Addictions

I’ve been more than a little frustrated by the president’s handling of this war in the past year; but we have to draw a line under that now. The past is the past. And George W. Bush is our president. He deserves a fresh start, a chance to prove himself again . . .

http://www.salon.com/opinion/right_hook/2004/11/09/onefingered_salute/index1.html

If I do not stop obsessing about political news, I will never write a piece of music again. I’ve written two this semester: One is a tiny voal piece talking about black clad anarchists objecting to non-fairtrade coffe. “In more FairTrade news, Marks and Spencer just switched to selling nothing but Fair Trade coffee.

Maybe if Starbucks switched over, those black clad anarchists would stop breaking thier windows” And the other is my Ann Coulter piece which everyone on earth has heard. Actually, it’s been played on two coasts and in two countries, so I’m kind of proud of that, but I need to move on. I’m working on something with Rush Limbaugh talking about prisoner abuse in Iraq, but Paul De Marinis did a piece with exactly the same process more than ten years ago and his sounds nicer than mine was going to. Alvin told me to write the piece anyway. He also said that if I wanted something to sound beautiful, I shouldn’t use Limbaugh. “Garbage in, garbage out” he said. It’s also hanging my computer.
We’ve been talking in class about using text in music, for the last couple of weeks. Leticia Sonami is coming in a couple of weeks from today, so maybe we can talk about her piece Conversations With a Lightbulb as that has got a lot of spoken text in it. This week we listened to Copland’s Lincoln Portait or Portrait of Lincoln or whatever it’s called. The text does have some kind of pretentious constructs, but I mean, you can’t fault him for sounding like his time period, as some folks seem to want to do. His stuff is incredibly beautiful.
George Bush deserves a fresh start because he’s incumbent?? That quote was written by a swing voter before the election! So, What: He’s fucked up, let’s give him another shot???? Oh yeah, that’s why we have elections, to keep fuckup assholes in office! It all makes sense now! This is why we need term limits! Because we’re fucking idiots! People don’t deserve another shot at fucking up just because they’ve been fucking up!! How could anyone think that? What is wrong with people? What the hell kind of logic is that? “I disagree with everything he’s done, but he did get into office illegitamtely and so deserves another term.” WHAT?? What is the matter with people? Are the public schools really this bad? Does anyone do critical thinking anymore? Have all the “swing voters” lost their mind? How can people think somebody is a giant fuckup and then vote for them anyway? (gratuitiously: fuck fuck fuckity fucking fuck fuckjob fucktastic fuckup fucknaught fucker fucked fuck fuck fuck fuck fucking fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckfuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck)
I nee dot back slowly away from the politics. One day at a time. One step at a time. Ok, I admit I have a problem. I just got a nice sample library. Maybe I’ll write a nice piece about train sounds. If we had decent transportation policy in this country, I could just walk downtown and record the sounds of passenger trains, but nooooo, we must have massive auto industry handouts so we can keep using as much oil as possible so Bush’s buddies can keep making money and we can keep invading countries in the middle east, which is good, because the bible says there has to be a massive war in the middle east before there can be the second coming. Of course, before that, the anti-christ must appear who will try to stop the war, so watch out for people who want peace, they’re EVIL. This is a great way to run a country. godfuckingdamn it
Um, but seriously, I understand that some people write music that is not political. How is that even possible?

todo

no sleep makes me feel like i’m going to cry. when i wake up, i’m going to write polly a reccomendation letter, go to post office and prioroty mail it, prepare for 1:00 class and create lecture notes for tomorrow night. i think i might have a voice + percussion piece due tuesday as well.

starting to feel panic about thesis. housemate has already scheduled concert. was i supposed to have done that by now? i still haven’t filed paperwork for a class that i took last spring. i’m too old to pull all nighters. sad that cola is gone. I’ve been up since 2:30 this morning. it’s going to freeze tonight and be in the low 20’s. beautiful weather for cola, but gone away with her. my upstairs neighbors do nothing but run water all day and all night. and move furniture and jump up and down. i want to throw them out of their windows. i want to go to sleep, but the sun has come up. makes me feel so sad.

