Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

I pledge…

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Apparently, Jeff Jarvis is proposing a ‘Post Election Peace Pledge‘.

After the election results are in, I promise to:

  • Support the President, even if I didn’t vote for him.
  • Criticize the President, even if I did vote for him.
  • Uphold standards of civilized discourse in blogs and in media while pushing both to be better.
  • Unite as a nation, putting country over party, even as we work together to make America better.

Hmm. Working my way backwards, up the list.

“Unite as a nation….” Sounds good. Not sure if it’s possible. Bush, while billing himself as “a uniter, not a divider,” has done so well at tearing this country apart that I fear it’s going to be a long, long time before the wounds really start to heal (and I doubt they’ll have much chance to start healing if Bush stays in office).

“Uphold standards of civilized discourse….” I’ve done my best to do that for a long time now. I may not always agree with everything I read, and the people who come here may not always agree with everything I say, but I’ve done my best to keep things civilized around here. Easy to sign on to this one.

“Criticize the President….” You bet your sweet bippy (and I’d do this were Kerry to win the office, too).

“Support the President….” This is where I have problems. I can certainly recognize and accept the final results of the election, even if I don’t end up liking them. But should Bush win (as looks likely) — support? How can I support someone whose ideology is for all intents and purposes diametrically opposed to my own?

How can I support someone who wants to declare some of my closest friends to be second class citizens merely because they love someone of their own sex? How can I support someone who cares more about lining his pockets and those of his cronies than doing anything to help the millions of poor and homeless in this country? How can I support someone who actually thinks cutting trees down is a viable way to save them from forest fires? How can I support someone willing, even eager, to plunge us into a war that, contrary to the Republican propaganda, was not connected to 9-11, and has cost over 1,000 American lives and as many as 100,000 Iraqi lives?

Answer — I can’t.

Later, Jeff updated his post after people asked him about this “support” issue.

Commenters ask me what I mean by “support.” Right question. I do not mean blind support, love-it-or-leave-it support, with-him-or-against-him support. I mean acknowledging that the president is the president and especially in a time of war, we need to stand together against our enemies — namely, Islamofascist terrorists — and not act, as too many have during this administration (and the one before it) that the enemy is in the White House. No, we’re on the same side.

At this point, I’ll turn the reins over to Shelley, who responds to this far more intelligently and rationally than my first impulse was to do.

That’s a little like the logic of saying to a person, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Jarvis has framed the question so that it reflects what he considers our most dangerous enemy: Islamofascist terrorists. I can’t agree with his call for support, because I can’t agree with the definition of the enemy.

You see, I consider our worst enemy to be intolerance. Intolerance on the part of some Muslims about other non-Muslim people from the west, true. But also the intolerance demonstrated in this country towards gays, towards women, towards people of color, towards those who don t follow what others deem the One True and Right Way.

When Jarvis says will I pledge to support the President as he combats the enemy, my answer has to be, yes, if we can agree on what is the enemy.

And there’s the rub — if we work on the assumption that Bush will be keeping his hold on the Oval Office, than we’re in a Catch-22, for if the President agreed with me on what the enemy was, than Bush wouldn’t be the President. In many ways, Bush is the enemy, preaching his message of bigotry, hate, intolerance, and America über alles.

I don’t doubt that Jarvis means well with his pledge. But this is one pledge I won’t be signing on to.

Monorail is a go (again)

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On the bright side, though, Seattle voters have (for the fourth time) given the local monorail a go-ahead.

Chanting “Let’s build it, let’s build it,” Seattle monorail supporters last night celebrated the defeat of a measure that could have stopped the 14-mile line in its track.

City voters yesterday endorsed the project by a comfortable margin — the fourth time a monorail issue has come before the electorate in recent years.

They defeated Initiative 83, a measure that would have killed the proposed line by banning its construction on city streets.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting, 63 percent of voters rejected I-83 yesterday.

The vote followed one of the costliest city ballot measure campaigns ever, and the vote counts showed I-83 losing by a wide margin.

Nice to have some good news to wake up to.

iTunes “Disco Death Race 2000 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Disco Death Race 2000 (full mix) (1996, 1:13:48).

254 – 252

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Ugh. This is not looking promising.

I spent most of last night watching Angel episodes, doing my best to ignore the results coming in — but, of course, I couldn’t stay away entirely. Unfortunately, every time I checked in, things looked worse and worse. Eventually, I just had to head to bed and see where things stood in the morning.

