November 2008 Archives

Some years ago, Eileene browbeat me into keeping a timesheet. The idea was to keep track of how I spent my time so that I would be able to identify when and how I was wasting it, and then to do something about that waste. Unemployed, I had lot of time I could waste, and did.

Unsurprisingly, I resisted the idea; I enjoyed a relaxed schedule. I had to work to develop the habit, and had to get back into the habit repeatedly, as I was quick to lose it when something, like a holiday visit with my parents, disrupted the normal schedule. Still, with a few chewings-out from Eileene, I keep returning to the timesheet, because it works, if not quite as intended. See, instead of exposing large blocks of wasted time, I find the initial act of filling out a timesheet keeps me much busier. Filling four fifteen-minute blocks with an hours’ goofing off is embarrassing, so I rarely waste an hour like that in the first place. The overall impact on my productivity is dramatic.

Keeping track of my weekdays in fifteen-minute intervals has had a curious side effect, however. For someone unemployed (and uninterested in church services), weekends are pretty much the same as the rest of the week. Before the timesheet, I was as likely to write on Saturday as on Wednesday. Marking workdays, however, also means noting weekends by omission, days when I do little work—housework or writing. Keeping a timesheet has created my weekend.

Even more oddly, it’s created Friday afternoons. Like salaried workers, I usually feel an urge to take things more easily on Friday afternoons. The days I break early to prepare a relatively fancy dinner are almost all Fridays. The fifteen- or thirty-minute blocks marked “goof off”—whether playing a quick shareware game or reading a magazine or whatever—are denser on Friday afternoons, the other dense spot lying around lunch on Wednesday, “hump day.”

Watching myself duplicate the work cycle when I’m my own boss is amusing; it suggests certain fundamental human laws of work and time. Plus there’s the irony of seeing how formalizing the week’s time, while generally making better use of all that time, also lends a sense of legitimacy to particular ways of wasting it.

Today was the first snowfall of the season, or at least the first I’d seen. There wasn’t much to see; at first, I was aware of it only as flickering motion too fast to identify, and only after a few seconds did I spot a snowflake briefly against a dark background, and, three seconds later, another. By the end of a 45-minute walk downtown, perhaps ten flakes had touched my face. Needless to say, nothing was visible on the ground. Still, it was snow.

Worse is to come: heavy, wet snow to be shoveled from our driveway, and again when the city snowplows, slow to get around to clearing back streets and dead ends, push it back into our driveway’s mouth. Months of the filthy slush New Jersey is prone to. Standing pools of brine, choked with environmentally unsound quantities of road salt.

But for today, while the snow is still a novelty, and while it is still too sparse to be a nuisance, I find it a cheery sight. Without a television, we are spared most of the out-of-season seasonal hype, and this year, I feel almost like the holidays are arriving when they are supposed to—barring that unfortunate episode of looking for Halloween candy on Halloween itself. On Monday, we depart to visit my parents for Thanksgiving, so we’re almost ready for Christmas snow. Not quite. The Christmas season doesn’t start for eight days, the day after Thanksgiving.

But, inasmuch as mother nature doesn’t attach end-of-year clearance sale banners to her first snowflakes, I’ll forgive her bringing out the decorations a week too soon.

Asperger’s syndrome is closely related to autism. Depending on who you ask, it’s either a particular kind of autism or a relatively mild manifestation of autism. It’s marked primarily by an abnormally low sense of empathy, although it comes with a host of related symptoms, like a vulnerability to sensory overload, risk aversion, and a tendency to comforting, repetitive motions. Like autistics, people who suffer Asperger’s have a hard time reading body language and social subtext, and are prone to simply ignoring people of no immediate interest, as one might ignore a television show. They say inappropriate things at imappropriate times. They tend to literalism, and to prefer situations with clearly defined rules. Like autistics, they often exhibit unusually good verbal, mathematical, and reasoning skills.

I don’t believe I have it—without a professional diagnosis, it’s impossible to say with certainty—but only that I have a strong streak of whatever makes for a case of Asperger’s. A lot of nerds do; low empathy and social skills coupled to extreme left-brain thinking is practically the definition of nerd. If I do have Asperger’s, I’m a high-functioning case. Probably a lot of nerds are undiagnosed high-functioning cases. Learning that there’s a name for that package of traits from a radio program several years ago was an eye-opener, and becoming conscious of the various associated behaviors has helped me compensate for my human failings. Discovering Asperger’s was good for me, whether or not I technically have it. So, eager to learn more, my metaphorical ears perk up when the subject arises.

With the attention autism has been getting lately—whether due to a rise in actual cases, or the success of Rain Man, or simply greater public awareness now that the word is out in use—autism has also had its share of politically correct assertions that autism isn’t a disease, or a handicap, but merely another example of “differently abled.” There’s something to that, since strong verbal and math skills and a good memory are definitely plusses, but trust me: a congenital lack of empathy is a handicap. But it’s possible to take the idea too far. Way too far.

I have to draw the line at the deliberate creation of a mythology surrounding Asperger’s syndrome. No, I don’t mean just a package of dubious beliefs; I mean a literal mythology, complete with a beatific ancient race, whose utopian home was destroyed in a cataclysm similar to that of Atlantis/Mu/Eden/Shangri-La, and whose descendants live among us now as Asperger’s “victims”—a slur imposed by the ignorant normal humans. That’s some fucked up shit, man. And all the crazier for catering to people with a strong predisposition for literalism and empirical truth.

