Digital Alterity

This morning, I was attempting to research something in some old emails around the time I got married (2001), and I happened upon an email to my friend Toby on 2001-09-12, the day after the bombing of the World Trade Center. At the time, people considered my views to be unnecessarily pessimistic and paranoid. I even got into an argument with one of my relatives at the rehearsal dinner for my sister’s wedding about this very topic. In retrospect, I feel a certain amount of validation:

I’m frightened for a lot of reasons, dude. First, I’m scared shitless that Bush v2.0 is going to lead us headlong into a needless war. Open declaration of war on terrorist (again I can’t help but wonder who would get to define who are “terrorists”) groups/countries would only invite further strikes on American soil. That means either one of two very bad things would happen. Either (1) Americans are either forced or voluntarily decide to give up certain civil liberties that we have previously enjoyed thereby giving our federal government even more control, or (2) We continue with business as usual allowing those who are careless about security measures to give anyone with nefarious intent the perfect opportunity to do whatever the Hell they wish. I don’t honestly know which would scare me more — probably the former but the latter isn’t a much more comforting alternative.

It sure looks like we took option one full force. And later in the same email…

I know that I’m really really terrified that this is going to set race relations in this country back by twenty years. I mean, the government and media started pointing fingers within *hours* of the attack — long before any sort of proper investigation could have been carried out. This whole thing feels less like a crime investigation and more like the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where they’re talking about burning the witch. It feels like McCarthy searching for Communist leanings in people who were never a threat to anyone’s national security. I’m terribly afraid that the less enlightened people in our country will start to discriminate/lash out against Muslim people and even those who are just of Middle Eastern/Arabic decent. I’ve heard the term “towel head” way too often in the past thirty-something hours, man — and not just from the native redneck communities of the American Deep South. I’ve heard that term on national media talk and call-in shows. And that scares me shitless.

I’m betting that my friend Jen would agree that the italicized portion of that text has certainly come to pass.

One of my tasks at my secretarial position is dealing with the Department of Homeland Security for the various faculty and graduate assistants who come here to the Fruited Plain to further their research. All of the processes by which people are granted permission to live and work in the US can only be described as “byzantine” (or perhaps simply “effing ridiculous” if you weren’t the sort of child that played with a thesaurus). Here at UF, we have an entire office devoted to sorting out residency status, visas, and other such forms involving numbers, letters, and judicious use of the word “homeland”.

I have been trying since March to renew a professor’s visa status and also try to earn permanent residency for the same professor. Keep in mind here that the fellow in question is a teacher and a researcher at arguably the most important research institution in our state. He has a PhD. He presents important papers in a scientific discipline at conferences. In short, he’s the sort of guy that any country would love to have around. Nonetheless, I didn’t get his visa renewal back until a week ago. Then today, we finally got back his I-797 approval notice for his permanent residency application. The letter accompanying this notice had a tangled mess of forms the professor could choose to fill out with absolutely no recommendation about which forms he should fill out. This isn’t unusual. Every step of the permanent residency process has been like this. The whole process resembles nothing so much as a giant real-life Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

Turn to page 43 if you want to fill out form I-485.
Turn to page 57 if you want to fill out form I-765.
Turn to page 13 if you want to fill out both forms.

You have been eaten by a wolf.

This whole thing is some bureaucratic version of Hell. I’m convinced of it.

Technorati Tags: residency, green card, Department of Homeland Security, visa, bureaucracy, humor

Last week, I sent a somewhat scathing message to Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) regarding his nay vote for cloture on the Reed-Levin amendment. I indicated in my letter that I was just fine with him disagreeing with the amendment but that the systematic attempts to close off a vote by means of a filibuster were disgusting to me. I got this letter back in response:

Dear Mr. Haskell:

Thank you for letting me know of your thoughts about Senator Levin’s recent amendment to the Fiscal Year 2008 (FY08) National Defense Authorization Act to withdraw our armed forces from Iraq. I appreciate hearing from you and would like to respond to your concerns.

As you know, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) recently proposed an amendment to the FY08 National Defense Authorization Act that would begin the withdrawal process for our troops from Iraq, culminating in a total transition or withdrawal of our forces by April 30, 2008. I opposed this amendment, and it was voted down by a vote of 52-47 in a procedural vote requiring 60 votes to pass.

Unfortunately, following the defeat of Senator Levin’s amendment, the Democratic leadership decided to remove the FY08 National Defense Authorization Act from consideration on the Senate floor. Rather than provide the necessary authorization of funding for our men and women in uniform, the Democratic majority decided to play partisan politics by delaying the passage of this bill. Regardless of the political issues surrounding our work in rebuilding Iraq, it must be our steadfast purpose to provide our men and women currently in combat with everything they need to safely and quickly complete their mission of creating the environment for a stable democratic government in Iraq to flourish.

