MegaMiscellanea

A pair of middle-aged women showed up at my door the other night. They had clipboards and they were wearing blue buttons. They didn’t have to say it, but they did anyway: “We’re talking to people about voting for Barack Obama,” she said, in the passive, indirect way that a therapist would tell you to talk to somebody who disagreed with you.

An aside: I live on the outskirts of one of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest suburbs. Many of my friends grew up here, and they all agree that a democrat in this area is extremely rare.

My first instinct is to try to get rid of them. I don’t want to have a conversation with strangers about something as personal and potentially explosive as politics. Someone I used to know went door-to-door as a child, for religious reasons. She said that the only guaranteed way to get rid of their particular branch of the big X was to say you’re an atheist. Because their church so adamantly rejected independent thought, a person who didn’t believe in God was the biggest threat to an impressionable child’s supple mind.

I admire these two ladies for what they were doing. I sure couldn’t do it, and I’ve tried. My friend Becky ran for Magistrate one year, and all my ex and I had to do, as part of her street team, was go up to peoples’ homes and knock on their doors and ask them to vote for Magistrate, and then ask them to vote for Becky, who happened to be the only girl on the ticket. It was easy. We even had pink pens to give out.

Becky didn’t really have a chance, as we discovered later. The guy who won was a local cop for a long, long time and basically already knew the whole town. She might as well have been running against everybody’s cousin.

So I understood how hard it was for them to come up to the front door of somebody with an undermowed lawn and a talking Darth Vader on his car’s dashboard and ask him to vote for Barack Obama. Maybe they thought it was a slam dunk. The Apple sticker on my car probably got their hopes up.

“Do you know who you’re voting for?”

The first thing I did was apologize.

“I’m sorry. Yes, I do.”

“Oh?” they said, pencils raised.

“Probably Bob Barr?”

Long, pregnant pause.

“Well,” said the leader. “We’ll be sure to write that one down.”

I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. I’m still not sure. She made no move to write anything at all. Did she think I was making a name up?

“Well, I’m a Libertarian,” I said, adding a period to the end of the conversation.

“And you’re voting with your party,” she said, nodding. “Thanks for your time!”

“Thank you, and uh, well, um, good luck,” I said, and closed the door. Carriage return.

I don’t know if I would have gotten an argument if I had said I was a Republican, or if they would have tried to sway an admitted independent. Most folks don’t really know what to do with a Libertarian, because we probably agree with a lot of the things they believe, but with different priorities and different reasons.

It gave me an idea, though. Maybe the quickest way to get rid of door-to-door campaigners is to say you’re a Libertarian?

Reason Magazine’s greatest asset is its point of view: that any law or policy that directly infringes upon an individual’s right to pursue his own happiness must be very carefully considered, with a bias against such laws. This is why Libertarians scare people – we have some pretty major ideas in common with both parties, and yet fundamentally differ them. You can read their awesome, nonpartisan critiques here.

Who am I going to vote for? I haven’t decided yet. I’m not even sure I’ll be voting at all. I have an argument against VOTE VOTE VOTE AT ALL COSTS!, but I’ll save it for a later time. Not voting is a perfectly acceptable option in an election, and I might just exercise my right to abstain.

When I watch the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, I keep coming back to the same conclusion – these folks, every single one of them, is a what their detractors would call ivy-league elitist intellectuals. On both sides! Barack Obama and John McCain have more in common with each other than they do with us.

It’s all hype. It’s all marketing. Hillary Clinton is saying the same things that Democrats have been saying for decades: Republicans love rich people, hate the poor, want to privatize everything and only care about money and restricting your right to choose.

These candidates are reciting the same script, over and over again. They will continue to do so, the ultra-rich power-wranglers who will never have to worry about a mortgage payment, will play to their bases when they need to, open their arms to the independents when the polls lag, move closer to the center as the election day approaches and sneak through the finish line while their pundits and flacks accuse the other side of playing dirty.

In my own little way, in my own little red, brick bunker here in the rust belt, I voice my frustration and dissatisfaction with the status quo. I defy it in my own way, by writing these blogs, by posting passive-aggressive twitters and maybe even by staying home on election night.

What are you doing? Voting the party line?

It’s like Doctor Who meets Men in Black meets Pushing Daisies meets the Gilmore Girls.

Or, it’s: clever sci-techie sexless man and cute girlie companion fights evil monsters and alien creatures with a lot of fairy tale whimsy and lots and lots of smart, fast dialogue.

It’s about a plucky, young artist and her employment as the assistant to the eponymous Middleman, a lantern-jawed asskicker former Navy Seal who never swears and takes on every otherworldly menace with robotic precision and a slightly psychotic disposition. And his assistant/secretary/electron miscroscope is a robot old lady named Ida.

Like so many sci-fi projects similar to it, The Middleman’s cleverness comes not from its pedestrian premise but from its execution. The dialogue is snappy and long-winded in a way that’s both endearing and hard to follow, but ultimately very clever. The whole show is clever, but its weird plots are often ripped from old sci-fi novels (the pilot episode depicts hyper-evolved gorillas with voice boxes). Even so, the writers seem to be well aware of this and almost revel in its ripped-from-the-paperbacks style (witness such inside references as Shadam of the House of Corrino, Frank Herbert Middle School and 1965 Caladan Lane).

I’ve long wondered about an American answer to Doctor Who, and The Middleman is definitely a contender. Who-like longevity is another question; it only has, oh, about 747 episodes to go.

One of the simpler arguments against anarchism is the traffic law. Without somebody to enforce those, the common authoritarian argument goes, you wouldn’t even be able to drive to work.

I give you this Hanoi intersection as evidence of every individual human’s essential ability to govern himself:

(via Boing Boing)