Nerds like facts. A nerd knows where he stands with facts, unlike dealing with fuzzier, often entirely opaque realms of opinion and human feelings. Nerds like truth and honesty. The more reliable the information pool we draw from, the less we have to perform the tricky task of separating people who are just trying to be informative from those who have an axe to grind, or a buck to make, or an ego to stroke. Deliberately presenting fiction as objective truth is among the gravest of sins in the nerd’s world view.

Nerds are also heavily prone to ridicule religion and mysticism, partly because transcendent and supernatural entities are virtually indistinguishable from no supernatural entities at all, and partly because faith leaves one at the mercy of possible charlatans posing as authorities on divine will. (Although some nerds, attracted by a clear set of rules for life and explanations for the universe, go for religion in a big way.) Already skeptical of widespread supernatural beliefs with a long and debatably dignified history, nerds are merciless when it comes to novel mystical gobbledygook.

Combining deliberate dishonesty with unabashed mysticism, and aiming it directly at people who prefer the empirically true is just plain stupid. If telling yourself Asperger’s syndrome isn’t a handicap helps get you through the night, or face an unsympathetic world, well…okay. Trust me on this, however: a congenital lack of empathy is not something to be happy about. Trying to sell the rest of us on the notion that we’re special, even more super-specially special by virtue of superhuman bloodlines than the people we live among is not only foolish, but divisive and even potentially harmful, if someone should take an Aspergian mythology as justification for refusing to show a little more empathy for our fellow humans.

Another sign of the times.

An article in the Times Online cites this conversation between Russian Prime Minister Medvedev and President Putin:

Putin: I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls.
Medvedev: Hang him?
Putin: Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.
Medvedev: Yes, but do you want to end up like Bush?
Putin: …ah. You have scored a point there.

The thrust of the article is a bit of Kremlinology, confirming that nominal head of state Putin is calling the shots while nominal head of government Medvedev takes orders, spinning Medvedev’s statement as a spark of independence, and tying it into the larger Georgian confrontation and France’s attempts to broker peace. But, Amerocentric that I am, I take a different point entirely from the exchange.

We’ve reached a point where Russia has a better reputation than the US on matters of human rights, military aggression, and international relations, and where the KGB thug running the country fears to seem so barbarous as the American president.

As a substitute math teacher, I’ve recently found myself performing arithmetical tricks again. Nothing so impressive, nor quite with the speed of my youth, but tricks nonetheless: instantly calculating the product of 24 and 37, for example, or 24 and 59. I’m just good enough with such tricks to understand how the real arithmetical savants do their spectacular stunts, even if I can’t imitate them.

It’s not a case of doing what everyone else does, only faster. Rather, it relies on two very different techniques: a larger bag of arithmetical tools and a facility for “chunking” the information into more convenient bits.

A bigger bag of tools is easier to understand. You have at least a small bag of tools already. You know your one-digit multiplication tables, for example: you know, without needing to think about it, that 6x9=54, or that 7x3=21. You also know how to multiply quickly and easily by 10: simply add a zero to the end. Arithmetical tricksters just know more tricks than the average person.

I mentioned 24x37 above. Asked for the product, most people would resort to pen and paper, or a calculator. But if you happen to know that 3x37=111, then the problem becomes much simpler: 24x37 = (8x3)x37 = 8x(3x37)=8x111=888. That 3x37=111 is a mere curiosity, of no number theoretical significance whatsoever. But it’s handy if you’re in the very special circumstances of wanting to look clever by finding multiples of 37 quickly. Serious savants might know lots and lots of these; memorizing the multiplication table for two-digit numbers, where the rest of us only learned one-digit numbers, isn’t out of the question. Rank amateurs like me just pick up a few bits here and there, like 3x37=111.

But memorizing arithmetical factoids, whether deliberately or through repeated casual exposure, is only part of the picture. The rest involves knowing, usually by intuition, how to divide up the numbers into bite-sized bits. 24x37 is hard to do in your head; 8x111 is easy.

Asked to find 24x59, I again don’t use proper multiplication. Instead, I note that 24x59 is 24 less than 24x60, and, since I happen to know that 24x6=144, the rest is easy: 24x59 = 24x(60-1) = 24x60 – 24x1 = 24x6x10 – 24 = 144x10 – 24 = 1440 – 24 = 1416. Now, I don’t do all those steps in my head in painstaking detail. I just figure 24x59 = 1440 – 24 = 1416; the rest I just sort of see all at once. But that’s what’s going on, formally speaking. Savants can see more complicated arrangements all at once, shuffling more numbers about more quickly to match a broader spectrum of numerical curiosities that they already know, but the process is essentially the same. Which is not to say that what they do is easy…or even that what I do is easy for every high school student.

Which brings me to my point. I don’t do these tricks to show off, but just because that’s how it works in my own head, using shortcuts accumulated over decades of practice and a little natural talent left over from my childhood. Nevertheless, although I can do these things, I have to catch myself and make sure that I don’t do them in certain classes. Some of these kids are still struggling with long division and percentages—grade school stuff. They may—and in at least one case, did—get confused about the procedure, thinking that some tricky shortcut is appropriate all the time. And it’s not.

Tricks are well and good in their place. But in math, perhaps more than in any other field of endeavor, it’s fundamentals first. You have to define continuity before examining pseudo-Riemannian manifolds, and you have to learn to multiply properly with a general algorithm before you start using shortcuts to do it in your head.

It’s leaf-raking season, and as I made my first pass at the yardwork this morning—more leaves are yet to fall, so more passes will be needed—I found myself whistling the theme to the Pokemon cartoon series. No, I don’t know why. For people who easily get tunes stuck in their heads, this sort of thing just happens, often on the slimmest of connections, or even entirely without rhyme or reason.

