Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

His follow-up post responding to comments and criticism is good too, as is his post ridiculing some of the stupid and/or assaholic comments.  From his comment on comments:

2. Your metaphor/analogy is good, except for [insert thing that commenter finds not good about the metaphor/analogy]

Well, yes. Metaphors are not perfect; it’s why they’re metaphors and not the thing the metaphor describes.

What’s even cooler about this post for me is that it introduced me to his blog, Whatever, and I now have the delightful adventure of reading through 15 years (!) of entertaining writing.

Mom Ruth Blau and mother-in-law Nora Fox at our wedding in 1993.

Grandmother Edith Blau sometime in the 1980s.

Grandmother Helen Farr Smith (Robertson) Love sometime in the 1950s.

And my sister-in-law Terri Robertson with my niece & nephew and their Aunt Amy — my favorite title!   Photo ca. 2000.  The kids are graduating from middle school & high school, respectively, next month; I have waaaay more gray in my hair; and somehow Terri still looks the same!

Late comment:  What does it say about my obvious genetic heritage as a nerd that both of my *grandmothers* are wearing suits?  Between that and the fact that I was partially gestated at a law school, my inevitable nerdiness was predestined.

My mother is lucky I wasn’t born with a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary in my hands!

Republicans are fond of saying that Obama is a failed president, that his policies have failed, and that there’s just a whole lot of fail going on.  The only possible definition they could have in mind for the word “fail” is “not doing what Republicans would like a president to do.”  Because by any reasonable, apolitical, measure Obama is a resounding success.  I’d really like to know how the definition of “fail” accounts for:

1. Killing bin Laden.
2. Saving the US auto industry.
3. Repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” ending defense of DOMA in court, and supporting marriage equality.
4. Supporting the overthrow of Gaddafi.
5. Signing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
6. Getting us out of an expensive and destructive war we should never have started.
7. Appointing two righteous women to the Supreme Court.
8. Passing Obamacare.
9. Passing the Stimulus.
10. Passing Wall Street Reform — not enough, but it’s better than nothing.

This is just sort of Amy’s top ten; there are a number of websites devoted to listing the President’s accomplishments, including

• A blog called “Please Cut the Crap” which makes me insanely jealous, blognamewise.
• A massive, categorized list on a site aptly named obamaachievements.org.
• The Washington Monthly’s Top 50 List.
• A list prepared by a professor of American Studies that started with 90 items and is now at 244.

There are, in fact, several very business-oriented metrics that suggest President Obama is a success.  For example, the Dow was at about 8,000 when Bush left office; it closed at 12,820 on Friday.  (This continues the general trend that the Dow likes Democratic presidents much more than Republicans.) And Corporate profits are way up under Obama.   So, um, “socialist” doesn’t mean what they think it means either.

I think that leaves for the definition of “failed” when used as an adjective in the Republican mantra “failed president” such things as

• Failing to cut taxes for millionaires.
• Failing to appoint Federalist Society members to the Supreme Court.
• Failing to leave the health of our citizens to the mercies of the perverse incentives of the insurance industry.
• Failing to continue the war in Iraq.
• Failing to not be concerned about bin Laden.

Ultimately, it is perfectly reasonable for Republicans like my brother to disagree with Obama.  But calling his administration “failed” seems like a weirdly transparent but ultimately content-free branding campaign.

*************

* The upshot of Bruce’s post is that all teen-age boys do cruel things, so we should not judge Mitt Romney by his decision to assault a classmate to cut off his hair or physically trick a blind teacher into walking into a door.   I don’t think any of my brother’s escapades (he takes the fifth but I’m aware of at least some small percentage of them) rise to the level of cruelty the Washington Post article describes of Romney.  But if in fact all boys do these things, perhaps it’s time to elect a girl to the presidency.

