Parabasis

Quick Question?

Why does Firefox suck so much, and is there anything I can do to fix it? It is so unbelievably slow that pages take forever to load and I am actually typing faster than it can display text. Also, the interface is ugly.

Bogus Obama Revisionism

Since Obama's election, there's been a lot of what can only be called revisionism w/r/t his victory. Claims that we elected him but don't like his policies and thus he has no mandate despite polls showing that voters agree with his agenda, arguing that voters might like his agenda but are still somehow "center right" etc.  A story I missed until recently in USAToday does a similar thing with Obama's fundraising, and the study it points it very flawed.  I shoudl state here that I wouldn't doubt that to some extent, Obama's small-donor fundraising attained a kind of legenedary status that went beyond reality, but the study that USAToday pimps out to prove the point is methodologically flawed and misleading represented in the article.

The first mistake comes right in the lead graph:

Despite attracting millions of new contributors to his campaign, President-elect Barack Obama received about the same percentage of his total political funds from small donors as President Bush did in 2004, according to a study released today by the non-partisan Campaign Finance Institute.

The problem here is the word "percentage".  Obama's share of money from small donors is the same as Bush's. Okay, fine. But he also raised a lot more money than George Bush did, whic means in terms of shear numbers, he still has a lot more first time donors and small donors than any of his predecessors, which is still pretty remarkable when you think about it.

And then come some more numbers:

a quarter of Obama's record-shattering campaign account, came from donors of $200 or less, according to the institute's analysis of federal election reports through Oct. 15. That compares with $205 million, or about a third, from those who gave between $2,300 and $4,600, the maximum allowed by law.

Forty-eight percent of Obama's total take came from donors of $1,000 or more, compared with 56% for John Kerry and 60% for both Bush and John McCain, the analysis found.

This is a little confusing, because there's several categories they're talking about here. The first category is people who donated less than $200.  The second is people who donated between 200-1000 (not talked about) the third is people who donated over 1000 and the fourth is people who donated between 2300 and 4600 (this overlaps with category three, btw).  But without info on category 2 (the 200-1000 group) it's really impossible to determine anything.  Still, a lower percentage of Obama's money came from people donating over $1000, which means his campaign relied more on small donors than either Kerry, Bush or McCain.  That's significant. It might not be a paradigm shift or whatever, but it's still significant.

Then there's a third thing which is disputed.  If I give 5 donations of $200, am I counted as a $1000 donation in the study or a $200 donation? The Obama campaign counts it as the latter, the study counts it as the former. Both are potentially misleading.  I might be only donating $200 at a time becaue it's all I can afford which means that really for the purposes of understanding how campaign concentrations work, I should count as a $200 donor.  But if I'm doing it because I'm vacillating on Obama and not ready to commit but could always donate $1000 whenever I felt like it, then I should count as a $1000 donation. There's no way to tell, however. The only way to be precise is to release a study that tabulates the results both ways and does some compare and contrast.

Two Good Reads from the NYT Op-Ed Page

First, this editorial on an investigation into the Mormon church'sactivity w/r/t Prop-8.

Second, Suketu Mehta on the Mumbai Bombings:

MY bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai? There’s something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.

Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. “Mumbai is a golden songbird,” he said. It flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird.

RTWT here.

Mixed Thoughts on an Obama Appointment

Obama recently announced that his FCC transition team will be lead by Kevin Werbach.  I am worried. Why? Because Werbach is a Level 70 Tauren Shaman named Jenkins and I'm not sure how I feel having a member of the Horde be in charge of the FCC. Although I guess it means we can probably look forward to more radio stations being commandeered by the undead.

(joking, obvs.)

In NYC This Weekend? Why Not Take In A Show?

Why not indeed, especially when there's plenty of good offerings around.  Let me recommend three, two I've seen, one I've read.

