Grim News

Let’s face it.  I’m a southerner.  I was born in the south (South Carolina), spent my youth in the south (Florida and Georgia), went to college in the south (Georgia Tech) and remain in the south to this day.  I know what grits are made of, and I believe that there is only two kinds of tea in this world, “sweet tea” and “swotty nancy-boy fancy pants tea”.

That said, I spent most of my adult life as a political conservative.  I believed that a government that governs least, governs best.  Unlike many of my southern brethren (and sistren), I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the “Religious Right” or other elements of the Republican party that differed from my own philosophy of “government has no business in my business”.

Then, one day, I woke up and the religious kooks took over the asylum.  Dubya was out there doing his best “guns, gawd, and gub’mint” routine, and there was no place in the Republican party for a guy who just wanted to be left alone to live his life his own way.  I couldn’t go with the Democrats because they were the party of “liberal college kids, poor people, Yankees, and Ted Kennedy”.  I really didn’t care what they had to offer, which is fortunate because they had very little to offer except opposition to Bush.

In 2004, I held my nose as I voted for John Kerry.  I wasn’t voting for him as much as I was voting “no” on 4 more years of Dubya-nomics.  John Kerry is about as inspiring as a pep talk from Ben Stein.  I was dreading 2008 because I assumed that it would be the coronation of Hillary Clinton, and like most other southerners, I believed that she was one step away from the Antichrist himself.

A funny thing happened on the way to her coronation.

I started paying attention to some of the rhetoric coming from the Democrats.  I started hearing words like “middle class tax cut” and “balanced budget”.  Instead of the “I’d like to teach the world to sing” foreign policy stances of Liberals past, I was hearing “We’ve got to go into Afghanistan and Pakistan and get Osama bin Laden”.  I was hearing criticism of the Iraq war, not because they were defeatist, or pacifist, but because our government was going after the wrong guy.  Meanwhile, our “Conservative” administration was promoting things like the Patriot Act, and engaging in a systematic erosion of rights, civil and otherwise, in the name of some nebulous “War of Terror”.

In all of this, I still held the belief that “Socialism is Evil”.  I was particularly fond of the canard that Socialized health care would be run with the cost-effectiveness of the military and the bedside manner of the IRS.

Then I started reading stuff like this…

One of my favorite political authors is James Carville.  When he managed Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992, he had 3 issues on the white board in his “War Room”

1. Change vs. more of the same.
2. The economy, stupid.
3. Don’t forget health care.

Sound familiar?  It’s a winning formula for any election.  If things are good, you want more of the same.  If not, go the other way.  I’ve heard that somewhere else, but I can’t remember where.

One of Carville’s most memorable phrases is one that he got from his momma.  “Tell me who you run with, and I’ll tell you who you are.”  In fact, I seem to remember stealing that phrase for something, but I can’t remember precisely what it was…

It is an article of faith in some parts of this country that Europe is a Socialist cess-pool where nobody works, and the government is nanny to a bunch of lazy malcontents.  Of course those of us who have actually spoken to a real live European know that they seem to be happy, well-adjusted, and oh-so-amused at the continuing hijinks of “Those crazy Americans”.  We work harder, for more hours and get less for it than our European friends, and yet we’re the ones turning our collective noses up at them.  While Europeans are enjoying between 4 and 6 weeks of vacation (PAID!!!) per year, many Americans don’t even take the 2 to 3 weeks per year that we receive.  Some might argue that adopting a European approach would “slow us down”, however the overall health and welfare of a society is measured in terms that go beyond mere economic output.

When you consider that much of our economic “productivity” is based on borrowing, lending, and speculation, maybe a more pragmatic, “slower” approach is in order.  Maybe re-channeling some of that economic activity directly into things that benefit all of us such as health care, or more worker-friendly labor regulations might be better for us in the long run.

Oh, by the way… Last year the European Union surpassed the United States as the largest economy in the world.  Maybe we could learn something from them.

…and all we can do is smile back.

I got a note from a friend of mine recently.  Josh and I go way back.  We went to college together, we drank together, we worked together.  I was fortunate enough to meet his family on multiple occasions, and we have both stood as groomsmen at each of our respective weddings.

We’re tight, in other words.

In the course of the 15 or 16 years that we have known each other, we developed little in-jokes that we could make at each other’s expense, knowing that nobody else in the world might find it funny, but we would.  Whether it was me losing my temper at a movie theater and throwing a full large coke at his feet, (or him bringing that story up at the most awkward possible time), or my making jokes about dating his little sister which would cause him to come as close to physical violence as anything else in this world. (for a doubly ironic twist, I’m twice his size… literally)  Josh has one of the most biting senses of humor that I’ve ever known, and a total lack of fear with respect to timing and audience.  He’d make a killer stand-up comic.

I tell you all of this because Josh wrote to me about a robbery in New Orleans.  A couple of punks went into a bakery and held the place up at gunpoint.   An off-duty police officer shot one of the teenagers twice in the chest while the other robber fled the scene.  As the wounded thug was falling, he started spraying bullets all over the place.  Thankfully, nobody else was hurt, but what really chilled me to the bone was reading the name of the Bakery’s owner.

Josh’s little sister.

Hillary Guttman and I have spoken maybe a dozen words to one another in all of the decade and a half that Josh and I have been friends.  However, I am extremely proud of her reaction to the botched robbery that could have very easily ended her life.  She didn’t “play the victim” or crawl into a shell out of fear. No, she kept her head high and dealt with the aftermath of a very dangerous situation with nerve and humor.

Gunshot Cookies

She patched up all of the bullet holes with little cutout hearts because she was thankful that those bullets only hit furniture and not people.