Though I don’t know how my thoughts drifted into music celebrating Pokemon, I do know where they went from that point on: a heartwarming account of an adult gamer impressed by the good sportsmanship demonstrated by the kids who comprised the entire tournament he joined, expecting to see other adult nerds. (The second block of text starting about 20% of the way down the page.) I’ve commented on the tale before; it’s stuck with me.

So this afternoon, I got to speculating on just why Pokemon should so successfully have taught good sportsmanship to its pre-teen fan base. It can’t just be the moralizing; there’s tons of moralizing on Saturday morning cartoons, and the more strongly the message gets pushed, the less persuasive it becomes. Consider “One to grow on,” and “Knowing is half the battle!” and those god-awful PSAs at the end of Superfriends. When I was a kid, I just saw those and thought, “What a bunch of dorks.”

(Incidentally, one great moment in cartoon history involved Bruce Timm’s animated Superman series, where Superman swoops down and rescues a boy from an electric cable tower. After learning the kid climbed the tower on a dare, Superman gives the boy, his friend, and his little brother a brief lecture on safety and the kids reassure him, “You’re right, Superman. I’ll be smarter next time,” and “Yeah. Thanks, Superman.” And, once Superman has flown safely out of earshot, add “What a dork.” “Is not!” But I digress.)

Maybe the difference is that the Pokemon cartoons—at least the few episodes I’ve seen—involve low-key stakes. G. I. Joe operated in in a world where lethal force was clearly justified against a violent enemy. That nobody, not even the disposable Cobra goons, ever died—parachuting safely from exploding helicopters, or throwing their hands over their heads and skittering off after a grenade explodes at their feet—just made it all look fake. Pokemon fight, but not to the death; they are simply training in a particularly flashy form of mock combat, like martial arts tournaments. After each fight, the participants, winner and loser, pokemon and trainers, brush themselves off and acknowledge one another, bowing or shaking hands or congratulating the victory/good try.

Maybe the difference lies in the show’s focus on personal improvement. Pokemon cartoons are largely about learning something new: discovering a new pokemon, or exploring their ecology, or mastering a new battle technique. Morality plays about cooperation and caring about peoples’ feelings seem appropriate in this context. He-Man and Thundercats, by contrast, were Manichean struggles for control of the universe; pausing to discuss how important it is to let everyone get a turn with the He-Man Battle Copter (TM), or to eat your vegetables, seemed grossly out of place.

But I think the biggest difference lies in the show’s unique conceit: that the protagonists aren’t warriors themselves, but trainers for their warrior pets, which makes the human characters the mature partners of the human-pokemon relationship. In all their many incarnations, the Pokemon are pets which must be cared for and taught to fight effectively, including learning self-confidence and cooperation and similar life lessons. The kids who star in the cartoon succeed by teaching their pokemon the lessons we would like our children to learn—which, of course, can only be done when the kids themselves understand the lesson. A sneaky but amazingly effective technique, if the results of the tournament are any indication.

Today is Memorial Day, once Armistice Day: the day we set aside every year to remember the sacrifices men—and now women, too—have made in military service to our nation. I’m having some trouble sharing in that sentiment today. It just feels too hypocritical.

The holiday started as a celebration of the Armistice ending WWI, though it grew to encompass all veterans of all our nation’s wars. WWI was about as bad as wars get, shy of the nastiness that can only be found in a civil war, where the sides are evenly matched and know one another well enough to kick where it really hurts. WWI was also evenly matched, and fought between rivals who knew each other quite well, indeed. So evenly matched that the war had to be fought by attrition, grinding one another down until there was nothing left. It was also fought with a glut of new weapons technology accumulated in nearly half a century without a major war to test them—a sure recipe for horrific results, and for an amplified public reaction to those horrors. Perhaps worst of all, it was a pointless war, a war nobody wanted, built of a series of escalations vainly intended to scare off the next raise in the stakes.

WWII was deadlier, but WWI was the more horrible war where it counts: in the minds of the public.

And so, even before the signing of the Armistice, WWI became billed as “the war to end all wars.” Having learned our lessons, we would never have another. That promise proved ephemeral; Hitler soon proved that it only takes one belligerent to make a war, and that there will always be someone willing to make one. But from the US perspective, we hadn’t failed in our promise to end war; we had the war thrust upon us from the outside.

The war we are in today, even more than Viet Nam, breaks that promise. The second Iraqi war was not fought to defend ourselves, or the right; it was fought without provocation to aggrandize ourselves, and to seize someone else’s oil, and to grease the way for curtailing civil liberties at home, and to hand tax money to corporations that had been generous with campaign contributions, and to allow a spoiled frat boy a chance to play general. We are now at war in Iraq for a lot of reasons, all of them bad. All of them betraying a promise to value our military personnel, to send them to die only if we must, for the best of reasons.

I opposed the war in Iraq from the start, for a lot of reasons. But I’m still part of the collective body that, ultimately, runs the US: the voting public. I feel a hypocrite trying to pretend my country values its servicemen and women. That doesn’t fly any more, when we sent them to die for all those bad reasons, and persisted in letting them die because it’s cheaper not to equip them properly or send sufficient forces. Judging by the tone of the few services I’ve found in the news, I’m not the only one who feels like a hypocrite.