Right now, things stand at 254 to 252 Electoral Votes, with Bush in the lead. New Mexico, Iowa, and (most critically) Ohio are still too close to call. Much as I’d like to believe that we could pull a rabbit out of our hat and pick up Ohio’s twenty Electoral Votes, it really isn’t looking terribly likely.

Even more discouraging is that even were we to disregard the Electoral College and look at the popular vote, Bush is leading there, too. It’s tight — about a three and a half million vote edge — but it still puts Bush ahead.

I’ve got to admit, while I hadn’t come out and said so flat out, I was pretty optimistic yesterday and in the weeks leading up to voting day. I really hoped that there were enough unknown factors &dmash; a mobilized youth contingent; the number of new, first-time voters; blocks of cell-phone users that hadn’t been factored into polling data — that predictions aside, Kerry would end up the clear winner. I thought there was a chance that we’d pull through with more than just a few percent here and there, but that there would be a definite, decisive win.

Basically, I made the mistake of forgetting one of my dad’s favorite maxims: “You will never lose betting on human stupidity.” I let hope and optimism push aside my customary cynicism. I actually thought that for once, this country would vote with its head and heart, rather than letting the fear, paranoia, and xenophobia so omnipresent in the Bush campaign to take control.

I really find it mind boggling that so much of this country’s population can support Bush. How they can look at what he’s doing to the country — politically, socially, environmentally — and what he’s doing to the rest of the world and honestly think that he is the best man to be in charge.

But it looks like that’s the case. Unless a miracle comes through in the next day or so as absentee ballots are counted, provisional votes are checked, and Ohio’s votes are sorted through with a fine-tooth comb (and Kerry, don’t you dare concede before it’s absolutely clear where things stand), Bush will continue his single-minded, blindingly theistic reign over our country.

Which scares me more than I really want to think about.

But even if Bush wins, the battle is not over. As Meteor Blades says at the Daily Kos:

Not a few people have spoken in the past few hours about an Americanist authoritarianism emerging out of the country’s current leadership. I think that’s not far-fetched. Fighting this requires that we stick together, not bashing each other, not fleeing or hiding or yielding to the temptation of behaving as if “what’s the use?”

It’s tough on the psyche to be beaten.Throughout our country’s history, abolitionists, suffragists, union organizers, anti-racists, antiwarriors, civil libertarians, feminists and gay rights activists have challenged the majority of Americans to take off their blinders. Each succeeded one way or another, but not overnight, and certainly not without serious setbacks.

After a decent interval of licking our wounds and pondering what might have been and where we went wrong, we need to spit out our despair and return — united – to battling those who have for the moment outmaneuvered us. Otherwise, we might just as well lie down in the street and let them flatten us with their schemes.

The battle for the presidency may be lost.

The battle for this country must keep going.

iTunes “Disco Death Race 2000 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Disco Death Race 2000 (full mix) (1996, 1:13:48).

First exit polls

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Some of the very first early exit polls have been released. As such, take these with a large grain of salt — we’ve got a long way to go today.

       AZ  CO  LA  PA  OH  FL  MI  NM  MN  WI  IA  NH
Kerry  45  48  42  60  52  51  51  50  58  52  49  57
Bush   55  51  57  40  48  48  47  48  40  43  49  41

(via Atrios)

Humidermy: So very, very disturbing

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Taking a break from election news (since it’s too early for results to start coming in yet), Julie Leung pointed out what has to be one of the most seriously disturbing articles I’ve read in a long time. I kept figuring that it had to be a Halloween prank, and kept waiting for a “gotcha!” moment…but it never came.

If burial or cremation isn’t quite your thing when your loved one dies…why not just keep them around?

“Come on, Timmy, blow out the candles before they melt the cake,” she admonishes the dark-haired lad, who is suddenly full of himself now that he’s entered his teen years.

“Why don’t you get Granny to blow them out?” cracks Tim, gesturing toward the elderly lady seated to his right at the dining room table — Robert’s mother, Esther. She, too, is wearing a party hat, though it’s cocked a tad to the side, making the casual observer think she may be suffering from some sort of paralysis.

“You know that Granny Esther can’t do that,” Gloria admonishes. “If you don’t blow out the candles, then there’ll be no presents for you, young man.”

“Whatever!” spits Tim, ripping off his birthday hat and throwing it to the carpet. “This birthday sucks! I’m too old for this. I’m not a baby anymore. I want to go hang out with my friends.”

