. To not let this make me take people missing the main allegory of the novel too seriously. To trust my instincts, my work, my efforts. And to keep having fun with the current project.

So it’s all fine, ultimately. I guess the real dream or thrall of this contest was getting to avoid some of the business side of writing. Not having to deal with agents and the monetary side as much. Not having to deal with capitalism’s absurd tentacles infecting the one thing I’ve felt unfetteredly good about doing with my life. But so it goes. Better to face up to the reality now than have it sneak up on my later. I guess.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I don’t want to talk about healthcare today. Not much, anyway. It’s weird to be in a maelstrom of euphoria that seems so unwarranted and unfounded, touched with a counterpoint of ludicrosity almost as bizarre. It’s a little like the day Obama got elected, I guess, except I at least understood that there was potential there (since unrealized) and history in the mere fact of America’s ability to overcome the deepest depths of its historical bigotry. But this? This? This is just alienating.

I watched some of the debate last night on the computer, mostly because Em had it on. I guess I didn’t watch so much as listened, heard the same rhetoric over and over on the lips of one Representative after another. One side, then the other side. One side, then the other. It, like all political discourse, was simply a sorry excuse for debate. If only APDA could show them how it’s done, show them what a real discussion with advancement of ideas and engagement of the opposition’s points looks like. But our opportunity to do that was squandered by a few paranoids who became more concerned that their God-given right to drink on Friday nights might be impinged by documentation of their ability to rise above 99% of elected officials in the ability to cogently discuss an issue. So it goes.

You, unless you’re one of about 3-4 people I could imagine reading this (or you’re not an American), are either euphorically happy today or you think the country you used to love is sliding into socialism. I am baffled in either case. I am baffled at how you could love a healthcare bailout that exchanges a few token sacrifices of the worst health insurance practices of the past for the great unknown of the egregious health insurance practices of the future. As though you can start trusting profit-driven companies once they’re given the free license to do whatever they like (save a couple small things) in the pursuit of free-enterprise on the back of the mandated poor of America. If this bill was so terrible for the health insurance industry, why did stocks go up today? And I’m even more baffled if you equate a requirement that everyone buy something from a private company with socialism. Socialism isn’t some ism word that you can just throw around whenever it suits your purposes. It means something, and it does not mean entrusting everyone’s health and fate to greedy corporations.

Ahem. I didn’t want to talk about healthcare.

I wanted to talk about writing.

Namely, The Best of All Possible Worlds, currently chugging along at a sprightly 48 pages through 18 days of work. Those of you scoring at home may note that this is less than three pages a day, which doesn’t necessarily mean good things for the original deadline of 17 May 2010. (The same pace maintained from here till then would yield 200 pages total by said date, which is a bit on the skimpy side.) At the same time, I’ve had a lot of distractions, including not having the thing mapped out at all. Which is certainly burdensome in some cases, but really exciting in others.

It also must be noted that the equivalent day in the life of American Dream On was 26 June 2002, when the novel was not only well short of 48 pages, but was also two-thirds of a decade shy of completion. And while there’s a chance I will look back ruefully on this post about the best-laid plans for the Best Of, I have reason to believe otherwise. It’s something about that freshness, that not knowing where everything is going.

I mean, I know where it’s going, ultimately – I think it would be pretty challenging to start a book without knowing the ending, more or less. What would be the point? The point might end up being something one disliked, and it takes a pretty apolitical free-thinking writer to be cool with that. No, I know where it’s going in the end. But how precisely it gets there and what happens along the way are largely opaque to me. Or they were on 5 March when it all began.

In the mere two weeks and change (it feels like months, actually, which must be good) since, a lot of the mystery has gotten solved. Things have come to light that seem like the obvious inevitable answer all along. Little loose ends are coming together. And there’s still a majority yet to figure out, but the way things are clicking, I have faith it will all coalesce nicely in no time.

