DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

MoveOn sent me an email claiming The Day After Tomorrow is “the movie the White House doesn’t want you to see.”

That’s just dumb. It’s clear to me that the folks in the White House are naive, or deceitful about the dangers of global warming, but do I think they really care whether I see the latest Hollywood blockbuster? Um, no. I think — well, I hope — Bush & Co. are thinking about Iraq and the economy and national security, and not about whether I go see some celluloid fantasy about tidal waves and icicles.

I think MoveOn has done an amazing job of engaging citizens in the political process, and I hope they never stop. But this, in my opinion, is a misstep; they’ve apparently overlooked this important lesson from history. I’d rather they go a day, just one day, without emailing me about some damn perceived emergency or other, than bother me about a movie. Sheesh.

California assembly bill AB 1967, the California Marriage License Non-Discrimination Act, “would define marriages in California as a civil contract between two persons, allowing same sex couples access to the same rights and responsibilities of marriage as heterosexual couples in the state” (according to the legislation summary from the bill’s author, Mark Leno).

The issue is wildly contested, as you can imagine.

Benjamin Lopez, a lobbyist for Traditional Values Coalition, said foes of same-sex marriage weren’t taking any chances, despite forecasts that the bill won’t get very far this year.

“We are marching on, ready for a complete showdown,” said Lopez, who missed the hearing in order to prepare a mass mail campaign against the bill. “We’re stopping at nothing to kill it.”

I can only imagine the junk mail piece his group is designing. “Beware the gay invasion!” It will show the US flag, and cite threats to the principles on which America was founded, I’m guessing. God is an American.

Had Lopez attended the hearing on this bill that he’s so hot to destroy, he might have heard the startling new evidence from the Williams Project (which is “the nation’s first think tank dedicated to the field of sexual orientation law and public policy”). According to their new study, titled (apparently by someone who spent more time studying Stats than English) The Impact of Allowing Same-Sex Couples to Marry on California’s Budget:

Allowing same-sex couples to marry in California will result in a net gain of $22.3 to $25.2 million each year, for the State budget.

Lopez, predictably, dismissed the study.

“It’s a matter of who you’re going to believe. Are you going to believe a professor on a liberal campus who wants this garbage crammed down the throats of Californians?”

Well, if you ask me who I’m going to believe, I’d want the choices spelled out:

• a lobbyist with the ethically repugnant “Traditional Values Coalition,” which claims homosexuality has roots in Marxist ideology?! Even more ridiculous, the TVC published a document claiming “many of the strategies used by homosexuals to bring about cultural change in America are taken from Hitler’s writings and propaganda warfare manuals.”
• a Harvard Law graduate and UCLA law professor with a history of donating time to the HIV/AIDS community, working with a “think tank” whose founding principle is to be “independent and non-partisan.”

With all respect to the lobbyist, I’m definitely going to have to go with the “professor on a liberal campus” on this one. I disagree that anything is being crammed down my throat — my mouth is closed, preventing stupid shit from flying out unannounced. Perhaps that’s a lesson lobbyists everywhere can benefit from.

What the heck is a ‘liberal campus’ anyway?

I was falling for it — the name-calling, the feigned indignation, the party line. Politics. What a pain.

In an effort to make this space a little more salty, a little more sweet, a bit less sour, and a lot less bitter, I have decided not to write about politics for a while. Maybe a long while.

But what about umami, I hear you asking. Yes, I’m going for more umami too. Someone pass me the Accent. Better a little MSG than more of the he-said, she-said crap. Jon Carroll’s plea for a return to the issues played a part in my decision. The war of personalities is an irritating distraction; it belittles the entire process. I’m done with it.

I’ll still write about environmental issues, even if they nearly always have a political edge. The environment is the thing I really care about. If not for that, I’d be utterly apolitical, and happier for it.

When I heard about MoveOn PAC’s Bake Sale, a coordinated grassroots effort to raise money for the Kerry campaign, I thought of Spinal Tap: there is such a fine line between clever and stupid.

It would likely make the news. Free PR is clever. But any single contribution to the opposition from a defense contractor or energy company would eclipse the total take of a nationwide bake sale, making the entire effort somewhat pointless.

Besides, I thought, who has time to bake cookies for a political campaign?

I do, as it turns out. And I wasn’t the only one. When I checked the MoveOn bake-sale site, I was surprised to see 35 volunteer bakers staffing three bake sales in this small town.

Given our normally tight weekend schedule, we had to compromise somewhat. We planned to make cookies anyway (for a dinner party), but getting them done in time for the bake sale required us to adjust our schedule. The adjustment meant not going to the store to pick up two of the necessary ingredients; instead, we substituted lemon zest for orange, and we used the wrong kind of coconut.

The chosen cookie recipe is nearly without peer: Nancy Jamison’s Coconut-Cranberry Chews. We’ve made the cookies many times before with uniformly excellent results. But our substitutions had an unexpected effect. The first batch sucked: dry, somewhat hard, not-entirely-sweet balls with a slightly astringent finish due to the lemon.

We added a shot of orange juice for a later batch. This cured the dry problem and the ball problem; it turned the batch into one Pangaea supercookie, encompassing all the earth’s landmasses, or at least all the dough on the cookie sheet. This cookie was so big, if we’d tried to dunk it in milk, it would have caused a tide.

This episode notwithstanding, I have a knack for cookies. I’ve seen a lot of sad-looking cookies, especially at, for example, community bake sales, and I’d looked forward to delivering a batch of something better. So it was with a distinct air of regret that I loaded a plate with the best of my own sad-looking cookies, and drove them downtown to find one of the local bake sales.

I’d had to choose between the perfectionist route — skipping the bake sale because my cookies didn’t turn out the way I expected — or participating with a slightly sub-par result. In the end I realized this was a completely appropriate conclusion for participation in a political process. I’d started with the best of intentions, made a slight compromise to accomodate a conflict, and the result was disappointing, leaving the consumer with a bitter aftertaste.

President George W. Bush is famous for his malapropisms and grammatical gaffes. There’s even a book about them: the cleverly titled Bush Dyslexicon.

I’ve found exclusive evidence that Bush makes more mistakes than most people realize: He’s even switching words that sound the same! Newsday.com quotes Bush as saying “We must not waiver!” Heh.

More seriously, President Bush has a problem. Maybe some of these are transcription errors? He can’t conjugated verbs. He can’t match subject/verbs/object number. He can string lots of word together but it don’t always form sense.

• “This has been tough weeks in that country.”
• “The terrorists who take hostages or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the same ideology…”
• “When this nation sees a threat, a gathering threat, we got to deal with it.”
• “He’s figuring out the nature of the entity we’ll be handing sovereignty over.”

Even more seriously, the author of the Dyslexicon came to a frightening conclusion.

Bush is not an imbecile. He’s not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he’s incapable of empathy. He has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he’s a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss.

He has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he’s speaking punitively, when he’s talking about violence, when he’s talking about revenge.

When he struts and thumps his chest, his syntax and grammar are fine.