Our ongoing efforts in Iraq constitute the most important front in the war against extremist terrorist organizations. Withdrawing our troops precipitously and leaving Iraq as a failed state would likely bring about genocidal levels of death and destruction. However, this is not to say that our comittment to the people and government of Iraq is open ended. To the contrary, it is imperative that the Iraqi Parliament make great strides in their efforts of reconciliation, strengthening of their national security and building a robust economy. Without a clear level of comittment and action on the part of the Iraqi people and government, it is impossible to achieve a sustainable level of stability within Iraq.

It is vital that Congress continue to examine the president’s plan, and I hope that we can pull together – Republicans and Democrats to solve the most intractable and serious problem we face today. Please know that I will continue to closely monitor the evolving situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the ongoing War on Terror. Further, I will continue to work with my colleagues and with the Administration to see that our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines receive every tool they need and every benefit we can afford during this time of war.

Again, thank you very much for sharing your concerns. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any additional comments or questions. For more information on issues and activities important to Florida, please sign up for my weekly newsletter at http://martinez.senate.gov.

Sincerely,

Mel Martinez
United States Senator

The emphasis above is mine. The misleading sophistry, however, belongs solely to Mel Martinez (or rather, to whichever aide wrote this response). This wasn’t “voted down”. It was talked to death and never allowed to actually be put to a true vote because the cowardly Republicans knew that they lacked the votes to properly kill it. The Democrats did their fair share of this nonsense back during the early days of George W. Bush’s presidency, and I was similarly disgusted by it then.

I’m voting against Martinez in the next election. He is a cowardly political operative who hides behind never-ending speeches instead of bravely falling on his sword and registering his opposition vote. Mel Martinez is personally responsible for us remaining in Iraq.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, War, Senate, Mel Martinez, Filibuster, Cloture

I’m somewhat (and rather purposefully) removed from the mainstream. I only watch TV shows via DVDs from Netflix. I get all of my news from Internet sites like Reddit, and honestly I spend more time on highly specific sites about politics, comic books, and food than I spend actually gathering general audience news. Occasionally a massive story like this Paris Hilton nonsense will crack through my shell of non-awareness, but for the most part, I am slavishly devoted to my obsessions and blissfully unaware of most of humanity. This is why you people think that I’m so productive.

When I am confronted by surveys of public opinion or news stories about public outrage, I’m often left profoundly confused. As I become more and more removed from popular culture and social society, some shared societal beliefs just don’t seem like big deals to me anymore. I’m getting exposed to way more of such things in my current secretarial job because, in four years working as a computer programmer, I had been working only with alpha geeks who had pretty similar social values and mores. These days, I often come home and tell Allyson with disbelief in my voice the things that people think and believe. This of course isn’t really news to her because she continues to live in the general public.

In an effort to talk more about me and my solitary genius/depravity, I hereby present a list of things that make little sense to me.

Separate sex bathrooms. I have completely lost any sense of why we have sex-specific bathrooms in public places. At home, we all use shared toilet facilities, and we all know the physical differences between males and females. I no longer have any perspective on why this is such a big deal. People think nothing of taking their kids into the bathroom with whatever parent is most convenient. Why not just have the grownups share toilet facilities as well?

The American nakedness taboo. Why are Americans so uptight about the naked body? We think nothing of portraying violence and death on TV shows. Heck, we even have people with guns in cartoons for children. I don’t get the big deal in showing realistic portrayals of the parts that human beings all have. I’m not talking about graphic shots of people fornicating here, folks. I just don’t understand why it’s a big deal to see a woman’s breast or a man’s penis. It’s time to drop the effing cultural fig leaves.

Why Americans only vote for Democrats or Republicans. The American public is pretty sick of this whole Iraq war thing. In 2006, they voted a whole bunch of Democrats into Congress to try to get out of/fix the Iraq nightmare. What happened next is hardly surprising to those of us to tend to support third parties. The Democrats promptly rolled over and further funded the war against the wishes of the populace that elected them. They did it because they know that Americans will vote for them in 2008 anyway. After all, the only choices are either them or the Republicans.

Repulsion toward gay people. As many of you know, I’m a vegan. Since I stopped eating meat and animal products, the idea of eating meat is personally disgusting to me. I would genuinely have trouble swallowing if meat somehow made its way into my mouth. Nonetheless, when someone who does eat meat tells me about a non-vegan meal that they genuinely enjoyed, I don’t suddenly act disgusted and tell people how repulsed I feel thinking of eating such a meal. Nonetheless, this is exactly how a large number of people act when some talks about being homosexual. Why on earth is it so vexing to see two dudes or two chicks (gasp) holding hands or hugging in public?