What’s great about this is that, while the location and discipline are the same, the method is quite different from ADO. And yet it’s still working. My biggest concern in abandoning Good God earlier this month was in going off-script, in risking everything to an ad-lib process when I’d enjoyed such success with a paint-by-numbers spreadsheet scheme. And, indeed, this process is even looser than Loosely Based, which was somewhere in between. I had nursed the ideas for LB for less time than the current project, but I had them more fully fleshed at the time of the opening lines. This one is pretty much being made up as I go along.

It’s exciting. That’s really what it comes down to. I remember this conversation I had with Lisha at the Academy about our little ventures into independent English study in sophomore year. Our high school was trying to take its best English students and give them the opportunity to go off-book, to write assignments individually assigned at a higher and specialized pace. We still would go to classes as normal and read the same books as everyone else for discussion, but then do independent analyses or creative projects on the side. She was working with Pat Scanlon and I with Eric Moya – I forget if anyone else was doing this, but I think there was at least one more person. Served us all right for turning in extra short stories and papers to our prior year’s English profs.

Anyway, she was talking about a long and arduous conversation with Scanlon about a particular work she’d turned in for the independent study and related that he’d lamented her inability to find writing to be fun. And then Lisha and I digressed into a long sidebar about what it would mean for writing to be fun in the sense the prof meant. What it came down to, as I recall, was that nothing in an academic setting like that could be fun in the sense Scanlon wanted to elicit. That there was something innate to the academic context, to exterior-imposed deadlines and requirements, the necessitated bludgeoning most of the enjoyment out of the process. Even in an independent study.

The Academy abandoned the project and we resumed normal classes the next year. I would resume the debate about academic bludgeoning of writing with many more people and went on to a four-year college career without taking a single class in the English department.

Writing this novel is fun. I am having fun. Not fun-relative-to-other-things. Not fun-for-writing-which-is-quite-a-chore. Honest to God fun. Like playing a video game fun. Debating fun.

Not debating on the House floor fun. Real debate fun. Just to clarify.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

This post has been over sixteen months in the making.

Yesterday we spent most of the day at Ariel & Michael’s, hanging out with banter, books, and Boggle. It was exactly the kind of day we’d hoped to have when we realized we were going to live close to Philadelphia, and I think all four of us enjoyed it immensely (though Em had to spend a decent portion of the day working on continual Spring Break Midterms).

For me, though, a key factor in the enjoyment is their apartment – and specifically the apartment’s third floor, a spacious, airy kitchen/living room space with high ceilings, an immaculate varnished hardwood floor, and tall windows offering a view of the Philly skyline at one end and Orwellian tenements at the other. Being Ariel & Michael, they have adorned the interior almost entirely with books and comfortable eclectic furniture, adding to the locale’s aura of a place where I was destined to be. Emily and I have spent no small number of hours coveting their place and further trying to convert our trailer-park hovel into something bearing a resemblance. But it’s just not possible.

Yes, the space is cramped and thus innately crowded. Yes, the best hope for this spot is cozy instead of airy. But the real problem, the ultimate sticking point, is that we’re on the first floor of a one-story building.

Sixteen months ago, I toured the new Glide building at 125 Mason Street shortly after it opened to its first residents. I was immediately captivated, not only because of the features and amenities Glide was making available to lower income San Franciscans, but simply because of the elevation of the upper floors. I’ve always been enthralled by heights, seeking out overhangs and railings, canyon cliffs and overlooks. The idea of being able to wake each morning in the sky, look out at the city or countryside below, and evaluate every action from the vantage of a high-rise, it simply strikes me as bliss.

I had one year of my life from such a height – my junior year in college. I was on the sixth and tallest floor of Pomerantz Hall in the infamous East Quad, living alone for the only time in my collegiate career. I had an east-facing window that offered a perfect view of the Boston skyline and woke me each morning at dawn. My computer seat was right under the window and I spent the year gazing at the layout of Waltham beyond the smokestack, at Boston, at the glimmers of the Atlantic, feeling utterly at peace. I’m not saying that room and its window height were entirely responsible for my junior year’s remarkable run at saving my belief in Brandeis, college, and even my life in general, but it sure helped. There were other factors, like getting the job at the library, being able to live alone in general, and debate and all its associated successes. But I attribute a huge part of the daily improvement of my mood and life to living up in the air.

