Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

Karl Rove thinks that the President is too self-centered. Or something. Contextually, it’s difficult to know what about that number he thinks is important, other than the fact that we all know now that he can count the number of words in a text.  I’d have liked some follow-up information, but I think that fruit wasn’t low-hanging enough for his stubby hands to grasp.

Yeah, that's mature. The Twice-Divorced Savior of Marriage, everyone.

Fortunately, I did some number-crunching for him. President Obama did, indeed, say “I” 96 times in his State of the Union speech Wednesday night. This is contrasted with President Bush, who kept it at 32 occurrences during his first State of the Union (the link Karl Rove used may not have been counting lexemes, such as “I’m” or “I’d”). The percentage of words between the differing speeches (Obama’s was 7,184 words, Bush’s 3,785) was 1.33% “I” for Obama, and 0.86% for Bush, or a difference of 0.47%. It was definitely an increase of almost 55% in the frequency of that word, but we’re still talking about less than 2% of the speech, assuming “I” is an equivalently powerful word as, say, “mandate” or “bailout.”

But I noticed something else that was interesting. Bush’s percentage of selfishness-induced verbiage decreased over the course of his Presidency. That’s not because he talked about himself less, but because he talked about other things more. While his first State of the Union speech clocked in at 3,785 words, his later ones were all above 5,000, and yet his “I” incidence remained at a steady average of 33, going for its zenith his last year at 37 times.

Given that it’s important to at least one person, I wonder if there was a busy little highlighter in the weeks before the previous President’s addresses, going through and counting the appearances of “I” and yelling at his cohorts to remove them. I won’t name names about whose highlighter I think it was. It does make sense, though: rhetoric about “our” country certainly feels like it should sell better than that about “my” country, especially with the President.

Tangentially, President Bush used, on average, 24 lexemes of “terror” (“terror,” “terrorism,” “terrorist(s),” “terrified,” and “terrorized”) in his speech. He talked about “terror” 73% as frequently as he talked about himself, compared to President Obama, who only did so 3% as much. He said “terrorism” once and “terrorists” twice. Take from that language lesson what you will.

As always, feel free to check for yourself:

• State of the Union Transcripts and Videos – C-SPAN

• Word Frequency Counter – Rainbow.Arch (I don’t think it’s that rainbow)

It’s going to be hard to say this without sounding like a sore loser, but the filibuster really should just go. I’m almost positive all the complaining now about it is loser-itis. However, it’s not just that for me. I say this because, as ominous as it sounds, it’s looking more and more likely that the Democrats, in their incredible ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, may hand the majority back over to the Republicans with some cookies and a nice fruit basket in just under a year. At that point, the filibuster will surely benefit the current-majority-soon-minority, right?

Except, as a rule, it does nothing to help anybody. Much has been made in the discussion about it on how it was used to try a block on civil rights legislation in the 60s. It’s also been noted that there’s an ever-increasing frequency of its use. In this past congress, before they lost the guarantee, Democrats knocked down more filibusters than had been attempted in the first 80 years of the 20th century. As I said, all these facts come from posts replete with sore-loser syndrome, and thus I don’t have a good bead on the count that the Democrats tried when they were out of power, but it was probably a whole hell of a lot.

“But its frequency and its past history shouldn’t cloud what it’s capable of now,” I hear the devil’s advocate replying. The problem with that idea is that it’s not capable of much of anything good. When the country was founded and people didn’t send members of Congress with predefined notions of what they would and would not support, and issues of the day really did receive debate on the floor, it made some convoluted sense to allow a combo breaker. But now, all it exists for is to provide the majority party with a severe case of legislative blue balls.

