Technologically-challenged, indeed

I need to spend a solid year just trying to keep up and catch up to technology.

Although the 21st century has not totally passed me by--witness this very blog, written on one of them computer thingies--I constantly feel as if I'm behind the curve. And I'm not keeping up, plain and simple.

• I want to be able to send text messages on our cell phone with ease, and to be able to take photos off the phone and then upload (or download?) them somewhere. And I'd like to be able to send photos on the cell to someone else.

• I want to know how to make my iPod Shuffle work as well as it's supposed to. Although I have 163 songs loaded on it, only the same 30 or 40 seem to play when I go running.

• I'd like to know how to sell stuff on-line, on either eBay or Craig's List. I've got some old baseball cards that I think could fetch a pretty penny.

• I need to be able to take my new video camera--a digital job given to me by my son for my last birthday--and convert those images to DVDs, or put them on our PC, or whatever the hell you do with them.

• I have a digital camera--also a present from son Tony--that mostly sits around. I don't have a clue about how to transport those images to other places.

• I should try to find out what this "4G" phones are all about. I've never used a Blackberry or an iPhone, and I have no idea how.

• I'd like to master the many fine points of Moodle, the platform used at the school where I work, for use in classes. I just stick to the basics.

• I've never tried to edit someone else's writing electronically, with those little windows that pop out when you want to make responses or comments.

• I've never Skyped anyone. I've never used an iPad. And I've never Kindled.

• When all is said and done, I'm Twitter-challenged and have no idea how I would or could use it.

Damn--when you start making this into a list, it really looks pretty pathetic. But I will, slowly but surely (or, "slowly but Shirley," as one of my students once wrote) try to make it into the year 2010. Right now, charitably, it's about 2001 for me, and these days, missing nine years of technology feels like I'm missing a century.

Obama's need for a rhetoric of idealism

I write this from "the lake," which is definitely a Minnesota term. It doesn't matter which of the 15,000 lakes in the state you're at--when you're there, you're simply at "the lake." It's been five years since we've rented a cabin on Woman Lake (near Hackensack and Longville) and it feels good to smell the breeze and gaze out over the shimmering water.

Maybe this lake stuff is putting me in a dreamy, romantic mood, but I'm wondering if our President needs to spend a little more time at the lake--despite the criticism that he's already spending too many days on vacation. What got Mr. Obama national attention in the first place was his "red state/blue state" speech at the '04 DNC--it laid out a vision of America that was not based on Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, good guys and bad guys. Rather, it was based on the ideal that we are all Americans, and we need to pull together with a common vision and an inclusive mindset. It was a type of rhetoric that appealed to our best impulses and our highest ideals--something that is sorely lacking in politics these days.

Take the proposed Islamic cultural center, two blocks from "ground zero" in NYC. Quite rightly, the President has said that there are and should be no legal roadblocks to such a project. On the other hand, he has deferred comment on the wisdom or appropriateness of such a move. And in the process, I think he is erring by omission. This is an occasion to call all of us to our best impulses--our ideals, if you will.

What kind of nation do we want to be? What are our "best practices"? When all is said and done, how do we want to see ourselves? If we want to see ourselves as a nation that values and cherishes freedom, understanding, and tolerance, then we need to celebrate it in this case, not merely grudgingly accept it. For at our best, we can indeed be "better" than the rest of the world--we adhere to a higher standard. And when we don't maintain those highest standards--such as at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo--we diminish the United States in ways that no "terrorist" can.

Mr. Obama needs to get back "on message"--the message that propelled him to the national stage in the first place. At HIS best, he can move people to a common vision, to a set of ideals. It requires a passionate, positive, blunt, and forceful approach--not an equivocal finger in the wind, worrying about the political fallout. Other Presidents (John F. Kennedy certainly comes to mind) distinguished themselves by their ability to articulate lofty ideals. I think we are still ready to hear someone at the top speak that way; indeed, I think we are yearning for it.

Note to Barack: go for it, big guy. Show us a vision for America that plays off of our best impulses, not our deepest prejudices and fears.