There were other times when I’ve at least been off the ground floor. Indeed, every other collegiate year was spent on the second floor of one building another, though Scheffres (freshman year) was sort of built into a hillside and so the view was of the rising side of ravine. It was more like being in a basement than above ground, unless of course one counts the fact that I spent most of the year in the top bunk, constantly at risk of bonking my forehead on the holey styro-tiles that comprised our ceiling. The Castle was pretty sweet, but second floor in the Castle was a little like getting an 89% – the 4th- and 5th-floor towers were really where it was at. And unlike our friend Greg down the hall, we lacked the Boston view and had to settle instead for a view of the lines outside Cholmondoley’s (the coffee house), which was its own little layer of depressing. Senior year, meanwhile, offered a view of the walkway between the labyrinthine buildings of Windsor Village, a massive amalgam of apartment buildings of various elevations. More or less like Scheffres.

I was also on the second floor in our tiny rowhouse in Washington DC during second grade, and this almost counts. Maybe because I was half my current height, so it was like being on the fourth floor, but also because the street view was really something there, especially as it snowed a great deal that winter and Poplar Street held this tiny scintillating set of neighbors and happenings, not all of them positive. Visalia seemed to have a moratorium on buildings taller than 12 feet, so getting to look down from above was a special treat at the time and may have inculcated my earliest glimmers of love for heights.

Not too long after I’d become captivated by 125 Mason Street (jumping here from 1988 to 2008), we went for a trip to Seattle in which we stayed way up (forget which floor exactly, but it was in the high teens or twenties) in the Sheraton overlooking Union Square. I was again overwhelmed with how my mood was elevated by my body’s elevation. The whole world seemed full of possibility, promise, hope, and excitement. I watched the window like most people watch TV, utterly engrossed. I came up with the idea for a novella, toward the back of the line in the queue, but with no less potential than any of the other ideas.

I’m even beginning to theorize that this might be a big part of why people love New York City, despite the city’s obvious failings. The fact that more people by volume live off the ground floor than anywhere else in America is probably no small part of the captivation people have with the city. My experience of New York heights has left a lot to be desired, of course, largely because the buildings are so jammed together that one’s view is often of windows across the street or a very narrow view of the street itself. Heights for heights’ sake don’t seem to cut it – one has to be able to see some kind of breadth and distance. It doesn’t have to be the kind of space one holds visible at the top of the Grand Canyon (though that might be the ultimate), but something more than a smorgasbord of neighbors across the way is probably necessary to really fulfill this phenomenon.

In looking ahead to life after New Jersey, still sixteen months (!) hence itself, I can only hope that we end up in a city in Africa or thereabouts and have the opportunity to get our feet off the ground. Combining this incredible boost with views of a deliciously foreign and intriguing city might prove the ultimate boon for my creativity. In the meantime, I guess, here’s to looking up.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Forty-seven million Americans are without health insurance. Why? Because they can’t afford it.

And what’s Washington’s solution? Require people to buy private insurance with the government providing a subsidy to the health insurance companies.

What a pathetic state of affairs that our national government cannot respond to the needs of the people and must first respond to the needs of Wall Street and the health insurance industry and their stock prices.

-Dennis Kucinich, 21 January 2010, e-mail to supporters

Ah, politicians I once believed in. I hardly knew ye. The last bastion, the last hope, he has abandoned me.

Bill Richardson? Long gone. Barbara Lee? Recently departed. Dennis Kucinich? Et tu?

In case you don’t like politics or the US or healthcare (and don’t subject yourself to them daily anyway as part of some scheme to at least keep a cartoon going, you should know before we go further that Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich flipped his stance on the healthcare bailout. He’s now voting for it.

Not only is this a big deal for Kucinich and his few fans like me, many of whom (not me) were pouring money into his 2010 reelection campaign for being the only spiny liberal left in the country, but it’s done something almost no other Kucinich headline has been able to do: grab the top billing on American news outlets. Not near the top or up there, but A#1. If only his resolution to end the War in Afghanistan could have done the same.