I guess I’m not a political junkie after all, despite a year or so obsessing over the electoral race, and despite straining since 2000 over the increasing perils the US faced at the hands of a party without shame when it came to turning their offices to permanent political or massive pecuniary advantage. I say this because, in the wake of the 2008 presidential election, with good if not spectacular results, I’m glad for a chance to sit back for a bit.

That doesn’t mean I intend to ignore events until the next election. No, Obama, with his short political career, is largely a mystery, and an awful lot of the Dems who just came to power are the same old concessionists who failed to stand against a criminal president for fear of no more than getting smeared for it. And, as I noted earlier, the right wing is still out there, ready to return to power if they can blame enough on the Democrats in 2012, although the current round of finger-pointing and calls for doctrinal purity are a refreshing turnabout this year. Citizens of a healthy democracy don’t just tune in every four years, and I don’t intend to, either.

But simply keeping abreast of issues is not the mark of a political junkie. The junkie is obsessive-compulsive. During campaign season, I found a half dozen or so web pages which collected and analyzed ongoing polls into a unified prediction, a process called “meta-analysis.” Different pages used different methods to weight the reliability of the polls they used, producing different, if roughly similar results, so keeping track of several at a time gave me a comforting illusion of greater accuracy. I checked them daily, twice daily in the last month, including the pages which rarely changed more often than once a week. Sometimes more often, if I had a little spare time.

I was not alone. Political junkies were much the same, and I naturally counted myself among them.

Until the news articles began to appear concerning the withdrawal symptoms political junkies are now going through. Such articles often pointed to compulsive checking of meta-analysis websites, specifically, and how political junkies are habitually returning to them even though there’s no longer anything there to see. The election is over. Or how disappointing the post-election analysis is for political junkies, given that both presidential and Congressional races came out almost exactly as expected, including razor-thin margins where races were too close to expect either candidate to win, and that the reasons why McCain was about to Obama were increasingly obvious well before he actually did. The current sport for political junkies is now prognosticating over Obama’s cabinet, and what each selection, or rumored future selection forebodes.

And I just don’t feel any of that. Now that the election’s over, and my side gave the other a solid thrashing, I’m relaxed once again. It seems the excitement I felt about the election wasn’t so much addiction to politics as an honest interest in and anxiety over the actual governance which follows an election. Now that victory is secured, and it’s time for rolling up sleeves and getting down to the more humdrum matters of actual policy, I welcome the slower, more deliberate pace.

Which is where a citizen should be. Turns out I can quit any time I want to.

The work of misrepresenting Bush the lesser and his policies to the world is beginning its transition from lies coming directly from the White House to lies coming from historian apologists. Rewriting history is a popular tool with authoritarian regimes of all stripes--1984 was inspired by Orwell’s horror at Stalinist Russia’s willingness to alter the historical record to match the political needs of the moment. That it should be popular with neocon think tanks should come as no surprise.

In the neocon narrative, the Vietnam war was lost by (fabricated) hippies spitting on veterans, and not by the intractable problem of subduing an entire population—as opposed to a rival government—by force. In the neocon narrative, Ronald Reagan cut spending (he didn’t) and defeated communism with a non-functional weapons system, rather than simply being fortunate enough to be standing nearby when Gorbachev dismantled Russian communism on his own initiative. In the neocon narrative, Newt Gingrich brought bipartisanship to Congress, and John Wayne was a war hero, and everyone—including the UN and military intelligence—believed Saddam had nuclear weapons, and that a blowjob is a graver presidential crime than torture.

And, as Goebbels and Orwell and folk lore observe, if a narrative is repeated loudly and often enough, it can supplant the truth. Which is why the method is so popular with authoritarian regimes.

CNN ran an article yesterday on how Bush’s legacy might be perceived in future generations, noting correctly that proximity to the issues of the day often clouds contemporary judgment, and that presidents often look better from a future perspective. But the historians quoted in the CNN article go well beyond recognizing a trend to judge a president less harshly with the passage of time; they are actively, and disingenuously, participating in obscuring the historical record.

Exhibit A: the claim that Bush was simply “unlucky,” the victim of events beyond his control, like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the current economic meltdown, crises no president has ever had to deal with before.

Excuse me? I do believe other presidents have dealt with violent attacks, climatic disasters, and economic crises. And characterizing them as nothing more than bad luck is simply fraudulent.

Bush did not initiate 9/11, to be sure, and we may forgive him for ignoring intelligence reports of an imminent attack—picking signal from noise in intelligence reports requires phenomenal skill and a bit of luck. Nor did Bush create Hurricane Katrina. But he sure as hell was responsible for the national failure to deal with Katraina. Responsible for discombobulating the once-effective and once-admired FEMA in his efforts to chain all government to a perpetual war on terror. Responsible for writing off Katrina victims—the poor, black, and/or Democratic ones, at least. Responsible for appointing the incompetent Michael “heckuva job” Brown. Bush is even more responsible for the economic meltdown, which economists almost unanimously ascribe to massive deregulation or negligent enforcement of existing regulation and to an artificially low prime interest rate, held there in the failed hopes of stimulating growth--cornerstones of Bush's economic policy.

Exhibit B: sympathy for Bush’s lame duck status. The implication is that Bush could fix the economic meltdown, and a lot of other problems, too, if he could just be treated as the executive until the end of his term, but that it’s all in Obama’s hands now. Literally, right now, and not beginning January 21. Such suggestions are absurd. As noted above, the gravest problems the nation now faces are a direct product of Bush’s policies. There is no reason to think he would fix any of them, any more than he has fixed them in the previous seven years. Other presidents, some with very good reputations, managed to accomplish good things in their own lame duck phases; why should Bush get any particular slack on this count? I note that he managed to get his $750B bailout package, despite being a lame duck. I note, too that it doesn’t seem to be working.

