Posts tagged with “politics”

Rewriting history

The Washington Post says:

President Bush will take to the airwaves for the last time at 8 pm tonight, saying in a prepared speech that while he “experienced setbacks” during his tenure, he always acted “in the best interests of the country”.

I think it reads better as:

President Bush will take to the airwaves for the last time at 8 pm tonight, saying in a “prepared” speech that while he experienced “setbacks” during his tenure, he always “acted” in the “best interests” of the “country”.

16 January 2009 - 11:25 | Tags: , ,

Review of the 2008 USA Presidential Election

While the result itself was fantastic, I’m forced to give the election 2 stars out of 5. After months of hype, I was expecting the biggest blockbuster of the year - something that would get a clean sweep at the Oscars and set new box office records. I’d seen posters promoting the election everywhere. People were wearing tshirts of their favourite characters. The soundtrack was a huge hit. There was the promise of moose hunting. However, from the opening scene I was able to predict the entire plot of the show. And what about the running time? Over by 8pm!!! I paid good money for tickets!

Enough joking, this will definitely be a day I remember fondly for the rest of my life. I’m sure I’ll never forget the moment that the first politician I really cared about won the most important election in my lifetime… and I’m not even American. I was really lucky to be in the country at the time. I hope that one day soon Australia will be strong enough to elect a female, or an Asian, or a homosexual, or a Muslim, or anything other than an old white Christian man as Prime Minister.

The only disappointment of the day is California looks like it is going to ban gay marriage. It seems California stepped backward while the rest of America took a huge step forward.

5 November 2008 - 16:46 | Tags: , , , ,

As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil.

…

It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.

— David Foster Wallace in his 2003 interview with The Believer magazine. I think this is why I prefer to get political commentary from comedy television, because they show you both sides are ridiculous rather than one side being evil. I don’t want to know politics is evil, any more than I already do. DFW’s death is saddening, but it has made me get off my slack butt and read his work, rather than leaving it in the “someday” pile.

20 September 2008 - 07:46 | Tags: ,

TV Ratings

The premiere of the new 90210 was watched by about 5 million viewers. This is considered a success for the CW network. By comparison, the final season of the original 90210 “averaged nearly 8.4 million viewers per week”.

Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech was watched by 38.4 million viewers. He was beaten by John McCain, with 38.9 million. Sarah Palin drew 37.2 million and Joe Biden about 24 million.

A typical episode of “Deal Or No Deal” gets around 11 million viewers, an American Idol finale around 28 million and LOST around 13 million.

About 13 million NFL fans watched the season opener, the lowest number since 2002 (although this still supposedly helped McCain since the game finished just before he spoke). The Beijing Olympics averaged around 25 - 30 million. Amazingly, in China the Olympic opening ceremony was watched by about 840 million making it probably the biggest television event ever.

[Other than the last figure, these are all US numbers. I’m too scared to see what things are popular in Australia.]

7 September 2008 - 02:11 | Tags: , , ,