Hey Joe! Where You Goin with That Pen in Your Hand?

As I noted in my last post, I hadn't published in awhile. Sure, I've been writing on this blog for over a year now and in a couple other places under assumed names or ghostwriting, but I'd been having difficulty finding my voice when I immerse myself in the writing of so many brilliant, talented, and entertaining journos and authors that I am lucky enough to count among my friends. It's pretty intimidating, to be honest.

Anyway, I enjoyed reading this today in the NYT, describing why "Joe the Plumber" shouldn't be published:

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.

Writing is hard, even for the best wordsmiths. Ernest Hemingway said the most frightening thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.” And Winston Churchill called the act of writing a book “a horrible, exhaustive struggle, like a long bout of painful illness.”

When I heard J.T.P. had a book, I thought of that Chris Farley skit from “Saturday Night Live.” He’s a motivational counselor, trying to keep some slacker youths from living in a van down by the river, just like him. One kid tells him he wants to write.

“La-di-frickin’-da!” Farley says. “We got ourselves a writer here!”

If Joe really wants to write, he should keep his day job and spend his evenings reading Rick Reilly’s sports columns, Peggy Noonan’s speeches, or Jess Walter’s fiction. He should open Dostoevsky or Norman Maclean — for osmosis, if nothing else. He should study Frank McCourt on teaching or Annie Dillard on writing.

The idea that someone who stumbled into a sound bite can be published, and charge $24.95 for said words, makes so many real writers think the world is unfair.

In fact the world is unfair, but his point is well-taken.

However, I think my favorite part of the piece was the last line: Maureen Dowd is off today.

Headline reference:

I've Been Busy

Sorry I haven't done much in the way of blogging recently. Post-election political apathy and news dominated by the trillions of dollars of bailout funding have left me less inclined to comment on the stories of the day--oh yeah, and that whole "work" thing too.

Seriously though, my old Chevy Corsica started smoking--coincidentally right after I quit smoking myself (it'll be a solid month without a cigarette tomorrow!) and really screwed up my transportation routine. I took it to a shop and they told me for me to attempt to fix it would be throwing good money after bad...and I took this as a metaphor for the situation GM and the other U.S. automakers generally find themselves in now. It also made me think that perhaps my mechanic* should be picked to replace Hank Paulson.

Anyway, I got another car, so my schedule should be flexible enough again so I can blog and work without one cutting into the responsibilities of the other.

And I did manage to put a piece together on Plax's fiasco up in NYC for reason. It's about time I published again. Check it out here.

See you soon!

JPB

*Upon recommendation from the Agitatrix--the Agitator's fairer half--I took the car to Wiygul Automotive Clinic. These guys are great and honest. If you're in NoVa or the DC area, I recommend them whole-heartedly.

Mood Music Monday

Happy Thanksgiving

Hey, just wanted to wish all my readers a safe and happy Thanksgiving (and for you damned fer'ners living elsewhere, you have a good Thursday. Sorry you don't get the next two days off!).

I'm not going to write some long-winded post about what I'm grateful for, not because I'm not thankful, but rather because I don't want to bore you with the details. Just a word of advice: thank someone who means something to you over the holiday.

Be safe. Have fun. See you next week.

-JPB

"Hate Crimes" Up Since Obama Victory

I'm annoyed when I have to read an English newspaper to read stuff like this:

Barack Obama’s election as America’s first black president has unleashed a wave of hate crimes across the nation, according to police and monitoring organisations.

Far from heralding a new age of tolerance, Mr Obama’s victory in the November 4 poll has highlighted the stubborn racism that lingers within some elements of American society as opponents pour their frustration into vandalism, harassment, threats and even physical attacks.

The article lists a number of crimes, but many of the instances don't exactly measure up to a reasonable standard of "hate crime." Of course all of these incidents are revolting, but some bigot writing "nigger" on a wall isn't worthy of federal law enforcement intervention, which is often the rhetorical reaction to so-called "hate crimes."