Sympathy for this lamest of lame ducks also ignores just how much Bush has done to put himself there, earning the contempt of his fellow Republicans as well as that of Democrats, testified by panicked efforts among politicians and pundits alike to distance themselves from his failures.

Exhibit C: if you close your eyes and imagine Iraq becoming a vibrant, stable democracy, and if you also imagine the rest of the Middle East following that example, and if you also pretend that Bush’s successors will have no impact on the current trajectory of Mideast government and international relations, then Bush’s failed attempts to impose democracy by force upon smaller nations would actually be successes, and he would be a brilliant leader, so who’s the foreign policy expert now, Mr. Smartypants?

I cannot make this argument any more transparently stupid.

No doubt, Bush’s reputation will improve with time, as so many others’ have. Some easing of his reputation may be justified. Little Georgie’s big Iraqi adventure, for example, will dwindle in stature to match the Vietnam war, bloody and expensive and pointless, but hardly the demise of the US. On the other hand, Bush’s efforts to place the presidency above the law with a host of dirty tricks—signing statements, executive privilege, “failing to read” email contrary to his desires, the creation of a prison it argued to be outside any legal jurisdiction, and many, many others—are every bit as serious as they seem and deserve to be preserved at the top of his historical legacy.

If Bush’s reputation improves significantly in future generations, it will be due largely to the efforts of unethical historians today, rewriting the record to match a desired outcome rather than reporting frankly on what actually happened.

Last night, we witnessed a long-awaited reversal of national leadership. Though I hesitate to describe my reaction as joyful, I think it qualified. Certainly, those who do not suffer shriveled emotional glands expressed their considerable joy. Good for them. Good for us.

There’s a lot of talk this morning about whether this represents a sea change in national politics, and a huge shift in the national divide, such as Reagan and FDR ushered in. Possibly, but such talk is premature. The voting public is good and mad at eight years of gross mismanagement under Bush. It’s less clear whether voters trace that bad government back to 1980, when we had our last sea change, or, even more importantly, whether they will continue to blame the neocons for the pains of digging ourselves out.

Very few are so foolish as to think our long national nightmare is over. There’s still that Wall Street collapse to deal with, and no money in the treasury to deal with it, nor even promising sources of loans. We’re still bogged down in two wars, where third world countries continue to embarrass US forces while we pay trillions for the pleasure. We still have years of unsavory legal precedents lurking in Guantanamo and elsewhere to reverse. We still have the least effective and the most expensive health care in the developed world.

Last night, our nation offered a resounding electoral rejection of bad government, 349-163 and counting. More telling was a sizeable blue shift in Congressional races. But that rejection was not reflected in the popular vote, 51%-48% in the presidential race. Despite Obama’s message of inclusion and unity, a huge segment of our country is still fueled by hate—towards gays, towards Muslims, towards blacks, towards immigrants, towards intellectuals. And, to be fair, some of that hate is being reflected back by liberals pushed too far.

Perhaps Obama can reverse that. I hope he can. If so, it will take several years. For the present, each major party is facing an enormous strategic decision about how to respond to the 2008 results. Their respective answers depend in large measure upon one another, and will shape national politics for a generation.

For the Democrats, the question is what they will now do with their victory.

The high road is the hard one. It means taking the opportunity given to them and using it, not only to begin reversing the immeasurable damage the country has suffered in the past generation, but to offer positive programs, as well.

Simply getting a start on the mess we are currently in is insufficient; because cleaning up the mess will mean sacrifice, it will be easy for Republicans to paint the pains of cleanup as somehow the Democrats’ fault, instead of laying the blame where it belongs—with Bush, and Cheney, and DeLay, and Lott, and Gingrich, and Rove, and many others. Reagan replaced Carter largely because Carter took the blame for the pains of cleaning up a Nixonian economic mess: inflation triggered by deficit spending and an artificially low prime interest rate meant to stimulate business, a middle class decaying under tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, an energy crisis and skyrocketing fuel costs, a distrust in government brought on by secrecy and open corruption—sound familiar? Bush the elder lost to Clinton because Bush took the blame for the bills come due on deficits and regressive taxes and artificially low interest rates for which Reagan was cheered. Bush the younger defeated Gore in part on the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the product of eight years of Clinton swiping the Republican financial playbook. Making a mess is popular, if it’s done while living high on future debts; cleaning up a mess is unpopular. So Democrats, if they are to profit from their victory last night, must do something more.

Universal health care would be a good place to start. An online acquaintance offered me an illuminating account of a young woman in a dead-end minimum wage job explaining that she was voting for Obama because she really needed health insurance, and felt her chances were infinitesimally greater with him…but sighed and admitted that she knew health care really wasn’t possible for someone like her. But it is. The industrialized world, with the gaping exception of the US, has health care for burger flippers and shelf stockers, too, not just the comfortably well-off. We in the US don’t have it because we’ve sacrificed our workers to the unregulated market, often mis-named “the free market.” If Dems can swing health care for every burger flipper and shelf stocker, they’ll have literally millions of votes-for-life, just as FDR earned lifetime devotion to his party for legalizing and empowering labor unions.

