Ciao, Tutti!
I am writing today, after just writing yesterday, for a few reasons. First and foremost, I watched the debate yesterday after posting, and, needless to say, I have a lot more to write. You may even be able to tell where this is going from the title of today's blog. I also figured the subject will allow me an opportunity to touch on some things I wasn't able to last week because of the Avatar thing (you didn't actually read that, did you?). We need to get that stuff out of the way and let the important stuff come in.
I do have issue with this title, though. I really did not want to talk about fear, to be honest. It's been a key Republican tactic to manipulate our fears and scare us away from the democrats and our own consciousnesses, in turn creating more cynicism. Either way, I did not want to give in to fear, but I fear that I have failed. The plan worked. I'm scared s***less. To find out why, well, you'll have to keep reading.
The 5 Things That Scare Me That Could Actually Happen
5) The 2008-2009 Sports seasons.
Even though I am specifically referring to basketball, I am talking about all of them. Even hockey. Every team I have any connection with seems to be going down. A's and Giants out of the playoffs, Tigers wasting their money on has-beens, Cubs about to be swept... again... I may have to root for the Devil Rays. That's sad. In football there hasn't been much to root for in at least a decade, and this year is no exception. Hopefully Brady's injury will keep New England out of contention this year. At least I don't care about football very much. The NCAA basketball and football teams from all four colleges I pay attention to, Cal, Stanford, MSU, and UM, don't seem to have anything special going for them, though I must admit I am not as avid a college fan as a pro fan. But the NBA has the worst of it all. The Warriors are out their star from last year and his back-up for the start of the season, and they were only able to replace him with Corey Magette, who is okay. The team will do well, but not well enough to make the playoffs in the power-packed west. And, finally, I sing my swan song for the Pistons team I feel like I've grown up with. After announcing each player except for Stucky was up for trade, Dumars couldn't pull anything together but an over sized contract for a proven nobody, and we all know Detroit has no more need for anyone named "Kwame." You are looking at the most unmotivated team in basketball. For the third year in a row. It will be painful to watch.
4) Needles.
I dread needles. This is an irrational fear. I can't even blame the Republicans for this one.
3) Movie Adaptations.
This is not just about Avatar. This is about every good book or TV show or comic book out there that someone looked at and hastily made a movie that just didn't work. Here are two perfect examples: "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Golden Compass." There are other examples I don't need to get into. What terrible wastes of good ideas these two movies were! However, things did not have to be like this. Three examples of movie adaptations that went amazingly well: "Lord of the Rings," "No Country for Old Men," and "The Princess Bride" (confession: I didn't actually like "No Country" that much). We all know how well Batman has been doing and how poorly the Fantastic Four went, and, on the subject of superheroes, no one can quite realize that the Hulk should just be put down for a while. The main point is that it is possible to do a great adaptation or fail miserably. When you take a medium that already exists, you have the weight of all the fans on your shoulders.
There are two adaptations I am talking about, one I talked about at length last week (correction: while unconfirmed, I heard that the Avatar movie coming out in 2010 is the first in a trilogy. That changes my "advice" from last week a little). I am also referring to, of course, "Soon I Will Be Invincible," former UC Berkeley English graduate student Austin Grossman's movie adaptation of his amazingly written novel. If the movie is half as good as the book it should be fine. But the problem is that we expect so much more now that the standards are set so high. Perhaps this isn't a problem but simply a risk. I've heard risk-taking isn't a good move in this economy. Speaking of the economy, that should be on this list. What did I write "needles" for? Who cares about that?
2) Teaching Constitutional Law
Yes, I forgot to mention this yesterday. Every Saturday morning, starting tomorrow, I will team teach a class of about 20 high-school upperclassmen about the constitution and important Supreme Court cases. I am completely unqualified for this job and I just got the teaching manual yesterday. However, I do know a thing or two (three at most) about the constitution, which makes me more qualified than some of the other undergraduate students teaching in the program. Plus I'll have two law students to help out, so it should be fine. Emphasis on the third to last word in that sentence. Should. I am still quite a bit scared about this, not knowing what the class will be like, not knowing how much charge I should take, how much the team teachers know, and so on and so forth. Basically, I'm scared. It's the Republicans' fault.
As the Onion says: "Undergraduate Student Under Graduate Student."
Whatever that means.
1) John McCain's Running Mate.
This is the real reason I wanted to blog today, and this is the real reason I am terrified.
First, some clarification: Since Sarah Palin was selected to be McCain's running mate on the day I flew back to Detroit, I have never seen Sarah Palin or any comedian looking like her speak. I never saw the famous SNL skit with Tina Fey and I never saw the equally famous interview with two of my least favorite people in the world, Katie Couric and Sarah Palin. I never even saw John Stewart or Stephen Colbert talk about her. I researched her stances on the New York Times as news stories about her came out, skipping over the dumb scandals that reporters began to dig up. I found out her stance and was already pretty scared of that. It was all I wanted to know, as I said yesterday. I refused to let her become important to me until this debate. Yesterday was basically my introduction to Sarah Palin.
