Wonking and Geeking

I hung out with Omaha at a picnic held by various successful factions of the Democratic party, met with a senator, a representative, and a county councilmember, ate some really good hamburgers and listened to some fairly good, but excessively amplified, folk music.

I discovered that there is a difference between wonk and geek. Wonk is defined as "a person preoccupied with arcane details or procedures in a specialized field," and that might sound geeky, it's not, really. There's a connotative difference that leads wonks to being very different beasts.

Geekiness is rarely exhausting. When geeks get together in a room, they turn the music down and set to exploring a problem space. The coalition of minds is always greater than its parts; geeks exchange information rapidly, cut each other off as they strive for conclusions, and seek solutions to the problems they have set for themselves and each other or, quite often, discuss the scope of the problem space and the potential pitfalls of enlarging it. Geeks might go home tired, but they are rarely exhausted; usually, an encounter with fellow geeks in exhilirating.

In contrast, wonkiness is often exhausting. It's also somewhat discordant. Geeks, for example, would never allow the music to be so loud as to discourage communication. If anything, I suspect the music came from the Democratic tradition of being a bottom-up, "many concerns all sorta moving in the same direction" institution. But working through that wore me out.

A failure of geek is lessons learned, not mortal blows. A good geek is allowed to fail, as long as progress toward a minimum viable product until a fatal assumption is hit, at which point the project diverges, the useful features and lessons are kept, and a new minimum viable product target is set.

A failure of wonk, however, often comes with loss of reputation and power that can be devastating. The people on your blackberry stop answering the phones, and rebuilding a network can take years. Dealing with people constantly has to be exhausting, even for the most social person, especially when you're tracking a number of people larger than your monkeysphere. Makes me wonder if David Brooks's observation on how socially wrecked most congressmen are fits into this observation: they've attenuated the monkeysphere they need to be human, turning that space in the mental rolodex over to remembering the power relationships they have to maintain. Wonkiness is still engaged in a certain turf-warring mindset that comes with dealing with both people and power.

When I expressed this discovery to someone, she said, "But that's not what this is about. We're not here to solve anything. This picnic is just for fun." And then she immediately turned around and asked the senator what could be done to get the health care reform issue moving through Congress once more.

And that was typical. Everyone wanted to talk about how to solve the problem of the new, angry and disruptive elements appearing at town hall meetings and so forth. There were good suggestions. They were just hard to hear over the pointless folk singing.

Damn, I missed the birther hour!

Damn, damn, damn! I turned on the radio and flipped throguh the dial, only to discover that I was listening to the last five minutes of conservative talk show host Bill Cunnigham's "A Great American" show, in which Cunnigham was taking Birthers, the birth certificate conspiracy theorists, seriously.

I hate missing out on the funny stuff like that.

Bill wasn't saying where he fell, one way or another. But he did say this, shouting a'la Mark Levin: "He grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia. He went to school there under the name 'Barry Soetoro.' Most Americans don't know this. The mainstream media didn't tell you this. They picked their candidate and sold him to you. Most Americans don't know anything about him growing up in Indonesia!"

Barak Obama's book Audacity of Hope, in which he discusses his childhood (including his life in Indonesia) was on the bestseller list for 30 weeks, the audiobook took home a Grammy. FOX and CNN covered this ground a gazillion times. Yes, Bill, actually we all know about "Barry Soetoro." He's an American, a citizen, and our President.

"Be afraid. Be very afraid."

One of the things I'm sure we've all heard about recently is the claim that health care reform will lead to euthanizing grandma. FOX has even run clips from Soylent Green while discussing the subject, and I hope whatever producer had that idea changed his pants afterward.

But look, section 1233 of one of the proposed bills simply says that one of the things doctors will be incentivized to do with you if you're over the age of 65 is discuss living wills and the extent to which you want heroic measures taken to save your life under various scenarios related to your current condition. That's hardly euthanasia; in fact, for mature people, it's outright common sense. When you can't speak for yourself, you should have documented how you want other people to speak for you.

Basically, the strategy of the right has become, "Death is scary and the Obama Health Care plan is determined to make you think about death (which is scary) and when the time comes maybe you'll think about death carefully (which is scary) so goddamnit you should be scared!."

Or, you could grow up. Your choice.

That was inappropriate of me...

If Rush Limbaugh and company want to encourage his followers to wear a t-shirt (the uniform of the common man) to his various events as a way of making the point that "there are a lot of us," he can do that. They can even pick a striking color like yellow or orange or something, or maybe they'll go with the tried-and-true red, white and blue. They could even be cute and turn it upside down.

I should not have made the Brownshirt joke, for the same reason that the various birthers and teabaggers should not be going around with Nazi symbols on their posters and placards. The Nazis really were evil; if we're going to hold them as images of fundamental evil, we shouldn't bleach out the efficacy of Nazi imagery by cheapening it in this way.

My apologizing for it, however, doesn't mean the right won't keep doing it.

America has always been a place, at least during my lifetime, where political violence was damn near unthinkable. I worry that what the extremists have learned, over the years, is that political violence works. Before the Internet and the 24 hour news cycle of cable television, we heard about bombings and terrorism in distant countries and had no concept of its effectiveness. Now we do, and you know what? It's pretty damned effective. It hurts a lot of people, but if you don't care that much about the other side, if you're convinced the other side is demonic and deserving of death, political violence seems like an excellent tactic.

The eliminationist rhetoric and pureblind scare tactics coming out of the right are stunning. When Newt Gingrich supports Sarah Palin's claim that health care reform will lead to euthanizing disabled children, he's allowed to get away with this blatant lie, and when Business Daily says that "Under the UK system, Stephen Hawking would have been allowed to die," few people on the right will point out that Hawking is and always has been a UK citizen and seems to be surviving just fine.

I've never understood why the Nazis are the canonical bad guys, and not Pol Pot or Stalin or Japan's Unit 731. But they're what we've got. It's unfortunate how many dupes there are on the right, and how unwilling they are to listen.

An anonymous blogger wrote to Andrew Sullivan:

For most of your time in America, this insanity has been muted by the success of conservative politics. Since you live in Washington, you probably saw daily the face of the successful conservative political establishment that milked the populist right, and by milking them kept their bitterness at a manageable level. That safety valve was stuffed up by George Bush's failed presidency.

So now, these people are facing their worst fears; actual change.

They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land's original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn't even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.

These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town's borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up til Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming, they make up much more of America then you would care to think.

I suspect that's closer to the truth than we'd like to hear.

Yo, DB

Robot Women!

I know my audience. Sometimes too well.