Tim shoves past his mother and grandmother, and in the process, knocks Esther Dunlop, age 76, to the floor. Esther lies there unmoving; Tim’s sister, Megan, picks up her grandmother and sets her back in the chair, straightening her hair and closing her mouth, which had popped open in the fall. The ease with which the skinny 14-year-old has righted the older lady is almost startling, given Esther’s seemingly sturdy frame.

No one says anything about the cake or the candles, which have since burned themselves out and are sending up wisps of smoke, like incense at a Mass for the dead. The imagery is appropriate. What is not readily apparent from this scene is that Mrs. Dunlop expired in June because of a massive cerebral hemorrhage; she died instantly as she lay on the couch in the Braswells’ home, where she had lived for several years, watching a rerun of her favorite show: CSI: Miami. What now sits before Timothy Braswell’s melting ice cream cake — blue hair and all — is her lifelike, taxidermied corpse.

Supposedly the company Preserve-A-Life, Inc. specializes in “humidermy” — taxidermy for deceased people.

I checked PAL’s site, and there’s nothing on the page or in the source to indicate that this is a hoax. The article is from the Phoenix New Times, which seems to be a real paper. So far, everything looks legit.

However, doing a whois search on preserve-a-life.com reveals that the preserve-a-life.com domain was registered by NT Media, LLC, and has a contact e-mail address of dom-admin@NEWTIMES.COM. New Times‘ site claims that it is a ‘publisher of alternative newsweeklies’ — and just happens to be the publisher of the Phoenix New Times.

So at the moment, I’m pretty sure that this is a Halloween hoax. Admittedly, a rather sucessfully creepy hoax…

Renee Carson of Mesa didn’t have enough money to have the whole body of her son, Marine Lance Corporal Jefferson Carson, done.

She opted for a head-mounting, and a military burial for the remainder of the corpse paid for by the Corps. Renee confirms that Preserve A Life waived its \$1,700 fee for the war hero. It was a good thing, too, that she chose the limited procedure, since Jeff Carson’s body was mutilated when he stepped on a land mine while attempting to take an Iraqi child and a fellow Marine to safety during the first few days of the invasion. The mine blew him apart as he was holding the little girl in one arm and dragging his buddy with the other. The child was saved, but he and his buddy weren’t so lucky. Both were awarded the Purple Heart posthumously, and Carson received the Medal of Honor. Wearing his camouflage hat and a stern expression, Jeff Carson’s head is displayed on a living room wall next to his framed medals, a signed letter from President George W. Bush, and photos of the 20-year-old in and out of uniform.

In retrospect, I’ve gotta admit I’m impressed. As I said at the beginning, I kept thinking that this couldn’t be real, and kept waiting for the “gotcha” moment, but then it never came. I’m not normally taken in by things like this — the combination of a healthy dose of skepticism and an admittedly sick sense of humor usually helps me ferret things out pretty quickly. This one got me, though, if only for a few minutes.

Priorities

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\$3 million Amount the White House was willing to grant the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 11 September attacks.

\$50 million Amount granted to the commission that looked into the Columbia space shuttle crash.

Many more scary numbers here.

(via Jonas)

iTunes “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (full cd)” by Chaykin, Maury/Jarmusch, Jim/Stanton, Harry Dean from the album Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (full cd) (1995, 1:16:00).

Puppy playtime

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At the dog park, Seattle, WA

Sunday afternoon, Prairie and I went over to visit Prairie’s sister and her boyfriend to visit, celebrate Prairie’s birthday, and visit their new puppy, Loodie.

We ended up heading out to Magnuson Park and letting Loodie romp around at the dog off-leash area at the park, a huge (nine acre) fenced-in area for dogs to run wild and play.

While I’ve never been a huge dog person — much more of a cat person, in fact — I’ve got to admit that the day was a lot of fun. Loodie’s a really cute puppy, and she found quite a few friends to roughhouse with.

On our way back towards the car, this golden retriever decided that it wanted to be my friend (to the point of nearly knocking me over a couple of times). Prairie grabbed the camera, and these pictures stand as evidence that while dogs may not be my favorite critters on the planet…well, they’re not all bad.

Jason Webley Halloween Show 2004

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Jason Webley Halloween Show, Seattle, WA

Prairie and I went to Jason Webley’s Halloween/Deathday show last night.

The show, of course (and as always), was incredible, and I’ll try to get a better writeup later on today. For now, though, I’ve uploaded a photoset from last night to Flickr.

The pictures don’t have full descriptions yet (another as-soon-as-possible project), but they start with the gathering of fans outside Town Hall, go through the entire show, and then follow us all out through Freeway Park until Jason left us yet again.

Enjoy!