Despite the words that headline this post, Kucinich today sent an e-mail reversing his decision and noting that Obama and Pelosi helped convince him that moving in some direction, any direction, on healthcare was more important than standing up for ideals, progress, or the progress of ideals.

Of course he didn’t use those words. He waxed on about his past concerns and noted that he wasn’t totally assuaged. He discussed the need for further pushing, knowing full well that there will be no further pushing for anything if and when a healthcare bailout package actually passes. He talked about how torn he was, what a struggle this vote was. But yet, he had been convinced.

We may never know what actually tipped the scales for Mr. Kucinich. It may have been a threat, it may have been a promise. But the problem is that Kucinich, like every other person in government, has things they care about more than representing their constituents, more even than representing their ideals. Everyone has a price. Maybe Obama said he wouldn’t run anyone against Kucinich in the primary, eliminating his need for all those campaign contributions. Maybe he threatened to run ads blaming Kucinich for every person who doesn’t have healthcare in America in the future, because we all know that not supporting a busted broken solution makes you automatically responsible for every problem said solution wouldn’t solve anyway. Who knows? The point is that when you have fallible vulnerable individuals in positions of power, they are susceptible to pressure. And they cave.

Just as Bill Richardson, one-time peace negotiator, found ways to explain proliferation of militant US hegemony to the UN. Just as Barbara Lee found it in her heart to reverse her vote on the bank bailout, something even Kucinich wouldn’t stoop to. But now he’s found his selling point.

This vote isn’t even about healthcare, really. It is a little. But it’s frankly more about his Afghanistan resolution. The point is that selling out the left has to cost Obama something. If it doesn’t, he can continue to embrace Bush-administration policies with impunity. If Obama wins healthcare and every single far-left member of his own party supports it, then all is lost. It’s a blank check for Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe even for Iran when the time comes. It’s tacit approval of any direction he wants to take the party. No matter how centrist, how hawkish, how corporation-friendly, Obama will be able to count on the vote of the (actually!) Socialist Senator from Vermont and the pacifist vegan Representative from Ohio. At which point, there’s really no point.

I still have hope that the healthcare bailout will fail, despite even the most pseudo-radicals of the Democratic Party getting in line. It’s not because I want people to suffer or because I don’t think access to humane treatment and medicine is a basic human right. It’s because no corporate giveaway in human history compares to the mandate that people be legally required to purchase something so expensive as health insurance from a private profit-driven corporation. And nothing would impact price escalation so steeply as to offer such guaranteed demand with no corresponding checks on price. Yes, the private companies would no longer be able to resort to their nastiest tricks in conspiring to kill people. But they also would have nothing preventing them from doubling the cost of their legally necessary product every year either. Especially when their other avenues to profit (those nasty tricks) were being shut down and they could argue that the whole economy would fail if they didn’t raise rates.

Beyond any of these moral issues, it’s a Ponzi scheme. America’s been investing in healthcare stocks like crazy, boosting claims of a recovery, because profiting off of suffering is the only business left in America, via either healthcare or the military. So if we boost up the corporations with a fat deal for them, the stockholders make money. And then they make more money out of squeezing more money out of everyone, who’s mandated to pay, and the only way to offset it is to… invest in more healthcare stocks! Yay. Everybody wins.

I guess I shouldn’t have been so mad at Dennis after all. He’s going to make everybody rich.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Despite my concerns with Facebook’s impact on blogging, the time has come for me to recognize that the train is leaving the station and I might as well get on board…

Click the above to become a fan of this site which, if you’re here, you already enjoy!

This is certainly no reason to join Facebook if you haven’t already, but it will make your enjoyment of the BP a little more streamlined if Facebook is a big part of your life in the status quo. I will be updating every time there’s new content (why did I sign up to do this again?) here, including D&C strips, blog posts, quizzes, updates, and so forth.

Plus, this is clearly the gateway to the long-awaited Blue Pyramid Facebook quizzes, which have been in the works for a long time, but might actually come to fruition once the BP has a fanbase to launch from on Facebook.

If the entire Internet is going to take place on Facebook in the future, the BP might as well be part of the picture. So click away! See you on the ‘book…