If you are ever in New Orleans and have the opportunity, stop by the Laurel Street Bakery (5433 Laurel St., 897-0576) and buy something, a muffin, a cookie, just something.  Folks like Hillary need to know that there are people in this world who admire them and are rooting for them.

As for the robbers, I can only hope that Darwin does his job on these two slowly and painfully.

Should kids celebrate Halloween?

Absolutely!  Halloween is fun.  Halloween results in sweet candy goodness.  Haloween teaches kids to worship the devil and believe in ghosts and demons.

*sound of a record needle scratching*

Are you freakin’ serious?

While the link above, from Pat Robertson’s Klan of Kooky Kristians,  does mention the pagan origins of the holiday.  It perpetuates the myth that Samhain is some sort of “God of the Dead”.  No, pagans do not run around worshiping some ooky-spooky death god.  Samhain represents the end of Summer and is closer in meaning to the Celtic New Year.

As far as the whole “worshipping the dead” thing is concerned…

“Wiccans as a time to celebrate the lives of those who have passed on, and it often involves paying respect to ancestors, family members, elders of the faith, friends, pets and other loved ones who have died. In some rituals the spirits of the departed are invited to attend the festivities.”

In other words, it’s a party.  Have fun.

Yeah, that’s a dangerous message to send our children…

I just got home from a weekend excursion to Alabama.  My wife and I took in an Auburn football game (brutal loss…) and spent the weekend visiting her family.  All in all, it was a relatively pleasant experience…

Except for…

As you might have guessed by now, I’m backing Barack Obama in this year’s presidential election.  If this surprises you, I would invite you to click on the Politics category and ready pretty much anything you find there.  While I knew, intellectually, that Alabama was “Red State” country and largely in support of John McCain, I really didn’t understand, in my gut, what that meant until I went to the game on Saturday.

Maybe you’ve heard those stories about people at McCain rallies who say that Obama is ‘an Arab’ and dismiss them as the rantings of scattered morons in a sea of otherwise rational human beings.  I talked to more than a few McCain supporters at the game (a local politician was giving out McCain/Palin stickers, and nearly everyone in the crowd of over 80,000 people had one on), and ‘Arab’ is only the first in an alphabetical list of things I heard Obama called this weekend.

• Arab
• Communist
• Foreigner
• Mohammedan
• Muslim
• The “N-bomb”
• Non-Christian
• Socialist
• Un-American
• Uppity

I heard more than one person state flatly that although they knew nothing about Obama’s policies, they would vote for McCain because they didn’t want a black man in the White House.  I honestly thought we were past this kind of thing as a nation.  These weren’t “Bubbas” wearing overalls and driving pickup trucks.  These were men and women whose only distinguishing superficial characteristics from an otherwise intelligent human being was an eastern Alabama accent.  These were doctors and lawyers and otherwise educated men and women saying things like “Obama should know his place” and “I won’t vote for any Muslim.”

To be fair, not every person wearing a McCain/Failin’ sticker was racially motivated.  I heard folks talk about how Obama was going to raise taxes for them despite the fact that none of the people who voiced this fear were in a tax bracket affected adversely by Obama’s economic plan.  I heard folks talk about how Obama was going to make the US weaker even though the current President has done more to damage the United States around the world than any President in my lifetime and McCain’s plan is to continue those policies.

I don’t know what scared me more.  The fact that they didn’t know any better? or the fact that the information is so easy to find, yet they don’t care enough to look for it.  In a way, it is a testament to the power of the Conservative Christian movement in the south.  I saw very little curiosity and a great deal of lock-step dogmatism masquerading as intelligent thought.  Having lived in the south for my entire life, I know for a fact that not everyone falls into that stereotype, but seeing such a large number of those people in one place was a bit frightening.  Those votes count just as much as mine does, and they put as much thought into who will be the most powerful leader in the world as I might put into which football game I’m going to watch next weekend.

It’s not all politics around here, I promise.

As some of you may know, my “day job” as a writer is a column called Ask Massively over at Massively.com.  In it, I take questions from all comers about issues that matter to MMO players.  I have heard comments from some friends and family along the lines of “I don’t know what an MMORPG is and I don’t understand half of what you’re talking about, but I liked your column.”

Forgive me for laughing a little.  It’s hard to remember what it was like not being a gamer because I’ve been one for most of my life.

That brings me to the topic at hand.  I haven’t exactly been burning up the Internet lately with my game play.  I’m subscribed to 3 games, down from 6, but I haven’t had much time to play lately.  Part of the reason (ok, the biggest part, by far) is my new daughter Samantha.  The other major reason is the upcoming expansion to World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King, which goes live on November 13.  I have been toying with the idea of picking up Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning but I don’t know if I will have time to give the game a fair shake once Lich King goes live.

Those of you who aren’t gamers, let me see if I can put this question in perspective for you.  If you are a sports fan who likes both hockey and football and your favorite out-of-town teams are both playing in your town on the same day.  Which game do you go see?   An MMORPG is an odd mix of entertainment concepts.  In one respect, a game is like an interactive television show or movie.  You tune in (or log on) and become the main character in your own story.  The other characters (players) are your co-stars, and nobody knows how the story ends.  In another way, playing an MMO is like going to a theme party.  Your friends are all there, you have a common task or goal, and there will be plenty of stories to tell afterwards.  The term virtual world is overused these days, but it really is the most accurate description of the genre.

So with a limited budget of available free time, how do you pick the virtual world that you want to inhabit?  Do you go with something new and exciting? Or do you stay where you are established and comfortable?