For the civics-disinclined, the Senate is composed of 2 senators from each state, plus the Vice President when necessary. Each state, regardless of its size geographically or socially, receives equal representation. That already should set off warning bells of disproportionate power assigned to smaller numbers of people. With the filibuster in place, preventing legislation can be permanently blocked by representatives elected by 31.5 million Americans, or just over 10% of the current estimated population. Don’t believe me? Bust out a calculator and do the math. That’s an extreme case, but it’s nothing when you consider that the legislation is, in all reality, blocked by only 40 Americans, or 0.00000013% of us.

Just how many ego-swelling power trips do Senators need, anyway?

Update: I’ve set up my own blog for pain purposes.

In the past, I’ve written extensively on the subject of chronic pain, and opioid therapy to treat that pain. In those writings, I’ve mentioned as an aside that these things apply to me, being that I am a chronic pain patient. What I haven’t done is write extensively on my specific pain, my specific treatment, and how my pain changes my life. There are reasons for this.

The main reason is because–until recently–I didn’t want to believe that my pain affected my life at large. I didn’t want to believe that this can not only affect my life, but it in fact dictates the majority of my day. I wanted to believe that I could take medications and ignore it and continue on the path I’ve chosen without modifying anything. To my disdain, this is painfully untrue.

In high school, I participated in running sports like Cross Country and the long distance division of Track & Field. I ran 6-8 miles every night, and I was in fantastic shape. I continued to run after high school until I was around 19. At this age I started having a dull ache at my tailbone. It was intermittent and mild, so I’d take over-the-counter (OTC) analgesics like acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen. As time passed and my age grew, so did my pain. The pain spread to my entire lower back and started taking over my life. By the time I was 21 OTC analgesics weren’t working anymore, and I had no health insurance. After being turned away at free clinics under suspicion of drug-seeking, I started going to an ER on a regular basis. They’d occasionally give me a shot of hydromorphone or prescriptions for a few day’s worth of muscle relaxants and opioid analgesics, but 90% of the time they’d also turn me away under suspicion of drug-seeking. At this point, the pain was nearly constant and unbearable. The clinic the ER sent me to for follow-up had a lazy doctor who never treated anything but crotch-rot and runny noses. He sent me to Physical Therapy, and a litany of other specialists within the charity hospital. I had x-rays and MRIs and no one ever saw anything. So, again, I was ignored for what was presumed to be drug-seeking behavior. Then, the aforementioned clinic was aquired by new management, and with this came a new doctor. I gave him a shot, and gave him my history, and he decided to give me a chance. I went through two-week trials of every NSAID you can think of, until he finally agreed to give me opioid analgesics, under the condition that I would continue to try to figure out what was wrong with me, and that he would stop prescribing them when I did. Around the time I turned 22 I moved 900 miles from that clinic, to Baltimore.

In Baltimore I spent about a year making my way through an orthopedist, rheumatologist, gastroenterologist, and a cardiologist. The original orthopedist discontinued the opioids and gave me injections, which worked at first but quickly faded. He gave me a few month’s worth of opioids and referred me to a pain management doctor. This doctor diagnosed me with lateral facet joint hypertrophy, or more plainly, a severe form of arthritis in the joints of my spinal vertebrae. He continued the opioids and gave me a multitude of injections, which didn’t help much. I was still miserable despite the narcotics and one day I broke down crying and he decided to pull out all the stops and put me on some real opioid therapy. I started taking extended release morphine along with the hydrocodone I was already receiving. In the time since I’ve been on methadone, and now transdermal fentanyl fills the role of my 24/7 medication, and the hydrocodone has been replaced with oxycodone. I also have adjuvant medications like muscle relaxants and sedative/hypnotics. All in all, it took nearly four years to get my pain under control.

Now that I see a good doctor–who does his best to help me manage my pain–I thought my fight might be over. It took day after day of good days and bad days before it dawned on me that I only won a small battle, and while I’ll spend the rest of my life at war, I’ll never win. I’ll continue to have good days where the pain is balled up into a corner of my mind, and I’ll continue to have bad days where I’m balled up into a corner of my bed. I’ve always known this, but only recently has it really fully elucidated itself: I will be in gut-wrenching pain for the rest of my life.

