wtf is it?

With the Cons and their nicknames? There's "Scooter" and "Cookie" and "Buzzy"...and that doesn't even touch all of the "normal" names like Chip and Tip and so forth...Is this something that can only be understood after spending $500,000 of your family money on Exeter/Andover, Harvard/Yale, and then Harvard/Yale again?*

*Maybe it's the drugs. I have long believed, and continue to believe, that the Cons have access to way better drugs than the rest of us. There is ample proof of this--for example, our foreign policy. Then there is the way they all tell lies with a straight face, and then recant after being out of office (I'm talking to YOU, Scottie McClellan, who is just now waking up from a bad, bad White House Kool-Aid hangover).

While we're here, let's note that the drug Cheney takes to allow his cyborg "heart" to continue to "beat" is called Warfarin. You read that right. Warfarin.

I'm sure I have some drugs around here somewhere...

a republican says something funny: take note

And here I mean "funny" as "actually humorous" rather than as "batshit crazy" or "ann coulter's feeble attempts to sound sane." Mike Huckabee, responding to Romney's attacks on Huckabee's tuition credits for immigrants, responded, "I guess Mitt Romney would rather keep people out of college so they can keep working on his lawn."

See? Funny! (Also, kind of...rational.)

the happiness revolution

It wasn't until long, long after Freud that psychologists and neuroscientists started thinking that, perhaps, they should study functional, happy people as well as non-functional, miserable people. That it took them a hundred years to realize they should study the flip side of the coin is, in itself, indicative. It shows how we humans tend to fixate on the negative and dark, how we tend to remember insults more than compliments and hurtful events more than happy ones.

So far, studies of happiness have largely shown us that we are spectacularly bad at predicting what will make us happy in the future. (See, for example, Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness.) They have also shown, though, that what happy and resilient people do, to put it simply, is shift their focus. They tell themselves a different story. And they are forgiving, of themselves and others.

For some time now, the progressive left in this country has hidden their happiness (or forsaken it entirely). When you know what's going on in the world, and are concerned at all with what is just and what is humane, with human potential, it's damn depressing. And most liberals I know are, to varying degrees, depressed and anxious. This depression and anxiety leads, unfortunately and all too often, to self-righteousness. We are angry, because we believe that no one cares about our suffering. And we suffer, for others, in the innocent and mistaken belief that our suffering indicates our level of care for others. On some level, we may even believe that our suffering eases the suffering of all the others we know are hungry, homeless, desperate, exploited.

This is a mistake. Our individual suffering helps no one, and hurts ourselves. Sometime after the 2004 election I realized that, in addition to the very real power The Administration had over my physical body, I had given them power over my mental well-being. I had given them my happiness--which they didn't want--and filled myself with rage. My anger hurt them not at all. It did not lead us to win the election, nor has it stopped their nepotistic, Keystone-Cops-Fascist, utterly incompetent behavior. I realized that all my anger, all that time, changed nothing. But it cost me greatly. I resolved that they would get not one more moment of my happiness. And for the most part, I've kept to that, in the face of considerable obstacles.

We can, and I hope we do, have a revolution in this country. But one thing we need to get back (listening to Led Zeppelin, or the Beatles, or the Doors, or Jimi Hendrix, or Dylan, makes this clear) is a joyful alternative to the mainstream ways of living. This is what the hippies had, and why they are still a cultural force even after everything they hoped for has been torn to pieces by 2 Nixon administrations, 2 Reagan administrations, and now 2 Bush Administrations. Even Clinton, for that matter, betrayed the ideals of the hippies. Why did they blow the doors open? Because they had a life that looked better, happier, more free than that of the society that surrounded them. We allowed that joy to be taken from us, and now we associate being a liberal with being angry, uptight, moralistic, judgemental: we think if we just tell enough people the truth the scales will fall from their eyes and they will say, "JESUS GOD, I can't believe I didn't know this before! You mean the ice caps are melting and polar bears are drowning and women and children are being used as sex slaves and our country has been bought and sold by corporations and we no longer have a Bill of Rights and Bush and Cheney have taken turns wiping their asses with the Constitution? To the barricades!"

It's not going to work that way. If we want peace, we have to make peace with ourselves. If we want change, we have to change ourselves. We can choose happiness. And wouldn't we, after all, prefer a movement full of happy, sensuous, present people than one full of angry and hostile people? Even if we make no difference, even if it's all too little, too late, we won't have spent our precious and irreplaceable time on being angry with people who really, frankly, couldn't care less if we were angry at them all the time.

Our suffering helps no one. Our happiness might. And even if it doesn't, well, you'll be happy anyway.

My New Favorite Thing

Is the Midwest Teen Sex Show. No, it is not porn. Yes, it is a funny, smart, honest show about sex, aimed at teens. This is what sex education needs to be like: unblushing, honest about the risks and the rewards of sex, and loaded with humor. For some reason I forget how to embed videos from YouTube (didn't there used to be a button? never mind) so just click on this. Also highly recommended is the episode on female masturbation.**

**As a side note, could we all come up with some new words for "masturbation"? It has to be one of the ugliest words in the English language. It doesn't sound like something you would want to do. It sounds like a something to do with a car engine, or a public disturbance: "There were massive masturbations in the streets of Kabul today..."