Things just get better and better

WESU may become an NPR affiliate. Hey, I’ve got a fun idea! Let’s re-do all the battles of the 60’s but have the conservatives win this time! We can start by replacing student radio with corporate drivel! Take that, free speech movement!

The Unitarian minister who presided over my marriage told me that he fled the US under the Regan administration and that he’d never regretted moving to Canada. He kept talking about how much saner it was. How *is* the music program at McGill? Also, Unitarians are cool.
Yes, I just called NPR corporate drivel. If you can tell the difference between an NPR news boradcast and a corporate radio news boradcast, it’s only because real corporations ahve gotten so much worse. NPR is sliding to their level with a five year delay. (Why am I talking about news, because certian unnamed lame-ass NPR affiliates in San Francisco don’t play anything but news. The ones that play music often play boring, conservative music. If you put KQED and KDFC together, you get a normal NPR affiliate. bah) There already exists a NPR affiliate in the middle of Connecticut, with a wide broadcast radius that reaches every place that WESU reaches and already has the NPR audience. But even if they were talking about making WESU a Pacifica affliate, I would still be opposed, because the idea is coming from the top down and being imposed on the Wesleyan radio station against the will of the people who are actually doing it. Say goodbye to freeform student radio. Say hello to hegemony. This idea is coming from the college president, Douglas Bennet. why not drop him a line and tell him what you thing about college radio staying in the hands of students:

Dougals Bennet
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT 06459
dbennet at wesleyan.edu
 
current mood: depressed about politics

alas

Salon is reporting that there was not voter fraud. If any media outlet would be all over it, it would be Salon. Which means, also that The Daily Mirror asks a serious question. Salon is also reporting on how it’s very easy to immigrate to Canada. Apparently it’s easier if you have a lawyer, because I didn’t score so well on the self-assessment. So many things in life are easier with lawyers. I don’t understand why people hate them so much. After about five years of living in Canada and jumping through hurtles, you can become a citizen. Now in five years, who knows who will be in power, but when you hear that Clinton, that great liberal who dems looove so much, was urging Kerry to pick up votes by verybally bashing queers, he gets a lot less likeable. Most Canadians favor gay marriage, which is already legal in two provinces and soon will be legal throughout the country. So, you could also Marry Your Way into Candian Citizenship even if you’re queer and looking for true love. Canada seems to have a fair amount of arts funding, including a lot set aside for Canadians. The downside is that nobody outside of Canada has ever heard of any Canadian composers. But having healthcare would be nice.

My plan: Germany. I’m putting off PhD/DMA most likely just to be an expat for a while. Maybe a long while.

The Hands that counts the votes rules the world

Tom Brockaw last night was bemoaning the slight delays in his being able to “certify” Bush the winner, but of course, the NBC correspondent from the Kerry campaign told us that Kerry had millions of dollars in donations and owed it to the donors to wait for final results before conseeding. Brockaw shook his head and called for a national voting standard that was fast, efficient and reliable.