The one I've read is Steven Levenson's Language of Trees, which is a beautiful play about a translator kidnapped in Iraq and the family he's left behind. It's a strange, perceptive, lyrical piece of work and definitely worth checking out.  Apparently, you can get $10 tickets to it using the code STHIPTIX. Buy them here.

The first one that i've seen that I'd like to recommend is the Mark Armstrong-helmed, Blair Singer written The Most Damaging Wound currently up at Manhattan Theatre Source.  The script is a great example of how much the "telling" half of the word storytelling matters.  It's a play about a group of male college friends who reunite roughly a decade later to enact a ritual they promised each other they'd perform.  Yes, there's drunken revelations, singalongs, fisticuffs, crying, and every character has their own particular unhappiness that needs to be explored.  It is not, in other words, the newest story in the book.

But that doesn't matter, honestly. It actually matters so little I hestitated in talking about it, but I thin it's important.  Blair  has taken a somewhat shopworn setup and elevated it to really good theatre by embueing it with snappy dialogue, compelling characters and a truthful, perceptive and difficult to find level of analysis of male intimacy, which is the show's real subject.  It was really refreshing to watch a play in which male intimacy was handled complicatedly and without the normal idealization and wish fulfillment that frequently goes on.  Furthermore, Blair makes a compelling comedic drama out of characters who are fundamentally decent well meaning people.  That's a really really hard thing to do. 

Mark, who you all know is a good friend, also zeroes in on the shared history of the characters and the cores of their being in a way that feel really truthful.  You would think watching it that the actors were all good friends even though many of them have never worked together before. Of particular personal delight for me was watching Chris Thorne, whom I'm used to seeing as a kind of broody malcontent, play the lovable drunken boor of the group.  The melancholia that Chris is so good at tapping into added fresh layers onto a part that a lesser actor would've turned into His Chance To Be Jack Black. Really, The Most Damaging Wound features some of the most compelling performances I've seen on stage in awhile, and Mark does a great job of helping to shape and modulate them so the play seems never out of balance. Buy tickets here.

Third is the new show from The Debate Society, Cape Disappointment. I am on the board of this organization, and many members of the group count amongst my closest friends. But I joined the board of the Debate Society because i love their work and the way they approach it, not because of the bonds of friendship. The Debate Society are experimental storytellers.  They combine some of the formalist concerns of experimental theatre with an actual interest in narrative (and in how narrative works). They also have a mischevious streak that runs close to the perverse.  For example: Cape Disappointment begins with a work they had initially developed when asked to participate in a dance festival.  That piece Detroit involves (a) no movement and (b) more lines in eight minutes than in the entirety of their second full length play The Snow Hen.  Earlier this season, they premiered a piece called You're Welcome which was intended to be a short billet of high school one acts (sample title: We Got A Fog Machine) all of which fall apart in some delicious way.

Cape Disappointment is, like last year's The Eaten Heart a collection of loosely connected vignettes that explore themes of nostalgia and the dark side of the American dream within a decaying retro setting.  The Eaten Heart was set in a seedy 1970s style motel while Cape Disappointment (and now Typepad is not letting me italicize for some reason so forgive all future formatting errors)  is set in a decrepit drive in theater that is haunted by the ghosts of the highway that surrounds it. The various stories and plot lines converge and collide and resonate off each other in really interesting ways, and the use of PS122's upstairs space is shockingly brilliant. I don't want to give away too much else, as one of the core policies of The Debate Society is secrecy, so please... go ahead and see it. Buy tickets here.

And just as a quick note, you can see all three shows for $46.00 which is less than the price of a ticket to an Off-Broadway show and at the end you'll see a new play by a serious up-and-comer, a well acted, written and directed example of how good realism can be and one of the best experimental companies in New York. Not bad for a weekend's work.

Religion and Politics

Those of us on the more secular humanist side of the spectrum have a habit of saying that we fervently support the separation of Church and State (or to take it even further, religion and politics) not only to protect the State from religion, but to protect religion from politics.