The Dems have been pushing to get tougher hate crimes legislation through but have thus far failed. It remains to be seen whether the hunkered-down Republicans in the Senate would be willing to stand-up to a new bill which will probably be making its way through the committees sooner rather than later--especially if incidents such as these continue to happen or, God forbid, escalate. I don't think the GOP is going to rediscover their federalist roots overnight and, I would guess, they will be unlikely to use the filibuster on such a sensitive issue--even though it would probably be the right thing to do.

Anti-lynching legislation made a lot of sense in the mid-20th century because, very often, lynchings had the tacit or even explicit support of local law enforcement officials. In spite of the still existent Good ol' Boy networks in police departments across the country, the notion of police collusion with lynch mobs is--happily--a thing of the past. Today, even in the most recent federal hate crime bill hearings on the Hill, local law enforcement was time and again proven sufficient in dealing with the vicious attacks on minorities. The guilty were caught and, quite rightly, punished severely. (Sitting in one of the pre-'Jena 6' hearings, I had trouble understanding why they were holding them to begin with, given that the perpetrators discussed were all caught and brought to justice.)

I don't take a definite position on enhanced local sentencing for "hate crimes"--I'm inclined to agree with it, provided they don't include mandatory minimums and the offenders clearly violate hate crimes laws. Problems arise, however, when these laws federalize assault charges and local governments rent-seek to get federal money to prosecute suspected hate crimes as prosecutors tack on a "hate crime" tag to a simple assault and battery cases.

For example, I would agree that a group of skinheads attacking a kid for being gay qualifies them for enhanced (local) sentencing. However, I would not condone upping a sentence for someone who got in a fight with a gay man at a bar just because he had used the term "fag" on previous occasions. If you can clearly tie the bigotry directly to the crime as the primary factor, then I'd be hard pressed to argue against it. Yet, very often, it's more a matter of fairness of application and trying to determine what someone had in mind, especially in rent-seeking situations as I described. The wider the door is opened for subjective assessments of motive that are tied to federal incentives, the greater the risk for abuse of the system and further injustice.

I was criticized on Culture 11 for being alarmist when I wrote that hate crimes could spike and bring federal intervention. As I said there, I hope they are right.

Mood Music Monday

Via my favorite Pandora channel this morning:

Point Guard-in-Chief

I don't often watch the late night talk shows anymore. If I do happen to have them on, as I did the other night, I watch Letterman.

I happened to be watching this week when Don Rickles was on and he made a joke that bombed:

[Rickles] was absolutely killing the audience on David Letterman's show the other night with his trademark scorched-earth put-downs. Rickles seemed at the top of his game -- until he tried to tell a joke about the new president-elect. Not even a well-timed rimshot from the band could have saved him.

It was just a quick bit in which he imagined Obama, faced with his first international crisis, telling his advisers he couldn't be interrupted because he was busy playing basketball.

Yeah. And?

Apparently, people got uncomfortable when an old white guy mentions our first black president in the same sentence as "basketball."

I don't read entertainment news because, well, its vapid and soul-sucking, so I don't know what kind of attention this seeming faux pas has been getting. But it certainly was enough to get an op-ed in the Washington Post today.

If President-elect Obama had not campaigned as a basketball player, or put up videos of him playing basketball on his campaign's YouTube site, or talked about basketball being his "first love", I could see a certain amount of "Oh no he didn't just say that" directed at Rickles. But Obama repeatedly played up his b-ball skillz as a reason to vote for him--especially in places like Indiana. (The night before the election, ESPN played this interview where Obama talks about the wisdom of his coach whom he favorably compares to Bobby Knight. This is my best guess as to how he won the once unquestionably red Hoosier state.*)

I can understand the sensitivity of the Letterman audience that led them to think that the boundary-pushing comic may have gone too far, but he didn't. Funny? Perhaps not. But Rickles is not a racist and his joke wasn't either.

Lighten up, America. It is still ok to poke fun at people--even if they're black.

*And just in case you're wondering, that's a joke too.