Post-Election Quiet

Election Night

It's amazing how quickly this country goes from being in full-on election mode to the post election quietude. This picture is from election night; everyone sitting around the tube, waiting to see if Ohio gets called for Obama. The mood was mostly quiet jubilation; Nate Silver had called it for Obama, and we believed him a lot more than we ever would Karl Rove (who also called it for Obama). Shortly after this picture was taken, we got word that turnout for Seattle was lower than anticipated and we didn't have the numbers for Governor Christine Gregiore to win if the rest of the state voted the way it had in 2004. As it turned out, the eastern counties had gotten wind of Rossi's plan to cut their roads and bridges budget, and Gregoire sailed on to victory without too much concern.

Ten days later

This is the same election center ten days later. The phones are all gone, and so are the computers. Boxes of door hangers, metal frames for yard signs, and some components of the coffee service are all that remain of this once constantly vibrant and active center of Obama, Gregoire, Tina and Dave's election headquarters.

Election aftermath

Ten days is a specific amount of time. It's the time the state gives elections to clean up all yard signs and other political paraphenalia left scattered on public property, along roads, and in center strips. Omaha and I picked up a few, but it looks like Tina and Dave have picked up many more of theirs and put them away.

So many dead trees, so much paper, and yet one side still lost, and the other still has to clean up the mess. How American.

Big Unboxing

Unboxing

Omaha and I went down to the Grand Re-Opening of the new, enlarged Apple Store at Southcenter Mall in Tukwila. There's a very geeky tradition among Apple afficionadios to photograph new hardware as you take it out of the box; this is called "unboxing," and I told Omaha that we should go to the "biggest unboxing there is," especially since the Apple store has had a big, black box around it for the past three weeks.

It turned out that they were giving away free t-shirts to the first 500 people who came through the door, as well as insane cheering that reminded me too much of the way parenting book recommend you over-enthuse over your child's successes in order to get them to repeat.

The line at the store was pretty long, but not 500 people. I went to get a coffee from Starbucks, and had the same odd experience I've had at other times at that particular coffee shop: I was the only man in there.

Kid's Station

I went back to the Apple Store and apparently they weren't out of t-shirts yet because they handed me one as I walked through. Along with the excessive clapping and cheering.

The store is less flourescent than its previous incarnation, more user-friendly. I was especially touched with the "Just for Kids" section, a kid-low table with two Macs running kid-friendly games, so that the parents could shop in quiet and the kids could come up with a long list of "buy-me-thats."

Apple is much more serious than other retailers about selling backup solutions (and bless Apple for making that a priority), so there have alway been portable hard-drives for sale at Apple stores. But they were also selling printers, which was new.

Their software rack wasn't any bigger than it had been the last time I looked. Omaha and I looked around, but we left empty-handed.

Apple Store Unboxing photo set on Flicker, 9 images.

Saturday afternoon: The No on 8 Rally in Seattle.

Rally at Westlake Center

Omaha and I went to the No On 8 Rally this weekend. We were pressed for time with all the other stuff going on Saturday, but we were determined to make it to the main rally at Westlake Center and join in the chorus of voices. I know a lot of straight people who wonder why this is happening now, since the election is over. I've even heard "You lost, get over it." What those people don't understand, and need to understand, is that the closet is a real thing still. Being queer isn't like being a different color. You can go your whole life without coming out to co-workers or family. You don't really believe the threats will reach you because your queerness is invisible. It's not until you've actually been bashed that you react. Well, Proposition 8 in California is a bashing of biblical proportions, and the reaction is commensurate to the damage done.

Someone thinks he's cute.

The rally was pretty big, as these things go. There were lots of cute women there, not all of them obviously queer, and not a few hot men, including one quad of very good looking bears right in front of me who were snogging and, as I photographed them, one put his hand down the back of his partner's pants in a gesture that was more than mere fondness.

I ran into solarbird and snapped a pretty good photo of her from my vantage point. When I caught up to her and annathepiper, she said she'd tried to return the favor but the batteries in her camera were dead.

There were cops galore everywhere, blocking off streets, keeping people from being run over, and generally doing a better than usual job of keeping the peace. This was a peaceable rally, not an anarchistic nightmare like we had during the WTO. There were mounted cops, their horses leaving scads of horse shit everywhere, and bicycle cops, and even a Segway cop. There were newsvans from KOMO and FOX. There were tables for socialists, anti-war demonstrators, and pro-Palestinian efforts-- I don't get those, do they really think there's that much, not common cause, but just even overlap with the interests of gays and lesbians?

The sound was awful. Omaha and I tried to listen to the speakers, but the sound kept cutting out on the repeater speakers behind us, and sometimes an annoying echo effect crept into the mix.

Vicious Meme Replicators

There were scads of vicious meme replicators claiming that if we didn't submit to their zombie's telepathic demands something very bad was going to happen to us. It wasn't just one knot, either; there were competing churches, there were guys with shoulder-mounted portable amplification systems, there were varying degrees of threats and promise. There was even a Korean church with its own independent, promise-based posters, staying away from the big, burly guys threating hellfire and damnation.

But the crowd was full of kyootness, which kept me interested. I photographed kyootness in the set below.

After the rally, Omaha and I stopped by Lush where she bought some stuff for the kids, and then we took a bus back to where I'd parked the car, out in the light industrial district. It was better than trying to get into downtown and find a place to park; faster and cheaper, since we both own pre-paid bus passes. We didn't get home until nearly five, at which point we were pretty tired from the walking.

No on 8 Rally, Seattle, 23 photos.

