Delayed post on my volunteering last weekend / Debate talk / Worldviews.

I will post soon about my volunteering last weekend in Indiana, though I am going down to Indiana again this weekend, so I'm digging myself a hole with delayed blog posts (and loving it!).

Yesterday I went to the black neighborhood bar to watch the vp debate, but they had the baseball game on, so I went back to the student bar, but the one nice (black) bartender around my age was working and he was into the vp debate, so it was all good, especially since the one bar regular who's this 60-some year old retired black guy Ron who comes in every night for 3 or 4 martinis and then goes home once he's hammered ended up sitting near me for the debate, so we had some good times.

For one thing, when Sarah Palin was saying for the third time how Alaska's an energy-producing state, Ron was like, "Fuck Alaska, how about the rest of the U.S.?"

Later, when Joe Biden gave his answer about diplomacy that climaxed with his comment about how McCain wouldn't even sit down with the president of Spain, the guy was like, "I like that Biden," and when I said that I did too, Ron was like, "Good man, good man", and he gave me a jocular mini-shoulder-hug and a fist bump.

But, the best part was when this late-40s black dude in a black baseball cap sidled up to the other side of the bar regular while Sarah Palin was on the screen, and he leaned in to Ron and quietly was like, "Hey, do you think that governor's a good-looking woman?", and without a blink, Ron was like, "Yeah, and that's all she is."

Also, I think this escaped a lot of people, but Palin was really using the evangelical "worldview" language to rally the base in her debate response such as this (taken off of the cnn.com transcript of the vp debate):

But even more important is that world view that I share with John McCain. That world view [sic] that says that America is a nation of exceptionalism. And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said, that we are a beacon of hope and that we are unapologetic here. We are not perfect as a nation. But together, we represent a perfect ideal. And that is democracy and tolerance and freedom and equal rights. Those things that we stand for that can be put to good use as a force for good in this world.

Usually, in things such as a conservative Christian worldview-based home-schooling curriculum, you have the ideal of a Christian worldview arrayed against other ways of seeing the world (e.g. secular humanism, into which all other forms of Christianity are put, usually). In this case, Palin was combining the "city on a hill" biblical language with the idea of America as a chosen nation in conjunction with this. I'm not saying the religious overtones of this part of the speech couldn't be picked up from her other comments, but what's interesting is that Palin, a known evangelical, is saying that John McCain shares her worldview and will be a force for good in the world - in other words, she was sticking up for him for her evangelical brothers and sisters in the viewing audience and saying he's one of us and will do our kind of good in the world.

Spazzing out.

I'm spazzing out, between booking trip tickets and planning to go to the Madonna, Tina Turner, and Joan Baez concerts. When I'm not spazzing out, I think it's funny how all my stress comes from arranging all the fun shit that I want to do.

Cabbage / Tina / Madonna.

So, the other day I was having lunch with the Mormon guy from my department, and he noticed that as part of my lunch I had a small cabbage salad. He said that some Greek or Roman naturalist (forgot who) said that cabbage was the food that heals all, and advised for wounds to eat a lot of cabbage and then piss on them.

Today I was looking up Tina Turner tickets for the arena concert here when this one grad student from anthro passed by.

"Hey Joe," I was like, gesturing to the picture of her on the computer screen, "Want to go see Tina Turner? This is her first tour in eight years since her Farewell Tour, look at her, you know she's gonna be good, she's a living legend."

"And a living sculpture," he was like, and then politely declined.

On another note, the cool-as-all-hell second career doctoral student who used to be into Moroccan dance in the late 70s is going with me to the Madonna concert coming up, if there are still tickets available.

Possible karaoke song set.

I think this would rock the shit out, and both these songs are in the hipster karaoke songbook (which is very thin and I have to dig to find songs after having been there like five or six times, it's nuts):

song #1 - Barry Manilow's "Made it Through the Rain"

song #2 - The Doors' "Love Her Madly"

The first one introduces me, and the second one rocks the shit out, and somehow they just work together.

Plus, it will make the host respect me, both with my having both songs in my repertoire and also my having the idea to put them together.

Boom Boom Room redux / Dutch journalists.

So me and my one Dutch friend went back to Boom Boom Room last night. I was pretty psyched to be back, but it wasn't as nice as summer, since then they had the riverside patio open and free hotdogs. Though, the people were as cool as before -- the entrance person was a sadistic clown, and there was this short old guy dressed as a gangster walking around, and a couple black guys with gold necklaces one of which was actually miniature handcuffs, and this young S&M girl with dyed red hair put up in tufts and a red leather corset with long strips hanging off of it that flung around when she twirled, and only four black transvestites compared to the six from last time, though one of them this time subbed in as a go-go dancer and did this marvelous thing with these little fans she had. My one Dutch friend was getting all worked up that he wasn't dressed hip or hot enough (he thinks you have to go one way or another), so next time he's coming in his tight-fitting suit and he says he's sprinkling coke on the sleeves so he really does look rich, and he's saying I'm on my way to hip and I just have to work a little bit more with something, and get some gimmick going.