Truth be told I don’t even understand anymore why being gay is such a big deal to people. We as a species are having no problems reproducing enough to increase our numbers. Gay people aren’t telling you that you’re not allowed to have and enjoy heterosexual sex. I completely fail to see why anyone even cares. Even if your religious beliefs consider homosexuality to be a sin, why would you care about homosexuals any more than, say, people who wear cotton/synthetic blends (Leviticus 19:19)?

Why people must be solely identified with their career. I’ve come to hate the question “What do you do?” I think this is, in part, because for the first part of my life, this question never actually came up. In small rural towns, it’s not uncommon for someone to have a job and then do something they’re truly passionate about in their spare time. I grew up around guys who worked in a prison or farmed but made cabinets or worked on cars on the side. I “do” pretty much whatever I want. I write. I draw. I read comic books. I play video games. Each of these things has far more to do with my identity than what I choose to do for money forty hours per week. I understand and appreciate that some people actually do get paid to do something they’re passionate about. I’m not there yet, and frankly, I might never be there. The comics I want to create right now seem to be more arty than superhero. The articles I write don’t seem to have much of an audience. I don’t intend to let lack of economic incentive stop me from doing what I love.

The root cause of many of the divisions we feel in the “Culture War” I keep hearing about so much on talk radio and cable news is classification itself. Any time we simplify a complex person to a simple ideal, we are committing a form of violence. In essence, we are dismembering that beautiful person in front of us until they fit into a convenient mold.

I’ve had to do a lot of work talking to people to show by example that, while I’m one of those Christian types, I don’t fit into the classification they may have built from their youth. Likewise, I’ve had to learn that my own childhood notions don’t fit anyone other than some non-existent ideal caricature in my head.

One of the lessons I’ve had to really learn in teaching myself to draw is that lines aren’t really all that common in the world. Boundaries aren’t made with clear cut lines segregating things. Most often, when you really look deeply at the boundary in question, you see that what we interpret as a line is really just a difference in tone (or “value” to use my recently acquired artistic jargon).

In much the same way, our categorization of the people around us has fuzzy boundaries. Christians aren’t a single group mind. Both the lapsed Catholic and the fundamentalist Southern Baptist are Christian. Atheists are likewise a diverse set. Richard Dawkins is an atheist out to expose what he sees as harmful ideologies of the theists. Other atheists are just quiet people who don’t share a belief in God. There are theist Buddhists and atheist Buddhists, but both groups attempt to follow the same dharma.

I resist the attempts of my culture to balkanize us via religion, race, politics, ideology, gender, and sexual preference. Sometimes I don’t notice my biases, but I’m always happier when I do so that I can mindfully seek what they have to teach me about myself.

Technorati Tags: Religion, Culture, Difference, Culture War, Balkanization

This Time article from Frank Luntz articulates pretty well why I supported the Republicans in 1994 but can’t stand this current lot:

The 1994 Republicans advocated balanced budgets. Today, they defend deficits. The 1994 Republicans wanted to eliminate government programs. Today, they propose and create them. The 1994 Republicans held themselves and Congress to a higher ethical standard. Today, they seem more interested in protecting their jobs than protecting the people they serve. They came to change Washington. Washington won.

Back then, the Republicans were a bold new challenger to the established political elite. Congratulations, assholes. You are now the established politcal elite.

The truly sad part of all this is that this is a virtual inevitability given our two-party system. One party is always the ruling majority party, and the other party is always the silenced voice that gets shut down whether their ideas are sound or merely fury. I dream of a parliamentary system with three, four, or even more parties. In such a government, the first priority of any party would be coalition building because you can’t accomplish very much without a majority vote when the time comes to actually vote on issues.

Technorati Tags: Politics, Republicans, Frank Luntz

Forcing people boarding airplanes to dump out any liquids they would otherwise drink on the plane is a criminal act. Attention airline industry: I’m not willing to travel on your effing planes if I can’t take a water on board with me.

The problem is that all the sheep in this country will just say, “Oh, it’s terrorism-related! I better just go along with it…” If you’re on the other side of this issue, you are, by definition, a complete idiot. Giving up your civil liberties in the name of security is a losing game.

This country is sick. I think it needs an enema.

Technorati Tags: Security, Politics, Freedom, Terrorism, Liberty

49% of Americans scare me.

While passing by the newspaper boxes outside my office building, I saw a newspaper headline which read, “51% of Americans Oppose Call List”. Now I accept that some people really are mentally ill, and they undoubtedly have representation in that sample set. Some people undoubtedly also just responded randomly without understanding the issue. I’m also sure that others just answered in favor of it just to stir the proverbial pot.

I don’t want to live anywhere near the people that answered truthfully in favor of the call list. Somebody hold me.