Pushing universal health care—or some similarly populist program—through will require some fortitude. It will mean taking principled decisions without worrying how the artful Republican smear machine will paint them. It will mean giving up large campaign contributions from powerful and wealthy corporate interests, like the insurance industry and big pharma. It will mean a lot of powerful Democrats in the DLC, who have done well imitating the DeLay strategy, losing power to younger replacements, like Obama, turning to Howard Dean’s example, and possibly even losing seats to Republican contenders to make such a change possible. The party discipline necessary to carry populist legislation will be tricky: conservative “blue dog” Democrats may have some trouble selling populist programs to their own constituencies, even though it’s the only way to pin obstruction on Republicans who will inevitably seek to hold onto the neocon gains that are breaking our country. So the high road is difficult.

The low road of inactivity and the path of least resistance is easy, which is why we’ve seen so much of it from Democrats since 1980. Standing on principle is so much work, and dangerous, too. Taking a stand against anti-terrorist measures that violate the Constitution can be painted as a pro-terrorist stance, so it’s easier just to let them slide. Actually holding factories to environmental laws is expensive and troublesome, and leaves the manufacturers reluctant to hand out campaign contributions, so it’s easier to let things slide. Giving homosexuals equal treatment under the law enrages the religious right, who outnumber homosexuals, so it’s easier to give in. The Bush years pretty well demonstrate that giving in doesn’t do much to win, or to make the country better, and Limbaugh-style rhetoric pretty well demonstrates that giving in just encourages the nutjobs to push that much harder, but Democrats have been doing it for a generation now, so there’s little reason to think they’ll stop now. Not unless the charismatic Obama can lead his party as well as the nation. He just might.

The Republicans also face a high road/low road decision, which came into sharp relief with McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin. Unable to fire the Republican base himself, he needed a running mate who could, and Palin was a dramatic success in this narrow sense. More broadly, however, she succeeded in arousing the base by methods which alienated the wavering center, and ultimately doomed McCain’s chances. Choosing Palin sacrificed electoral victory for a robust popular vote.

The divisive “culture wars” tactics that served Republicans so well since 1980 failed in 2008. The more embracing Obama scored a solid victory if not a landslide, and the Congressional shift is an even more dramatic demonstration of its failure. Many Republicans are settling down to some serious soul-searching, asking themselves how their party’s ideals could vanish beneath neocon agenda of rampant spending, military adventurism, government corruption, and Constitutional violations, propped up against centrist revulsion with appeals to racism and religious bigotry. Now that the breakdown of party ideals is apparent to all but the crazy 27%, for whom no evidence is sufficient, the natural question is what to do about restoring the party to ethically respectable grounds.

The high road is very hard, indeed. It would require cutting loose from the “southern strategy” of mobilizing the religious and racial bigots, as the Democrats did under LBJ. The consequences would be equally devastating: a leaving the opposing party to hold the field for a generation, just as the Democrats suffered, beginning with Nixon’s campaign of “law and order,” and reaching as far as smear tactics using Reverend Wright, and an ongoing tarring of “intellectual” as a mark of unfitness for office. The decision would be even harder on the party for demographic reasons: the wealthy and essentially aristocratic leadership of the party has always depended on appeals to fear—fear of Catholics, or anarchists, or communists, or negroes, or terrorists, or immigrants—to mobilize voters against the natural majority of the more populist Democrats, while the Democrats could still turn to labor in a post-civil rights environment for its get-out-the-vote efforts. Refusing to pander to racists and fundamentalists is undeniably right, but would mean losing an awful lot of elections before creating a platform broad enough to appeal to enough moderates to replace the far right voters.

The low road is much, much easier: just keep on smearing as hard as possible, with no concern for truth, or fairness, or respect for human dignity. Fear-and-hate tactics may have lost in 2008, but the voters on whom such tactics have worked so well in the past are still there. As long as you can con some centrists, which becomes easier with every merger of news media in megacorporate hands, you can win again with fear mongering and lies. As noted above, Republicans have made considerable political hay with a ratcheting approach to wins and losses. Win the White House. Consolidate wealth and power. Make a huge mess in the process. Lose the White House. Blame the Democrats for the pains of cleaning up the mess. Repeat. With each cycle, consolidate more money and power, and whittle away more safeguards against abuse of power for the next cycle. If Democrats can’t make good on their victories in 2008, the country will be ripe for another plucking.

That dynamic is what makes the twin questions so difficult to resolve.

From the Democrats’ perspective, the urge is contrarian. If the Republicans take the low road, Democrats must take the high road or watch the 2008 elections become one more hiccup in a long, general downward trend towards oligarchy. If Republicans take the high road, Democrats can expect a generation of easy victories, without any real need to bring any change to Washington—no more than entrenching themselves with time-worn tactics of gerrymandering and influence peddling, that is.

From the Republicans’ perspective, the urge is to match strategies. If the Democrats take the high road and take the reins of a responsive, populist government, fear and hatred won’t work any better in 2012 than they did in 2008, nor in the years beyond 2012. Taking the high road will be the only way for Republicans to survive at all, though it be at the expense of a couple decades as underdog. If the Democrats take the low road, then the sleaze machine will bring the same old crop of corrupt conservatives right back in, with the gains of the Bush years giving them even more leverage to create the “permanent Republican majority” which seemed so possible in 2004.

Naturally, neither party will make this decision as a body. In the wake of the electoral disaster, Rush Limbaugh is calling for a ideological purge of moderate Republicans from the party—to him, and other right-wing demagogues, McCain’s loss was the product of his own moderation…and of the liberal media conspiracy, of course. Other Republican voices, usually less publicly recognized due to a generation of just such purges, are finally beginning to recoil in horror from what their party has created, from the decidedly un-American $750B of corporate bailouts to the decidedly un-American cells of Gitmo. It’s unclear which side will be allowed to keep the Republican label, and which will be the one cast out. Similarly, the DLC, the blue dogs, and a visibly bitter Bill Clinton seem all too eager to get back to business as usual, utterly neglecting the lessons of Obama’s victory, and a lot of Congressional seats with him. Elements of each party will pull in different directions.