The only real event of the night was two, one where this giant black trannie walked in and ran into a couple girls she knew, and one of them felt up her tits right there during the course of the conversation, like they had been talking about her chest or something and the one girl wanted to check out the texture. Then, like five minutes later the giant black trannie was sitting down with her giant legs crossed and text-messaging and I was glancing over at her and she looked up intensely at me, where if I had decided to return it we could have been flirting, though I didn't, she was way too intense and scary.

The other thing that happened was that this drunk half-Asian half-Mexican girl in a really short skirt was somewhere around us for a lot of the night and my one Dutch friend thought she was cute, and when he was going off on how he needed a look, she separated herself from her brother and was dancing by herself rather skankily right next to him, and he wasn't noticing the entire time since he was going off on how he wasn't dressed exactly right as I watched him bitch and right behind him this girl practically moaning as she heaved herself up and down.

Also, I forgot, there was this really light-skinned black chick in her 20s named Ramona who had tall legs and daisy dukes and a tight shirt on, and she kept walking around the entire room the entire night and every time she passed by us she would introduce herself to my one Dutch friend since she thought he was cute.

Also again, I forgot, there was this other girl who was totally on something who when we were leaning against the bar on the main dance floor she stumbled into me and somehow grabbed both my pecs at once as she fell against me and then looked up and kind of smiled and picked up my hand and held it weakly, and then walked away slowly stumbling like the Bride of Frankenstein and let my hand drop as she went.

All in all, it was a Monday.

On another note, one of my Dutch friend's Dutch friends is a tv journalist who is coming to the States now to cover the presidential campaign, and he's trying to persuade her to set up a camera in the black neighborhood bar the night of the election, though she's resistant, so next time we're in town we might go scout authentic locations with her in her rented car.

He was saying, too, that she had arranged with a (black) friend of a friend to take her to a ghetto for footage, and first this (black) guy was like, "I have some friends I think you'd be interested in talking to," and the next thing they were in a really nice black part of town with her talking to his friends about politics. Later, she was like, "I can't use this footage, these black people live in a mansion, they are too rich," though she was happy with her ghetto footage, and her footage of a town in Indiana where she talked to the sheriff who was wearing a cowboy hat.

My mom's not sorry for Sarah Palin.

When I talked to my mom this weekend she mentioned the Palin-Couric interview, and she was saying she overheard some librarians at work talking about it in back, but she didn't catch what they were saying.

"She's such a lamekovite," my mom was like, "Like I was telling everyone about her convention speech, anyone with a teleprompter and Speech 101 can give a speech, you're just reading off a teleprompter."

"She's a what?", I was like.

"A lamekovite, it's someone who's really lame, it's a word your father uses."

"Oh," I was like, "How does he spell it?"

"I don't know," my mom said, "I don't think I've ever seen him spell it."

Then, when I started saying that I was kind of feeling bad for Sarah Palin since it's so obvious that she's out of her league, my mom was like, "Don't you go feeling sorry too fast, when she had power she liked to hire and fire and make it felt and throw it around, so she could have said no, but she didn't, she wanted it too much, so don't go feeling bad for her all of a sudden."

On another note, my mom's recent worry is that I do too much stuff, and she said that she googled "physical exhaustion" the other day at work to find out side effects.

"Oh," I was like, "so you think I have physical exhaustion?"

"No," my mom was like, "I just want to be ready when the time comes," and then she added how she was saying all the stuff I do to one of the librarians at work, this really quiet laconic woman who's divorced with teenagers and is kind of mousy though cute, and that woman just listened for a while while my mom was going off and then was like, "Your son would have been fun during the 60s."

On yet another note, I've been thinking about the anti-intellectualism of Sarah Palin and George W. Bush, and how it's not so much anti-intellectualism, though it is, but it's better described as this folk-wisdom approach where common sense from the heartland trumps elite learned knowledge. Only, with Sarah Palin, it shows how that kind of thing when successful is politics is more a posture than a genuine personality, since it takes a lot of privilege like Bush's Yale education and wealthy family and travel and policy knowledge to pull it off as an act; Sarah Palin doesn't seem to have had any of that, so her posture, which seems more genuine, doesn't work, since she flubs the details and comes off as out of her league and not having the command of the facts that you decimate and slice through with your folk wisdom. It's very odd, that only the privileged can pull off folk wisdom in politics, and kind of contradictory.