Technorati Tags: Government, Politics

I’ve heard a lot of people chalking up a lot of the poverty/abandonment issues to race in the whole hurricane thing. I have a bit of a different perspective from spending most of my life in the rural South. There’s an economic stratification that renders race sort of irrelevant. In my opinion, a lot of this goes right back the aftermath of the American Civil War. Since then, the North (and rich northerners who came south to rack up money over the agrarian war-torn South) has created a lower class amongst Southerners that they rule over economically.

Most Southern families who have lived in the South for generations are poor. Those who do have money tend to have been those who aligned themselves with the carpetbaggers. There is a strong resentment of families with money in the Deep South/rural South, and while most folks can’t tell you where their hostility comes from, I can assure you that it’s almost always a family bias brought about for the reasons I mentioned above.

When hurricanes rip through rural areas and cause devastation just as crippling to those in trailer parks and small homes on rivers, no one gives a shit, and it turns into a cultural joke in no time. Such folks almost never get true disaster relief because their homes get undervalued by insurance adjusters and appraisers, and honestly also because there is a strong distrust of the government (born out of, again, the mistreatment during the Reconstruction amplified by the retelling through generations).

Nearly all of the issues I hear folks talking about in relation to urban areas are also problems in rural areas of the South. Unemployment is almost always higher. Sexually transmitted diseases are rampant. (For a time in the 1990s, Hamilton County was the STD capital of Florida per capita. Miami/Dade County was second.) Crime is an ever present concern, and law enforcement rarely gives enough of a shit to actually enforce laws in poor areas. Education isn’t culturally valued. (Six folks from my school came to college with me. I’m on the only one that actually earned a degree.)

So anyway, it’s not really connected directly with the hurricane, but I just wanted to mention all of that. New Orleans has a chance to get fixed. The urban/Northern biased media will make it enough of an issue that action will happen. How many trailer parks in Mississippi will actually get the aid that they need? How many CNN news crews will be covering that angle of the disaster? How many FEMA executives will actually check up on how the corrupt state governments are allocating their disaster funds? (Hint: The riverboat casino owners will get plenty of remuneration, but nary a penny will make its way into the pocket of the farmer (yep, we still have those down here) who lost almost all of this year’s crop to flooding.)

The stereotypical stupid southerner is just as disgusting a stereotype as the big-lipped chicken-eating lazy negro. In both cases, it is a means of control of a population that is out of favor with the majority.

Technorati Tags: Southern Politics, Stereotypes, Civil War, Reconstruction

Attention magnetic patriots:

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but buying a little yellow ribbon magnets to affix to your vehicle of choice is actually not the best way for you to express your support for the American military and your agreement with our current government’s military policies. Since I’m sure that you’d honestly like to do everything within your power to express your patriotism and respect for our country’s servicemen, I’ve collected a list of other actions you could take that would actually do something with a bit more tangible benefit.

Join the military. The branch of service is really a matter of personal choice, but the occupation of Iraq has really put a drain on our ranks. Military recruiters are always in need of new patriots, and only those with medical or psychological conditions are usually turned away. Heck, if you have a college degree, then your unique job skills would be even more valuable. America needs nurses to tend to the wounded on both sides. America needs computer programmers and IT workers to help with communication systems and securing intelligence data stores. America needs anyone willing to help honestly. Just walk in to your local recruiter and say that you’re ready to do your part to help support a cause and country you believe in. This is precisely what most of your grandfathers did.

Write letters to those serving in the armed forces. The service men and women aren’t here in the States to look at your conveniently removable magnetic doodads. Far more effective in relaying your concern and support would be actually picking up a pen and paper to write a letter expressing your feelings to the eighteen-year-old kid from Iowa who’s actually working security in the middle of Baghdad through the cold nights and sweltering days. Tell your soldiers how truly grateful you are for the personal sacrifice they’ve made in your stead, and explain why you think it will help the Republic for them to be there doing such things. It’s gets lonely out there, folks. Learn to knit and send wool socks for those cold nights. Send a solider some heavy-duty re-sealable bags to protect his personal belongings from sand. Take time to learn what a soldier might need or want and buy that with the money you’ve wasted on four copies of the same ribbon magnet to put across the back of your car.

Conserve. All of the oil, electricity, and raw material you use could also be put to use in the war effort. Most of your grandparents lived through rationing. Most of them had victory gardens in their backyards to help reduce the drain on our food supply. Recycling was an important facet of the war effort at home during World War II. Do you really need to take that 15 MPG SUV or light truck a mile down the road to pick up soda cans you’re only going to throw in the trash?

Write to your elected officials. This is especially helpful if your duly elected senator or representative is against the current war effort. Explain to them why this issue is important to you, and be willing to vote them out of office if they don’t agree with your opinion on this issue that’s obviously important to you. Your elected official is rarely in your district long enough to take a survey of how many cars have what quantity magnets on them.