I don’t just live in a differently colored state than most of the country, I like on a differently colored planet. On my planet, the president is elected by the actions of the electoral college, who meets after all the states finish counting their votes (which will not be fore another ten days in Ohio). On my planet, candidates are responcible to voters, not donors. On my planet the most important consideration for any voter tabulation is reliability. Efficency and speed, no so much. I mean, if Ohio gets 11 days before it knows its real, final results, then maybe the days in between could be spent getting an accurate count.
Canada, the UK and Germany all vote by marking a piece of a paper with a pencil. Then humans, who are being observed by the media and party members, count all the votes by hand. In the UK, the vote count is televised. In fact, the US is the only first world country to have mechanized voting.
When you have ballots counted by hand, you have observation and you have an audit trail. When you have votes counted by machine, you have nothing but the word of the company making the machine. In the case of Diebold, we know the results of the election based on the word of a man who promised to deliver Ohio for Bush, who made machines that have been documented being gamed in Florida in 2000. Traditionally, exit polls match very closely with actual election results. They’re very accurate. In Ohio, they were not accurate, based on the word of Diebold. I’m not saying the election was stolen. I’m saying that there is no way to know whether it was stolen or not. If the votes are counted in secret by somebody who is strognly partial to one candidate, that doesn’t sound like much of a democracy to me. Why do we have voting machines at all?
Americans put great faith in technology. We thought we could prevent cheating by having infallible machines do it. In the movie Dr Strangelove, the titular doctor is explaining that nobody has to choose which humans will be spared from the nuclear holocaust. A computer can do it, making sure, of course, that it’s programmed to pick everyone in the room. That quote shows the faith we have in the fairness and objectivity of computers and also how they are only as fair and infallible as their programmers. Computers relieve of us of responcibility and blame, but they are no more fair than we are. If voting machines were open source, at least citizens could certify that they appeared to be above the board. But our democracy is a trade secret in the hands of a highly partisan corporation. This just brings us back around to my earlier question: why have machines at all? Sure, TV networks want fast results. But networks are why football has TV timesouts. They shouldn’t be the cause of possible massive election fraud. We must return to hand counting, like every other first-world country.
However, as one red state book says in it’s title, “they can’t steal it, if it’s not close.” A lot of people did vote for Bush. Most of them were gravely misinformed, but they still must have been aware that their wages were not rising, but their costs were, if they even still had a job. Bush is the first president ever to be re-elected on an economic downturn. Millions of lost jobs, but Bush gets sent back for another term. The premise of capitalism is that if everyone acts in their own best interests, it will lead to efficency and be best for society. This is demonstratably false. It’s best for me to dump my sewage, untreated in the bay, because it’s just me and then I don’t have to pay sewer bills. But of everyone did it, it would be a disaster. Descisions must be made with an eye to the collective good, rather than the individual good. But yesterday, Americans countered an even more basic premise of capitalism. They did not act in their own best interest. Not even that much of capitalism is working. Not that we have capitalism. Or won’t have a bankrupt country within 4 years. Invest in euros. They’ll still be worth something when the dollar collapses.
Oh, and apparently, some very high percentage of peopel said they voted on moral issues. The democrats, like the republicans, are not an ideological party. They exist to get their members elected. I know this is true, because I learned it in high school civics. Rather than thinking, “we need to find away to rally people around the left,” they’re going to think “we need to co-opt the morals of the right.” The moral mandate of the election, the lesson learned, is going to be scapegoating queers. Personally, I really am going to leave the country. But for those of you staying behind, you have two choices: put your party, the democrats, back on track and force them to move leftward. Or build an ideoligcally left third party. I see more hope with the Greens than I do with the democrats. I thought there was something of a difference between Bush and Kerry, especially supreme court-wise, but if the democrats move even more rightward, which they will likely do, it would be personal and poltical suicide to vote for a bushist fascist just because he’s a democrat. I expect to see even less difference between the parties in 2008, if we’re still having elections in 2008. It’s not true to say the democrats are a “regional party” because they only won states on the coasts, as it was very close all over the country. But the media will and the democrats will move more and more right, as they have an “obligation to their donors.” We can’t rely on them. We need to build the Green party.

What is wrong with the rest of the country?

the south, the midwest. what is wrong with them? do they really hate gay people? why? do they hate sick people? do they hate poor people? what do they think about? what’s on tv there? what’s in the water? what does “culturally concservative” mean? how do we fight it? if the wonkette is coping with the election by drinking, can i do it too?

AUGH NBC is calling ohio for bush! fuck fuck fuck fuck one electoral vote short for bush.

Attn non-voting residentes of Connecticut

I’m reading that you don’t need to be registered in order to vote for president. If you are a wesleyan student and you are not voting elsewhere, this seems to mean you can go to your local polling station and cast a vote for president. Bring a picture ID and mail to your local address. You cannot vote twice, so don’t do this if you voted in your home state. Find your polling place.