Knowing that, it begins to dawn on me that I will be unable to live the life I want to live. A given activity may be restricted or even impossible for me to endure. Walks in the park are now a test of my pain threshold rather than a harmless stroll. Going out with my girlfriend to places like malls is now not only mind-blowingly boring, but back-breakingly painful (one might think this is a good thing, but any time together is good time together). Not only are these things difficult now, but my condition is degenerative; it will continue to get worse every single day, as will my pain. While a walk through the mall may seem hard now, walking at all may be an arduous task in the not-too-distant future.

So where do I go from there? Will I become legally disabled and unable to work? What of my plan to go to medical school? What of all the hard work I’ve already put into school? Medical disability programs in this country are pitiful, and a mere pittance compared to my current income, let alone the future income I could achieve with a medical license. Being a physician is physical work, and carries the longest hours of any profession. I’m not implying that I couldn’t get a degree, but what am I to do with it if my physical limitations continue unabated? Will I be seeing patients or will I be relegated to boring research?

The degeneration could be curbed by strong back muscles, but in order to get stronger I have to exercise, and that is quite difficult when mere walking is a test of pure will. I don’t believe any amount of medication in the world can change this. My medication barely allows me to function in the world. I’m lucky when I get out of bed and get back into it without some horrifying pain in-between, let alone adding purposeful physical exertion into every day. Perhaps if I take a morphine shower afterwards.

As things are I take quite a bit of strong, dangerous medication and it barely manages an uneventful day. I frequently employ the aid of a cane. If I so much as play with my little nieces or wrestle around with my girlfriend, I pay for it dearly. I used to think that bill would stop coming, but I really do realize now that bill controls my life. It controls what I can and can’t do. I can think “don’t let this control me, don’t let this be who I am,” and yet it is anyway. My pain is my life, and my life is pain.

I’m thoroughly unsurprised to hear that the Supreme Court has cockblocked Democracy.  Whereas previously we had the illusion of a people with a voice, now we’ve got companies freed from their shackles to spend whatever ungodly amount of money crushing their opponents as they’d like.

Take a gander at some relativity on recent news.

The health care reform is an important issue; I know far too many people who work “part-time” jobs more than 40 hours a week and get health care coverage that basically amounts to “we’ll buy you some vitamins at the Safeway.”  That so many people should go without health care completely and others who have it should have such marginal coverage, in our behemoth of a wealth-generating nation, is a travesty.

Democrats being terrible at campaigning and losing at key issues when they have all the leverage is an important issue; see health care reform above.  It shouldn’t come as a shock that people are pissed off that Oakley lost, it was a deck horribly stacked against the Republicans and she couldn’t be bothered to win cause she needed some time to take down her Christmas lights or whatever.

But these issues are all passing problems; if health care reform passed in any form, it’d be repeatedly challenged.  If Democrats had won in MA, they’d still face down a hard fight in November and in 2012.  They are things that require passion on both sides; Democrats to be infuriated that their party is so impotent, and Republicans to be spurred on by their victory.  This verdict handed out by the Supreme Court is a body blow to both sides.

You see, as it was previously, there was already a value assigned to a seat in Congress, or to the White House.  You couldn’t get your foot in the door without millions to advertise and put your name out there.  With PACs and other outside donations, the latest presidential race reached astronomical financial proportions.  The only thing holding the reins back was the fact that the richest constituency, the faux people created at each and every corporation to provide a taxable singular entity, were barred from unlimited contributions.

The donations provided by individual Americans were a huge boon to the Obama campaign.  However, if you think of what sort of amazing advertising can be bought with $100 million, think about the fact that during the 2009 Super Bowl, NBC sold their spots for $209 million, and that’s not including the production costs.  Hopefully, once you realize that the budgets of all the camps in the biggest presidential campaign in history was blown for one day of advertising by the private sector, you’ll see how the Supreme Court just fucked America.