But sooner or later, quite possibly within the next four years, some faction on either side will grow to speak for its party. We may hope that both sides will take the high road, but we should not expect it. Neither party has shown much of a record over the past thirty years of placing principle before short-term gain, or the good of the American public over the good of the party.

Nevertheless, a charismatic leader of firm purpose can take control of his party and compel it to behave, as Lincoln once persuaded conservatives Republicans to abandon slavery though admitting slavery promised an earlier end to the Civil War, and as Lyndon Johnson once persuaded liberal Democrats to embrace civil rights though it meant losing everything from North Carolina to Louisiana for a generation. It can happen. And when it does, the whole country is the better for it.

Hope for the better. Vote to reward it when you can.

When reports began coming in about high turnout among early voters, I didn’t take it as much to get excited about. The results in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 created a lot of mistrust among voters toward the system, especially among Democratic voters. After the disappointments of those elections, and the promise of long lines this year in the face of high voter interest, heavy early voting was inevitable, as was the likelihood that early vote tallies would line up in the blue column.

No big deal.

Had to catch myself, however, in that sentiment. While the analysis is true, as far as it goes, it wholly misses a larger point, which is worth getting excited about: voter turnout, early or otherwise, is going to be huge. That bodes well for Democrats, who tend to win with larger turnout, and especially stand to gain this year, when so much of that turnout consists of protest votes against Bush and anyone who reminds us of Bush. But set aside party gain. High voter turnout bodes well for the country.

That’s the small-d democratic ideal, isn’t it? The presumption that individuals are the best judges of what serves their own interests. The more completely our population makes it to the polls, the more accurately government will reflect the actual desires of the public. When people stay home, well-organized special interests, often from the extremes, carry disproportionate sway. When we all vote, or even when a large majority of us vote, we all get a lot more of the government we ask for, and a lot more of the government we actually want. And that can only be to the good, even on the occasions when heavy voter turnout works against the candidate(s) I prefer.

To my embarrassment, partisan fervor drew my attention from this fundamental truth. At least I’ve woken up to it again. Regardless of tonight’s results—which promise to be good—we already have something to celebrate in the 2008 elections.

Now get your ass out to the polling station!

I’ve had the Civilization IV: Colonization game for a few weeks now, enough to have played several games on a few different settings—not enough to have seen the whole game, nor to plumb all the mysteries of perfect efficiency, but enough to get a good grip on its outlines.

The original Colonization was built off the original Civilization, with enough departures to make it a completely different game. Likewise, Civ4:Col is clearly recognizable as an offshoot of Civ4, but is completely different in playstyle and tone. But, while Civ4 represents a long evolution from and improvement upon the original Civ, Civ4:Col is not so clearly superior to the original version.

Like the original Col, Civ4:Col is more about making money than about conquering the world. With money, you can afford to jump-start your population with salary bonuses to potential immigrants. With money, you can rush vital constructions to magnify your output. Above all, with money, you can afford the arms you’ll need for the eventual showdown with the mother country, winning which is the whole point of the game. Your colonies must employ home-grown politicians to produce sufficient “liberty bells” to raise rebel sentiment and declare independence—with the additional incentive that high rebel sentiment earns healthy productive bonuses for a population fired by patriotic zeal and liberty bells win over “founding fathers” to provide special bonuses to your nation-to-be. In the meantime, take pains to build defenses and either craft or buy weapons to make your claims to independence stick, because the royal reaction to your impudence will be brutal.

The first impression I got was that professional reviewer Tom Chick was right: Civ4:Col injects a lot of the micromanagement that has plagued the Civ line right back in. One of Civ4’s greatest achievements was a streamlining of your empire’s management, largely through an implementation of tools that had existed before, but which, before Civ4, had never worked properly. I hasten to insist that the return of micromanagement is not entirely a bad thing; empire management sims are largely about management, even micromanagement, in the same way that MMOs and so-called RPGs are about grinding xp and gear. People who play empire sims often like a certain degree of micromanagement. Still, players should expect to go and fiddle with minor details on a regular basis, which may be a turn-off. Players who remember the original Col should be familiar with the way fledgling colonies, especially, may require a single person to work both as lumberjack and carpenter by turns, or the way wagon trains must scour your empire to collect raw materials efficiently into 100-unit bales and avoid wasteful warehouse overflow. Labor is a prime area of micromanagement. In Civ, a worker is a worker, and can be left to work the same field or mine for millennia. In Col, anyone can perform any task, but many of your colonists will be experts in a particular field, offering a production bonus to mining ore, say, or refining sugar into rum, or spreading national sentiment. You’ll want to shift labor about almost turn-by-turn to make the best possible use of these experts without their skill outrunning the capacity of your warehouses or the availability of raw materials, and to assign unskilled workers to school so that they might duplicate another colonist’s expertise.

My second impression is the reason micromanagement doesn’t become a nightmare. Civ4:Col is…small. You neither need nor should want more than half a dozen colonies. Gone are the vast continental expanses of my favorite Col runs; now the name of the game is digging in good and tight into an impenetrable knot of rebellion. Gone, too, are the extensive building projects; one cigar factory, one rum distillery, one textile mill is enough for an entire nation. Don’t even bother with dockyards or a navy. Five cities seems about the ideal, and I’m beginning to experiment with fewer; even a single large colony rushing to an early revolution may be a viable strategy. More than that becomes a strategic liability, forcing you to spread your revolutionary army thinly over much ground, rather than concentrating against the crown’s regulars.