The canons of conservative thought: a meditation

Russell Kirk is sometimes regarded as one of the founders of the moderns conservative movement. In the mid-1950's he wrote a book called The Conservative Mind in which he outlined a number of interesting tenants of what it meant to be a conservative.

Reading them, I can't help but see that each and every one of them is based on nothing more than a feeling of rightness, perhaps smugly so, written across Kirk's persona by his own experience with religion. I've been reading Kirk, and I'm reacting to it, like every reader. More to the point, although his ideas will surely feed my writing, I'd like to get a grip around his ideas and explore them.

Kirk's first two premeses are these:

1. The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.
2. The conservative believes that there exist natural distinctions, and that society requires orders and classes that emphasize these distinctions.

If you've already recognized the inherent tension in these two statments, congratulations. If you see the basic flaw in the first premise, and how its resolution resolves the second, you're way ahead of me.

If I were a theist, I might agree with Kirk's first statement: it flows naturally from the consequences of a unitary and interventionist theism. God made us. God imposed His Will upon us. But I'm not a theist and I don't believe in interventionist superstitions. So I have to turn to human experience, and the mounting collections of evidence to make my case, and not to an arbitrarily chosen minority religious position.

And I'll give Kirk's first statement as true, if the analysis is shallow and banal enough. Because here's what we know: there is not one human nature, there are many. There's no such thing as "neurotypicality," there are only varying degrees of many different human mental capacities. The biological focus on reproduction goes awry when other mental modules, meant to provide order among men in the tribe during the millenia of evolutionary adaptation, converge in excess: homosexuality. The mental capacity to understand the pain of others, meant to create sympathy among tribespeople and hold the tribe together, end up flawed among a small subset to provide the viciousness needed to survive in a competitive environment: psychopathy. Another mental capacity to multitask, to be distractable, to be capable of certain kinds of synthesis get sacrificed to make room for capabilities that give us invention, innovation, focus: high-functioning autism.

There is not one human nature: there are thousands of different kinds. This is not the "diversity" of Kirk's second principle, except in the poorest of constrained definitions: this is innate abilities that cannot be rectified by imposing a uniform order. No laws can be created that fit "human nature" perfectly because human nature has a temporal component: it is only the mass aggregate of human beings alive at any given moment, and the law is desperately trying to catch up with that aggregate, the one straining against the other. Law is forever adapting to the moving target that is human nature, and human nature only exists as the contingent outcome of recent events and the dead hand of tradition.

If we're to take what's left of Kirk's argument seriously, we have only this left to admit: if we go with illiberal communitarianism intent on solving the needs of real people, then our problem is finding a constraining framework for action that satifies everyone, and I mean everyone: the sociopath as well as the saint, and the ultimate constraint is one that satisifies nobody. If we go with a society that actually believes in real liberty of conscience and action, then we end up with a meritocracy where limited psychopathy ends up being rewarded, where unequal distributing of resources results from individual choices.

Somewhere in the middle there is the solution. And I think Kirk's got the better handle on it by respecting that those differences exist and must be managed, but he and conservatives like him have a hell of a lot to swallow in accepting that human nature is deeper and more subtle than even we humans commonly accept. There is a tension in Kirk's thesis that comes down ultimately to simple power dynamics, a world in which the powerful do what they can, and the powerless accept what they must. In Thucydides' time, that quote applied to very clearly demarcated classes. Unfortunately for Kirk and conservatives like him, that's no longer true.

I am such a mammal...

"Munchkins," I murmured, my mind a-doze in post-coital bliss.

"That's right," Omaha said.

We were lying together, sweaty bodies stuck together, catching our breath. I'm not sure why the answer chose to bubble up to the top of my head just then-- we'd been talking the day before about the four categories of game players: "Real Men, Real Roleplayers, Loonies and... ?" but neither of us could remember. There's something about really good lovemaking that makes my mind work better, but what was so reassuring was that she knew instantly what I was talking about, and affirmed it. She complains that she needs me to give her context more often, but moments like this remind us both that she's more often on my wavelength than not.

Omaha and I continued the day by heading up to attend Tina Orwall's victory brunch. It was hosted at Salty's on Alki, which was pretty impressive considering the crowd. Salty's is simply the most outrageous brunch in town. There were oysters, crabs, shrimp, an omelet chef, prime rib, bacon, eggs in multiple incarnations, a simply unbelievable amount of food. This is one of those places that exists to pretend the whole world isn't going to Hell in a handbasket.

We ate and drank and had a great time. I asked Tina what I ought to do about the website, and she thinks we ought to park it until the next time around. I ate so much food that it put me into a coma when I got home. I'm such a mammal. Enough sex and enough food, and the knowledge that my cave is secure, and I'm completely ready for sleep.

So Omaha and I napped, and I finished Blindsight for the second time. That is such a loathesome book you don't want to ever read it again; it contains so much brilliant thinking that you can't help but read it a second time.

Other than that, nothing happened. I did laundry. I cleaned up the kitchen. Kouryou-chan and I played a vicious game of Stratego, and then Omaha joined us for a round of Sorry. Omaha let Kouryou-chan play Spore for an hour while she and I walked to the grocery store for milk and breakfasty things and such. I wrote my brief essay thinking about Kirk and Conservatism; I could round it out with examples and I probably should; I could submit it to some magazine somewhere. I doubt anyone would care. But it's been bugging me: how does Kirk's conservatism stand up to our modern awareness of functional neurology? How will it survive the coming tidal wave of special self-awareness-- not just the "this is what I am" awareness than so few have, but "this is the physical structure that make that, and I could fix it this way."