I’ve updated the look of the blog, with a brand-spanking new theme I downloaded.  I like it pretty well, it displays the plugins in a much easier-to-read format, and I’ve always been partial to darker-colored themes.  I meant to update the title, as I found another blog a few months back with my exact same theme (the old one) and almost the exact same title.  It turns out my clever and witty acceptance of the sheer number of blogs in the universe wasn’t as original as I thought.  It’s kind of ironic.

Therefore, I need a new title.  I have space for a title and a subtitle.  Currently “JAB – Just Another Blog” and the Full Metal Jacket reference fill those two slots.  I’ve thought that maybe “Thoughts of a Dying Atheist” and “This body was born from death, all it can do is die” would work.  But, aside from the fact that no one would get that it’s a Muse song and a Doctor Who reference, I’m just not sure it really fits me.  I deleted the only draft of a post I was writing on theism, and I wouldn’t describe myself as an atheist anyway.  The deleted post covered it, but I’m not sure what I would call myself.

And that’s the final change.  I had about 6 drafts, all waiting for a mystical “some day” to be edited and posted.  That was an ever-growing pile of lies I was telling myself, so they’re gone.  I thought I had some good writing in a couple of pieces, but it was mostly the same steaming pile of crap over and over.  I don’t know how many times I can get away with saying I am sad about being lame, but I get the feeling if I want to find the line to cross I’ll have to turn around.  This is also somewhat like “The E-mail DMZ” only on steroids.  And a blog, you know, instead of E-mail.

When you click on that link, browse the site a bit.  The guy has some good ideas.

That’s all I got for now.

Scott Brown won the Senate seat.  ”Huzzah and hurray,” say the Republicans, “we’re once again relevant!”  Of course, they’ve been building to this moment for a year, ever since the White House was unduly upset from their hands and into a historically black President.  Meanwhile, Democrats are going nuts, or so I’m told.  I haven’t been able to care enough to check on that myself.

You see, I barely did any research on this whole Coakley/Brown affair.  To be quite honest, no one really made a fuss on my Twitter stream until about two days ago; and, since I’ve become quite disillusioned with our system of government, I only read the news when it’s slapping me in the face.  However, since it tossed everyone into such a tizzy tonight, I finally looked Scott Brown up on Wikipedia to see what kind of sack of crap America had bought itself this time (Libertarian-flavored, it turns out).*

About halfway down the page, I noticed a mention of a campaign ad where the Democratic candidate slammed (perhaps inaccurately) her challenger on a bill he proposed in “Massachussetes.”  That, right there, told me everything I needed to know about the campaign.  Well, that and the fact that, with the election squarely in her pocket (MA is a blue state, after all), she took a week off to let her opponent build up steam.  Democrats lost this like they lost 2004′s run for President: sheer and utter stupidity.

I’d bemoan this, but it’s just par for the course these days.  Democrats had a chance to tell conservatives to take their unsustainable tax cuts and shove them, and to give the country a chance at bona fide health care for people within our borders who desperately need it.  Instead, they wandered from topic to topic, and after some loony bins started being meanie poo-poo heads and acting like 5-year-olds at town halls and no one could muster up a single “shut the fuck up you crazy S.O.B., I’m talking,” they got scared and backed down.  Again.

I was a political idealist, once upon a time.  I thought that one of the two extremes, with enough sanity and moderation, could make things work in this country.  If conservatives gained a stronghold, we’d have a smaller government with fewer taxes, but fewer programs to suck the revenue stream dry.  That’s not my choice, I’d rather help people with government than give them the finger and say “not my problem,” but that’d require higher taxes.  Both ideas have merit, if you take into account the need for someone to balance the books at the end of the day.

