The Other Side to the Trip I Took

Well, the recent visit to Atlanta went well. I've told various details of the trip enough to be weary of it at the moment, though I very well might make an extra effort to type those out later. No, no, I'm preoccupied with what I saw on TV while I was in the hotel room, either waiting to go to bed or trying to defrag or what I saw on Saturday morning.

First, there were quite a few interesting movies on. I suppose it must be a consequence of being in a hotel and having nearly zero chance of sitting still long enough to watch them. I ended up watching one of the Young Indiana Jones shows... I only watched one or two, but got bombarded by ads for them whenever I watched the VHS Indiana Jones movies, so they were hyped for me... suitably. It involved a WWI British excursion to Beer-Sheba (near the West Bank), and Indiana Jones's efforts to infiltrate it and make sure the wells aren't blown up by the Ottomans before the dehydrated troops get there. It was engaging. There was also this one movie where this boy pilots a computerized F-14 and tries to get his father out of a Middle Eastern nation where he crashed landed and was subsequently held hostage. He listens to 80s rock music while he dogfights, singlehandedly reduces a fully-armed airstrip to impressive showers of smoke and fire, and even evades and shoots down the flying ace. It was like the Karate Kid... but tons more implausible.

But what got my attention was a CSPAN call-in show on the Democratic and Republican primaries. Two people describing the primary process, one of them an expert, the other person conducting the interview. So at one point they start to take calls, presumably for questions. Questions, right? "Hey, I don't understand how superdelegates work, could you explain?" "Does its form tend to give advantage to particular movements in a party?"

No. No. The questions were statements. Statements on why they should support so and so a candidate, why it would be outrageous if so and so were elected, and so on and so forth. They were not questions. They hardly pretended to be questions. The expert tried to answer them in the best way possible, but how do you answer someone who gives you a proclamation, an assertion, a boldfaced endorsement? Silly people, that wasn't the venue for such a thing, and your saying that "X candidate is an honest man, you can just tell, he's quite virtuous and just feels like a president," even if it were in the right place, would not sway me in the slightest. They say that about everyone. I want policy, not gut feelings. I want them to prove they can be trusted. I want a distinguishing characteristic. Just... one.

And then I read the StoryChat page on the Leaf-Chronicle and get even more befuddled. People believe that President Bush is a really great president? I mean, I can believe thinking he was well-intentioned, or not bad, but making him sound like he's the best president ever? He is, at best, a mediocre president, and depending how the next few years play out, may be seen as a terrible one (my personal tilt inclines me here, make no mistake). But I don't see what he's done that could merit such heralding, unless they are only focused on a couple of issues (which I probably disagree with).

And really, writing a letter into the paper talking about how Senator Clinton should show more respect to the President during his State of the Union speech... one, there were so many other people you could pick on, so I wonder what motivated you to pick her. Pick on all of those people, not just Senator Clinton, and not just one party. Address the system. Otherwise (and perhaps even then) you're just trying to manipulate it for a little saber rattling, a little, shall we say, downtalk.

Needless to say, other people's opinions really rile me up sometimes. I wish they would base it in something, or have some methodology, but I know sometimes I don't, and I'm speaking with a college education and a whole lot of other expectations besides that. But what I wish most, what I so earnestly wish, is that people would stop trying to force what are essentially opinions on me. You, me, everyone can make no claims for other people when life begins, we cannot claim against the scientific community that Intelligent Design qualifies as science and should be taught as such, and we cannot decide whether two responsible adults can have a relationship and express it in a legalized format. I try, sometimes, to think these things through from the other sides, but they don't make sense. The claims of God-supported evidence make many people tetchy and arrogant. That isn't the only way to be tetchy and arrogant, but it's proven an effective one thus far. I won't go and pretend that there was ever a time when we, as a people, ever really respected difference, but I'd at least like to believe that we could continue to have that ideal written in our laws, if weakly held there on the federal level and overwritten by infantile scribblings in the Tennessee constitution.

There. That's a little ad hominem. I'm not going to change "infantile scribblings" to something more polite. I know I'm not arguing with children, but sometimes it just feels like I'm running against the stubbornness of one. Of many.