Concentrating your forces is vital because the tyrant back in the Old World fights a lot harder to hang onto his colonies than he used to. The waves of troops thrown against your shores can seem endless. Now that combat is no longer an all-or-nothing affair, but one where units are wounded, you will need large armies to throw back the hundreds of royalist soldiers sent to return you to servitude.

Although the increased military challenge to revolution is welcome, the actual execution is my least favorite part of the game. Be prepared: the war for independence is a long and grinding affair, lasting an ahistorical fifty, sixty, seventy, even eighty years—a huge slice of the hard 300-turn time limit under which you labor. The reason the war takes so long is that you do not win by hanging onto independence for a certain period, but by killing off every last royal soldier within a certain period. This is a huge problem, because you have no control over the speed with which the king sends his forces to humble you. If the royal forces are understocked with ships, or if they dally too long softening up your defenses with broadsides instead of fetching fresh troops, you can lose the game without losing a single town, or even a single battle, simply because they regulars didn’t arrive soon enough. Perversely, the king’s best strategy for suppressing the rebellion is to ignore it entirely. You could have half your population in arms, lodged behind an impenetrable network of fortresses bristling with cannon, but as long as one royalist soldier remains alive, picking his navel in Europe and leaving the colonies free to do as they like, your revolution is a failure. Perversely, the king’s best strategy for suppressing the rebellion is to ignore it entirely. Denied the chance to slaughter a European army, your Continental Congress would simply give up in despair. That’ll show those pesky rebels!

The motherland is, fortunately, the only military challenge you need face. Your rival colonists from other European nations seem disinclined to challenge you for the virgin continent, and the natives, while much stronger than they were in the original Col—three dragoons were once enough to wipe out an entire Indian nation—they are also much, much more forgiving when it comes to territory. They do demand a fee for using territory close to their homes, which you can get away without paying at some risk of igniting a war, but as long as you pay up, you’re safe as houses. Unlike the original Col, the natives think nothing of your expanding population or cultural borders (also measured by liberty bell output), and cheerfully disband their settlements as your borders envelop them. The first couple native surrenders may free up useful territory, but thereafter, each native gone is actually something of a loss: territorial gains are useless after your first half dozen cities, and it can be hard to give up the free education the native camps provide.

Civ4:Col has several advantages over the original Col besides the easier management that comes from holding so few cities. Your rivals are no longer the nuisance they once were, for example. In the original Col, the computer would cheat egregiously in allowing foreign colonies to declare independence, often with cities so loyal to the motherland as to suffer productive penalties to reflect a lack of patriotic sentiment and a damning of initiative among a subject people. The only solution was to conquer these cities yourself, but, because a city with a stockade could not be disbanded, this resulted in a large collection of small, vulnerable, and entirely undesirable colonies far from your power base. You can even play entirely without foreign rivals if that’s your cup of Boston Tea; a tiny map leaves the contest strictly between you and the mother country, although this does remove some of the interest of jockeying for first claim on particularly desirable founding fathers. A map editor allows you to tweak a scenario to your liking…although the game engine gives you little reason to care enough to bother.

On the other hand, Civ4:Col gives up some of the more interesting facets of Civ4. Strategic resources, for example, are once again reduced to mere bonuses. Where Civ3 and Civ4 use strategic resources for empire-wide effects and to allow the production of vital units, Civ4:Col simply offers +2 tobacco per turn from ground that could grow tobacco anyway. Diplomacy essentially vanishes; as long as you don’t actively provoke the natives, they’ll remain friendly and have little to trade. The motherland’s only interest in dealing with you is to shift to a war footing when you declare revolution. Foreign powers pretty much ignore you and, without strategic resources to trade, have no reason to offer a deal except for an exchange of maps.

So it’s two steps forward, one step back throughout the game design. Civ4:Col’s greatest drawbacks, apart from the very real possibility of losing a war for no reason, are its small scale and a frustrating…sameness to the games. Without strategic resources, one patch of ground is very like another. So long as your first city squeezes comfortably between territories the natives claim as their own, you’ll quickly absorb all the land you need or want, unchallenged. And it hardly makes a difference whether that land grows cotton, or tobacco, or sugar; market prices are much more stable than in the original Col, and the much shorter game (300 turns instead of the original 500-odd), nearly a quarter of which is spent unable to trade at all (The customs house has been eliminated, and wealth now has little effect on score, anyway.) means market fluctuations hardly matter for very long at all. The building portion of the game is enjoyable, despite its smaller scale, but the military showdown is eye-bleedingly repetitive, with the possible punchline of losing for lack of resistance from the crown. I find myself tempted to play only to the point of revolution and abandoning my games thereafter.

Altogether, Civ4:Col feels very much like a specialized scenario for Civ4, rather than a game in its own right. This is the more embarrassing (for Firaxis) and disappointing (for me), when Civ4:Col is marketed as a stand-alone game, as the original Col was, while the Warlords and the outstanding Beyond the Sword expansions to Civ4 included several scenarios apiece, including a dungeon crawl, a space-faring scenario, and a static defense scenario no less radical a revision of the engine than Civ4:Col is, along with several less radical variations. Civ4:Col is a worthy addition to the series as an expansion pack, but is a little light as an independent game.