** My favorite is “Sometimes I sing and dance around the house in my underwear. Doesn’t make me Madonna.  Never will.“  Don’t ask me why.  I have actually used this quote on opposing counsel, though not to his face.  We have an opposing counsel who has, on his voice mail, a pompous quote-of-the-day, which you have to listen to, all the way through, before leaving him a voicemail.  It’s generally something from Gandhi, or the Buddha, or a Hallmark card, and it’s often very long, with no option to push # and just skip it.  After several years of superhuman effort exerted toward not saying, “Dude, you are working your ass off to deny the civil rights of people with disabilities; stop it with the quotes, already,” I finally left him two quotes of my own.  The first was this one; the second was “I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused.“   No reaction to either one from him, but I cracked myself up!

One venerable English teacher, Carl G. Wonn­berger, nicknamed “the Bat” for his diminished eyesight, was known to walk into the trophy case and apologize, step into wastepaper baskets and stare blindly as students slipped out the back of the room to smoke by the open windows. Once, several students remembered the time pranksters propped up the back axle of Wonnberger’s Volkswagen Beetle with two-by-fours and watched, laughing from the windows, as the unwitting teacher slammed the gas pedal with his wheels spinning in the air.

As an underclassman, Romney accompanied Wonnberger and Pierce Getsinger, another student, from the second floor of the main academic building to the library to retrieve a book the two boys needed. According to Getsinger, Romney opened a first set of doors for Wonnberger, but then at the next set, with other students around, he swept his hand forward, bidding the teacher into a closed door. Wonnberger walked right into it and Getsinger said Romney giggled hysterically as the teacher shrugged it off as another of life’s indignities.

How does this speak to Romney’s views on people with disabilities?   There are many measures of how far the Republican party has sunk — from William F. Buckley to Sarah Palin, say — but in my neck of the woods, it couldn’t be sharper than the contrast between the man who signed the ADA and someone with so little respect for people with disabilities that he would humiliate his own blind teacher.

Would any of us be elected if judged by our adolescences?  Perhaps not, though mostly due to lingering squeamishness with recreational drug and alcohol use.  I cannot think of any friends or classmates who did anything close to the cruelty of assaulting a fellow student to cut his hair simply because he was different or physically ridiculing a disabled teacher.

Two other things strike me.  First of all, of course, the homophobic bullying has received far more attention than the disabiliphobic bullying.  Part of that has to do with the fact that the article was published within a day of both North Carolina’s shameful vote enshrining marriage discrimination in its constitution and President Obama’s declaration of his support for marriage equality.  But I’m concerned that that casual tone of the quote above indicates a greater societal acceptance of disability-related “pranks” than homophobic “bullying.”

I’m also struck by just how uncivilized Romney’s behavior was.  And not just once, but apparently over and over.   We Democrats are supposed to be the party of the uncouth, unwashed hippies, and the GOP the party of Brooks Brothers, using the proper wine glass, and not wearing white after Labor Day.  But the behavior described in this article is deeply uncivilized, and the fact that it was laughed off at an elite prep school speaks volumes.

How on earth could we trust this man to run our country?

And in honor of this step forward in civil rights, in response to the benighted state of North Carolina, and in recognition of the fact that I’ve been in trial prep and trial for the last month or so and have not had the time to come up with a new post, I’m rerunning a post from July 2010:

If we’re going to defend hetero marriage, let’s do it right. 

Folks opposed to marriage equality argue that if gays and lesbians are permitted that state-sanctioned status, it will have the effect of destroying heterosexual marriages.  In response, they promote legislation ostensibly designed to protect this venerable institution.  Most liberals campaign against these measures, on the grounds that they are unfair (what part of “equal protection of the laws” is unclear?) and irrational (straights have done a pretty good job of marriage destruction all on their own).

My view is:  if we’re going to use the legislative process to protect heterosexual marriages, let’s pass laws that might actually reduce stress and promote harmony in those marriages.  These measures would “save” those marriages in the sense that the people in them would remain happy with one another and therefore married, rather than in the way that opponents of gay marriage think it works:  that we’ll only stay together if we can smugly monopolize the legal label for our relationships.