Inception: Quite a complex conception

Well, the big movie buzz of late has been around the movie "Inception," which has been touted as nothing short of amazing. And, in many ways, it is an amazing attempt to play around with our sense of "reality," and in a visually stimulating way.

Having said that, I can't help but feel a little exasperated at a movie that tries to do so much. As a premise for a film, it's apparently not enough to work with the idea of planting a thought--one thought--in someone's head through dreams. No, in this movie, they are trying to plant thoughts in (a) a dream (b) within a dream (c) within a dream--no small feat! Not only that, but the dreams portrayed are incredibly rich in detail--gosh, these people dream way better than I do! To create dreams for others of such intricacy severely strains my sense of credibility. I can't even begin to think how visuals of such elaborate complexity could ever be planted in someone else's brain.

In short, I'm OK with trying to move us into another realm of consciousness. But I have a hard time suspending my disbelief to a level that defies any sort of realism. It's the same complaint that I have with the TV show "Medium"--Allison DuBois not only dreams about various crimes that have occurred or will occur; she dreams about them in such elaborate detail that it's as if a video camera were in the room. That makes for a sort of clarity that seems unreachable. I'd be happier if Allison had some vague-but-compelling images that she had to interpret. But not to worry--it's all there for her, item-for-item and word-for-word. If a guy in her dreams is wearing a blue shirt and says "I just came from the hardware store with this cordless drill," that's precisely how it plays out in "reality." That woman is just very, very talented!

Dream on, Hollywood.

Keeping up with the Joneses (and every other freakin' family)

I'm coming off a "cluster reunion" this past weekend at my alma mater, dear old Macalester College in St. Paul. And quite a cluster it was! Three different class years all put together in the same place. And quite a group of very "accomplished" people! Yikes--I felt like a total schlub. One of my classmates has given $2 million to the college. Another was governor of Wisconsin a few years ago. Another owns a portion of the horse that placed 3rd in this year's Kentucky Derby. Another (my first debate partner in college) is a high-profile D.C. lobbyist who just gave $2500 to the college and spreads thousands of other dollars around for various political causes and campaigns. Suffice it to say that I wasn't in line for any "Most Likely to Succeed" awards!

At times like these, we are forced to examine our own life and take in some basic principles of Buddhist philosophy. Fight off the envy, my man! Be at peace with what you have! Do not find contentment in material goods! Strive for inner goodness! And, find SOMEBODY who you feel at least a little superior to! (There were a couple such people at this event, but it would be pointless and tacky to say anything more.) But, best of all, appreciate that you are still around to attend these events; I regret to say that I can think of several people out of that era who didn't even live close to long enough to celebrate such a milestone.

Yahtzee and one's legacy

As my thousands--nay, tens of thousands--of loyal readers may know, one of the first things I read each day in the Star Tribune is the obituary column. Yes, I start the day by finding out who has died. Why, you ask? For two main reasons. First, there is a chance that someone I know has died, and from time to time, that truly is the case, and so I need to know. The second reason is a bit more odd, perhaps, and vaguely "philosophical." But it comes down to this: reading the obituaries is my way of celebrating that I am alive for at least another day. It's a recognition that life is transitory, that shit happens, that my shit is waiting as well, but that for now, I need to appreciate that I am still among the living. Any psychologist ought to have a field day with that!

While reading the obits, I also sometimes glance at or pay some attention to the details of some stranger's life. The other day I was reading the notice for a woman named "Patty"--a very nice woman, I'm sure, and her photo revealed a winning smile. But in terms of her existence, the best they could seem to come up with--besides the fact that she "cared for her family, her animals, and the garden"--was that "she enjoyed playing Yahtzee and Scrabble, gardening, decorating, and attending garage sales."

Now, I should tread carefully. One can live a very full and happy life without doing anything "amazing." And one's family, animals, and garden can be a meaningful focal point for a very deep and satisfying existence. Still, I for one would hope that my legacy does not come down to Yahtzee, Scrabble, and garage sales. There's gotta be more to life than that. Although I have many mundane activities that comprise the daily rituals of my life, if anyone is writing a notice for me, please leave out some of the silliest ones! For whatever reason, I don't want to be remembered as "the meanest Scrabble player in town." But then, I can vibrate my uvula, I once memorized the Gettysburg Address, and I enjoy doing the Cryptoquip in the paper each day! Lacking a Nobel Peace Prize, I guess I'll have to live with a smaller legacy. It's just too bad that I'm not an avid Bingo player.