But when we had conservatives in charge, we got fear.  We got tax cuts and explosions in spending.  We got a social agenda that looked like it longed for the pure and holy days where sinful acts like interracial dating were beaten out of people.  We got imperialism run amok, miring us in wars that we had no business starting.  I’d say more about the conservative years, but I think people blogged it to death just fine without me.

Then, the glorious hope from the heavens came.  2006: the great big upset.  For the first time in 12 years, congress was a bright and shining blue.  But we got nothing.  2 years of hand-wringing and complaining and the best we could get is blame on the fact that they couldn’t override a veto on Bush, they just didn’t have the numbers.  Thank whatever gods you like, then, that Barack Obama, the Champion of Change, swooped in.  After battling Hillary for Prom Queen for a year, he took Pennsylvania Avenue by storm.

But we got nothing.  Again.

Some liberal pundits talk about how much Barack Obama has done.  Maybe it’s more like Snow Leopard was to Mac OS X: it’s all under the hood.  But we aren’t treated to rousing speeches anymore.  We’re treated to meetings with the opposition, to see if maybe they’ll sell their agenda up the creek for tea and cookies.  Democrats didn’t learn from the other side of the aisle: you take the power you’ve got and you ram through your agenda, and you don’t care if half the country disagrees with you.  You won’t win them over with passionate pleas of “can’t we all just get along.”  You win them over by beating them and trumpeting the success of that which they didn’t support.

Of course, the core will never believe you.  But the people on the edges, the ones swaying on the fence, they can be won over by success.  They’ll never be won over by cowardice.  And that brings us to tonight.  After a barely-fought and not-really-particularly-contested fight for Massachusetts, Democrats lost the ability to block a filibuster (if they ever had it).  At this point, it hardly seems like the agenda will change at all.  Things that wouldn’t come to a vote before will still manage not to come to a vote.

The future does look more grim, though.  The political pendulum doesn’t seem to have stayed very long on the left.  If all that happens is fiscal conservatism, I’ll call us all lucky.  But I don’t foresee that.  The talking heads warning us of ever-impending doom and war, against the world and against each other, are still out there.  Some espouse libertarian ideals of social responsibility and fiscal conservatism, but most are willing to stoke the fires that burn us the most.  I don’t want another world where I have to fear what my government is willing to do to me to safeguard against largely phantasmal enemies at the gate, but if Democrats don’t shape up and grow a pair, that’s where we’re headed.

* Note that I’m not saying conservatives are sacks of crap.  Politicians are sacks of crap.

I don’t care much about anything.  Deliberately dispassionate reactions to the world have long divorced me from anything resembling a damn I could possibly give.  Unfortunately, it didn’t do anything to relieve me of my regrets.  Because, while I look forward into a dismal future of doing the same thing day in and day out, and can’t seem to muster up the essence of being – the will – to change my course, I look back and see every single missed opportunity and bemoan it.

It is no one’s fault but my own.

I had a discussion tonight with my partner Larry about school, to which I intend to return shortly.  I explained that I’m going back to discover that in which I might still find interest, and specifically not going back because I have a topic which rocks my world; although, the major I’ve selected certainly does interest me.  Essentially, I am going back deliberately for the “finding myself” period of college wherein a major is a priority, but not a fixed and immutable point.  This was met with abject disdain: “But you’ll be wasting your time and your money.”

My response was abrupt and ended the conversation as abruptly: “I don’t care.”

And that pretty much sums it up.  I’m going back, to a community college of all things, to start a program in foreign languages.  I have a trajectory, – an arc, whatever – that I’d like to follow which ends with me enmeshing all I’ve learned into a patchwork career which could be both rewarding and interesting.  Of course, it relies on a lot happening almost exactly as I imagine, but a shaky plan is quite literally infinitely more than the nothing I had before.