Often when we say this, I think most people think we're being insincere or maybe to put it a little more mildly self-serving. After all, many secularists aren't religious, what do we care what happens to religious communities etc.? Aren't we just saying that to get more people on our side?

Well, frankly... no, we're not.  The early history of secularism in the United States is generally the history of religious groups and people fearing persecution (many of whom were Catholic of Jewish).  The ACLU, which gets branded an "atheistic" organization for its firm belief in a separation of Church and State has argued many landmark religious freedom cases on behalf of religious people. 

I bring this up in the wake of the Prop-8 mess, and the resignations by prominent artistic leaders who were Mormons who supported Prop-8 because they were told it was their religious duty.  This is exactly the sort of thing secularists like myself worry about in terms of religious organizations involvement in politics.... I don't think in the long term the Mormon Church's experiment in intervention is going to be positive for either California or the Mormon Church or its members. People are losing their jobs because they obeyed a religious directive from an organization that abused its authority (and I would argue tax exempt status) and the trust that people put in it.  That's bad all around for everyone.

And by "abused its authority" what I mean here is that I think there's a real difference between the Church of LDS saying "we believe marriage is between a man and a woman and shouldn't be changed" and saying "it is your religious duty to work and contribute money to make sure Proposition 8 gets passed". Similarly, there's a difference between the Catholic Church saying "life begins at conception" and saying "we will not offer communion to people who voted for Obama because he's pro-choice". The former in both cases is an action that reflects a point of view that I strongly disagree with but is well within the bounds of what is appropriate, the latter is using one's religious authority to create a very real threat (of hell for example) to compel people to do something. Which is, you know, abusive.

Another One Bites The Dust

Richard Raddon, director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, resigns amidst revelations that he donated money to Yes On 8 in California.  He had this to say for himself:

As many know, I consider myself a devout and faithful Mormon. I prefer to keep the details around my contribution through my church a private matter. But I am profoundly sorry for the negative attention that my actions have drawn to Film Independent and for the hurt and pain that is being experienced in the GLBT community.

Organized religion meddling in politics is workin' out great so far.

Interesting Reads on No-On-8's Failures

How did Prop 8 end up passing?  Overwhelming enthusiasm from Mormons?  The increased Black turnout in the 2008 election?  The incompetence of the leaders of the No-on-8 Movement?

How did it happen that double digit opposition to 8 turned into a 52-48 victory for the forces of hatred?  The Advocate has some interesting answers. Queerty piles on here.

Tuesday Hair Blogging-- Profile View

It's Beginning To Sound A Lot Like Christmas

Longtime readers of Parabasis may know that although I am a deeply secular person and won't really set foot in religious institutions except for major occasions (weddings, funerals, mar mitzvahs) I really like the secular holiday of Christmas. Not the religious one, mind you, you won't catch me at midnight mass or anything but I like the giving of presents, the eating of good food, and I actually like good Christmas music.

Keep in mind the word "good". The problem with Christmas music is that most of it is very very bad.  Very little of it is good. But some of it is, and finding those good Christmas albums is tough but worth it.  For example, the classic Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack (largely with music by the Vince Guaraldi Trio) is awesome. So good, in fact, that it's one of the few Christmas albums you can listen to pretty much anytime of the year.  I also happen to like John Denver and the Muppets Christmas album. Los Straightjacks surf-rock 'Tis The Season for Los Straitjackets is also a joy to listen to.

So I'm accumulating more Christmas music this year, including Ray Charles' The Spirit of Christmas which is amazing... sexy and bluesy and groovy and heartfelt and even a little gritty in places...the sparse intro to Winter Wonderland, for example, is gorgeously effective given  how overblown and overproduced most Christmas music is. I also picked up Stevie Wonder's Someday at Christmas which I'm not as big a  fan of. Although it has a couple of good songs on it (particularly What Christmas Means To Me), it sometimes gravitates to the sappier, more embarrassing impulses of Wonder as a singer and arranger .