I have to me make myself more clear. I am not actually most scared of Sarah Palin herself. She might be somewhere in my top 100. I am not even scared enough of her policies to put them on this list. I don't like them and I think the world would be in a terrible place if they were implemented, but they were always there, in some politician or another. It didn't have to be about her. The fact that she stands for everything I stand against, it seems, is scary, but not why I write today.
I am not even writing about how scared I am that she could actually become vice president. Not just that! A year from now we could all be under a Sarah Palin presidency! That is truly terrifying, much more than needles. More than bad movie adaptations, too. If M Night Shyamalan took time to campaign for Obama and won him the election and his trilogy suffered because of that, I would forgive him in a heartbeat. Same for you, Austin Grossmam.
But that is not why I write. You see, I watched the debate in horror. I had never seen Sarah Palin before since she was nominated, don't forget. Her policies scared me, yes, but not nearly as much as what was obviously lacking. That is, any knowledge about anything she was talking about. She had her positions and all she was doing was stating them and using incendiary language, trying every once in a while to inset her two or three memorized facts to support her side. It was obvious when there was a question she had rehearsed for because she would wink at the camera and pull out her smile and "normal person's" accent from the fingertip-land of America. Otherwise she would freeze up and start spewing catch phrases and diverting the question (yes, I know, not answering questions is an important aspect of debates). No matter what she had to stick to her limited political vocabulary and very limited political knowledge and repeat her empty speech constantly.
I could not look at this like an undecided voter, no matter how hard I tried. But I could look at it like someone who was undecided about Sarah Palin. And, as someone who had never seen her before, I could not believe how badly Biden out-debated her. I had to ask my friends if Biden was really that good a debater or if she was just making him look good. It was a massacre. Every time she said something Biden always could come back with at least a satisfactory answer (though never quite the best answer), while Palin never gave an answer to Biden's challenges that was even remotely convincing. All she had was her Alaskan charm and her catch phrases. I swear, she said "team of mavericks" so many times I thought she was talking about Dirk Nowitzki and Mark Cuban.
I got a pretty bad impression of her. I'm not exactly a fair judge, but it was obvious she was terrible. I also don't like McCain's super right-wing policy, but this doesn't change the fact that I think he debates on a higher level than Obama. It was blatantly obvious that Biden blew Palin out of the water.
Now for the scary part: after the debate the commentators on ABC said their initial reaction was that it was about EVEN! They said an undecided voter probably would not have been able to tell who won. They said Palin did great at portraying herself as a common person and attacking Obama while Biden showed incredible calm and restraint. The New York Times called it a "recovery performance" and that she "exceeded her expectations." Sarah Palin said she thought "things went very well last night." I couldn't believe it; I still can't believe it. Did they watch the same debate as me?
The problem was that they all had watched the devastating interviews with Katie Couric and heard all of her gaffs, which I was filled in on by my friends and family after the debate. She did so poorly before that everyone thought she did WELL yesterday, even though she definitively lost the debate in my mind and my mind only. The only reason it was a so-called tie was because she didn't gaff. Everyone was expecting her to make a huge, career-ending blunder, and because she didn't the debate was a tie.
Excuse me while I go curse out a window for a moment.
So I guess number 0) of the things that scare me is all of you! What's wrong with you all? How come our standards have become so low that we can accept this travesty? The New York Knicks could improve their record and still be the worst team in basketball, and would disgruntled Knicks fans say it was a successful season? If yesterday's debate shows Sarah Palin at her best, then we are in serious trouble, people! Not f***ing up is not good enough for our vice president! Just because we all expected to see her fall down like it was a boxing math or something doesn't mean she tied or did well. Let's get this straight:
She did well by her standards AND ONLY HER STANDARDS. She isn't even on the same playing field as John McCain, Joe Biden, or the uninspiring debater Barack Obama. She's barely even at student council level. I am fine with considering it a success FOR HER. The McCain campaign did not collapse with the economy yesterday, as some expected it might. That is a success FOR HER. That's a success? Listen, people, this woman could possibly be president in a year, and we need better than not screwing up.
Hey, but she seems like a nice person to have a beer with. I'll bet she's more coherent when she's drunk.
Please email me and tell me why this shouldn't scare me so much. But only do so if you really, truly think I shouldn't be scared about all this. Especially the needles. And the economy. Why didn't I write about the economy?
I think more cursing out of windows is necessary here.
-Sam goldsmith