Because, you see, it’s hard to figure out what you want to do when you just can’t dredge up any passion for life.  Once it’s been sucked out of you and the tiniest spark of inspiration is all that’s left, you just kind of have to roll with it.  I can’t sit around and wait and think of what will light the proverbial burning fires in my soul; absolutely nothing ever will.  There will no lightning bolt, descending from the heavens to strike me with great inspiration and insight.  There is nothing but a growing gnawing darkness encircling my life since I left school, and no one’s interested in helping bring me back to the light.

Don’t get me wrong, school was a prickly place, full of self-centered braggarts who couldn’t be bothered with beings they considered lesser than themselves.  However, since then I’ve just reduced the quality and quantity of those people, not their sentiments.  At least in a place designed to foster creativity and intellectual pursuit, I could, you know, be creative and pursue intellectual activities.

So that’s it, I’m going to jump back into the pool.  Maybe I’ll find out that foreign languages aren’t my cup of tea and I’ll have to switch up after testing the waters.  Maybe it’ll be like waking up from a nightmare into a bright and shining new day.  I don’t know, and I truly, honestly, don’t care anymore.  Everyone tells me to be more decisive but rushes to make sure I second-guess myself at every turn.

I’m done second-guessing.

So, Baratunde suggests we need a #NewHate – Race, gender, sexuality, etc. are all “played out.”  Of course, I can see where he’s coming from; we’ve got plenty of high-profile people of various demographics now, and only the lunatic fringe (less fringe-y in some parts of the world/country than others) really has a huge problem with it.  I take it that the fires of irrational hate take energy to keep stoking and with Americans’ attentions being distracted by such activities as getting fatter by the second, we just don’t have the vitality for our old hatreds.

Of course, his solution is to hate people who wear their scarves differently.  That’s silly.  No, I don’t mean it’s not a valid reason to hate someone, I’ve seen some atrocious scarf-mountings in my day and I was this close ( |—| ) to calling Pat Robertson up to spew a vitriolic stream of moronic faith-based hate on them.  Rather, I think he’s missing one of the following two key points of irrational hatred: that it be something people have little choice in being part of, and that it be completely and utterly a stupid reason to hate someone (points for the latter, Baratunde).

My theory is this: let’s hate people based on the number of vowels in their names.  Personally, every one of my names has two vowels in it (even my nickname does, since “y” is only sometimes a vowel), and I think that’s the way it should be.  It keeps things simple, and that’s the way God intended it (he gets off the hook cause he’s God and all).  So join me, my two-vowelled brethren, as we take the world back for the righteous and the proud!

On the other side of the cloth wall of my cubicle sits a black guy.  So far, he hasn’t shown up for work yet today.  That’s unfortunate for me, cause I needed some information that only he has the skills to provide.  A few minutes ago, I heard discussion from his space, space he shares with another coworker who is in today.  Awesome!  I get my information at long last!

So I wheel myself out from behind the wall with great vigor, only to find that my coworker has not arrived, but rather a FedEx guy, who happens to be black.  “Oh no,” I think to myself, “I’ve just made a terribly racist assumption.”  You see, I recognized the voice as belonging to my coworker.  Being as they’re both black, naturally this meant it was that sole trait which registered in my brain.

Or is it really?  I know there’s a terrifically stupid assumption that “all [race] people look alike” that most racists make.  Naturally, it follows that “all [race] people sound alike” is a similarly racist statement.  Of course, I’ve never been good with identifying unseen voices.  When I first spoke with Eric and Matt on the phone, I couldn’t tell them apart, and as a white person that should be easy as pie for me, right?  They’re even from different areas of the country and have (supposedly) different accents.

So, after thinking so ashamedly of myself for a few minutes, I’ve finally figured out that maybe I’m not the worst human being ever for being voice-identification challenged.  But that leads me to wonder, how many times is it that we assume some sort of racial profiling is in effect because the person involved is of a specific race, when nothing could be further from the truth?  I realize there are plenty of instances where people do profile; but, sometimes maybe jumping the gun and assuming something is racist, i.e. taking special note of someone’s race to make that judgement, is actually the more racist part.