Heil Obama?

As mentioned in some previous posts, I have corresponded quite frequently with a high school friend I have referred to as "Kyle." And Kyle, as you thousands of loyal readers know, is about as far to the political "right" as anyone I know. He's a "birther" who believes that we should eliminate the minimum wage, sees Obamacare as a "power grab" by the feds, and believes that global warming is more than a myth--it's a conspiracy among liberal scientists to obscure the truth. So it should come as no surprise that a fair number of Kyle's posts to me have included references to Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany in the same sentence as Barack Obama. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) claim is that Obama and Hitler and the Nazis have something in common.

I have told Kyle repeatedly that this linkage of Obama to Nazism is at once inaccurate, incorrect, inflammatory, and an exercise in demagoguery. Still, he continues to make such claims, including a tu quoque fallacy--i.e., that those "liberals" have called certain Republicans Nazis, which I guess in his mind makes it OK for him as well to return the favor.

Recent developments make the Nazi analogy even more annoying. Mr. Obama has just announced that he is nominating a Jew for the Supreme Court of the United States--gosh, that's a sure sign of another Hitler! Meanwhile, the Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that our true-blue, all-American governor, Tim Pawlenty, violated the law by deciding on his own to cut various state budgets--something called "unallotment." And indeed, unallotment is the closest thing we have in this nation to a "dictatorship"; what this move involved was for Pawlenty to flat-out ignore what legislation had been passed by elected representatives, and to trim the budgets based on his own whims as a chief executive. So much for democracy.

Anyway, I ended up telling Kyle that I'm done with such rants. I simply won't read anything else he sends along because it is so offensive that it ceases to be civil discourse. Now I haven't heard from Kyle at all in more than a week since I started trashing his messages. And, it's been very liberating--damn, it just feels good to keep toxic waste off of my screen. Until such time as gay people are forced to wear pink triangles and Jews are shipped off to concentration camps, I think that Kyle should stop playing the "Nazi card," which is nothing like a trump card in my deck. It's more like the Joker. Or maybe not even a card at all. It's just stupid.

Rot at the top

"Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery on society, which increases earthquakes."

- Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedinghi, an Iranian Muslim cleric, blaming women for a spate of recent temblors around the globe

"(T)he feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

– Pat Robertson

I think that we are all conditioned to believe that people in positions of authority and leadership know what they are doing. The world has to make some sense, doesn't it? Surely these people--whoever they are--must be intelligent and reasonable; after all, they are in a prominent position! Well, that ain't necessarily so, as these two quotations demonstrate--those are a couple of steel-trap minds! (Robertson is especially annoying, if only because I see his mug so often when I'm channel-surfing--how does he get so darn much exposure?)

The latest and rather interesting case: Christopher Hitchens, writing in the current Newsweek, makes the argument--and a rather strong one at that--for bringing up the Pope on criminal charges, given the protection which pedophiles have gotten within the Catholic Church, in some cases with the direct involvement of the Pope himself. Even yours truly, a skeptical heathen type, was surprised to encounter this point of view and to seriously entertain it for the first time. I mean, he's the Pope! How could a Pope be arrested for anything? The Pope sent off to prison for obstruction of justice? It's almost incomprehensible--that is, until you consider the utter humanity that we all share. The Pope is a guy named Joseph Ratzinger--call him "Joe" if you want, because he is in the end just an Ordinary Joe. He puts on his pants the same way you and I do. He trots into the bathroom in the morning to do the same things that you and I do (we share the same throne!). He gets spinach stuck between his teeth. And, like Misters Sedinghi and Robertson, cited above, he is no smarter than you or I; at times like these, notions of "papal inerrancy" seem particularly ridiculous.

There is rot at the top, my friends--and sometimes in the middle or at the bottom! Please help us avoid legitimized insanity in any way that you can.