Warning:  what follows traffics in the basest of gender stereotypes, derived directly from my own 16-year experience with heterosexual marriage.

The Bathroom Separation Act.  Men and women were not meant to share bathrooms.  The vast genetic differences in cleanliness perception and many practical differences in paraphernalia make sharing facilities a source of stress in 55% of heterosexual marriages.*  Under this proposed legislation, all new homes will be required to have two completely separate bathrooms adjacent to the master bedroom and money will be allocated from the federal budget to retrofit houses of married heteros with one extra master bath.

The Laundry Technology Act.  All new washers and dryers will be equipped with control panels of equal or greater complexity to a sound system of comparable price.  In addition, federal regulations will require garment labels to include one of the following two statements, as appropriate:  “This Goes In the Light Wash,” or “This Goes In the Dark Wash.”  At least 43%* of the bickering in hetero marriages concerns lack of laundry participation by one of the two genders commonly found in those unions.  This measure will not only promote increased participation, but will ensure that the result is not uniformly pink.

Music Parity Regulations.  FCC regulations will require at least one station in each broadcast area to play folk rock and heavy metal tunes on a strictly alternating basis.  Imagine the heterosexual marriages — not to mention lives — saved by not having driver and passenger switching constantly among stations in search of (to take a completely random example) Boston or The Indigo Girls.

Quality Motion Picture Act.  At least five movies each year will be required to have both exciting action sequences (car chases; explosions; zombies) and a plot with believable, grown-up dialog and characters.  Hetero marriages will flourish when husbands and wives not only attend but enjoy the same movies.

Full Funding for Public Education, Universal Health Care and Assisted Living Act.  Approximately 95%* of the fights in heterosexual marriages concern the kids’ schools, the doctor’s bills, and how to care for the in-laws without having them actually move in.  The FFPEUHCALA will ensure high quality public education, availability of heath care without forgoing food and heat, and a comfortable, safe old age for your in-laws** somewhere other than your home.  This legislation will avoid at least 3.2 million* heterosexual divorces each year.  In addition, just imagine all the quality time hetero couples will have in lieu of the hundreds of hours they now spend filling out insurance forms, fighting with insurance companies, filling out more forms, waiting on hold to insurance companies, and figuring out how to pay for things they already bought insurance to pay for.

Let’s see if those anti-marriage-equality folks really want to protect hetero marriage — let’s see if they’ll support all this crucial legislation.

* All statistics in this post are invented out of whole cloth.  They sure sound about right, though, don’t they?

** Love ya, Denver & Nora!

I love The Killing.  It doesn’t have the snappy dialog of Justified, but the characters seem incredibly well-drawn and real to me.  I strongly dissent from all the whining about the end of season 1 when we did not in fact learn who killed Rosie Larson.  Apparently the producer got major push-back for the simple act of treating her audience like grown-ups and showing us that the plot would not resolve itself as neatly as we all hoped.

Season 2 introduces a new, equally compelling, mystery, however:  How badly will the show fuck up the newly-spinal-cord-injured-mayoral-candidate story line?  As of now, he’s in the hospital starting to get his head around the fact that he’s paralyzed.  We’ve had a couple of scenes designed, I think, to underscore the reality of How Bad This Really Is, and we’ve watched his (it turns out) chickenshit campaign chief run away from him rather than talk about it.

But where does it go from here?  The way the entertainment industry generally treats disability suggests several likely scenarios.  WordPress lets you vote!

Pre- and post-bath brushing.

He looks like he just lost ten pounds.  And he’s actually a golden retriever again!

If she were not Muslim, she would still be alive.

If he were not disabled, he would still be alive.

When Walton Goggins gets going as Boyd Crowder, you become convinced it’s your patriotic duty to vote for his corrupt candidate for sheriff rather than the other, equally corrupt, guy.   (Note this is apparently taped direct from some dude’s TV.   Fair use?  I think so!)

This show should sweep the Emmys.  But most of all, it deserves an Emmy for Dickie Bennett’s hair: