A Vision of Optimism

The one thing the liberal media attempts daily to portray to the masses: optimism. Whenever I read the title of an MSNBC headline on Google News, this artificially-inflated confidence is so easy to pick up. Whether it's Democrat analysts dissecting a "favorable" poll, or liberal commentator triumphantly proclaiming the impossible task of getting average Joes to relate to Mitt Romney...the level of arrogance  therein is rather disgusting. But it's not exactly surprising or stupid, given that there are apparently enough viewers to keep these stories consistently at the top of the political sections of major news outlets online. If they were, heaven forbid, about to lose an election, moping about it wouldn't exactly do much to rally uncertain Dems out to the ballot box, now would it?

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I feel as if there is a subtle yet powerful connection between this "campaign strategy" and Obama's suave sense of assurance that he attempts to project into every other aspect of his presidency. Egypt falling to Islamists? Eh, no big deal. Unemployment still a nightmare? "The private sector is doing ok." Pardon me folks, but when it comes to being out of touch with reality, Obama is out of Romney's league. Well, of course with enough audio editing, even Romney can appear like a total air-head, but hey that just demonstrates the creativity of MSNBC's sound crew, right?

My point in all of this is that we conservatives, as a collective (no, that's not a strictly communist term) have to interject an increased sense of optimism into our discourse, especially on the national media scene. Disparaging Obama gets old after a while...yes, I said it. I love Fox News to death, but instead of the same old doomsday predictions, let's get more scenarios of growth, hope, and dare I say...change?

In the world of policy debate, debaters are intensely focused on research and answering the "line-by-line" as best as possible (responding to each and every point). Yet equally important is the need to frame all these arguments within a general framework for how to evaluate the final decision at the end of the round...the bigger picture, as it were. In a similar way, I wouldn't mind seeing a clearer road map from anyone, particularly Romney, about the prioritization of policy initiatives in the future. Now, this doesn't mean we have to show our full hand to the Dems, but a timeline accompanied by analysis of potential benefits goes a long way towards improving the general appeal of a campaign platform and rendering it competitive with Obama's failures. FDR was able to use his charm to trick America into believing in his grand dream for a more progressive nation, and his successors have done their best to do the same.

Fighting fire with fire can and will work, but we need to take the high ground for American unity and pride. From that vantage point, the contrast with Obama's divisive, last-ditch grasps for an electoral comeback will begin to make all the more difference.

Divide and Conquer

I was having a conversation with one of my "moderate" friends over his choice of voting in November's numerous elections. As this would be his first opportunity to participate in our democratic system, I was eager to hear how his rather shifting worldview would manifest itself at the ballot box. How was my genius friend going to determine who would be worthy of his endorsement?

"I'm probably going to flip a coin," he humorously speculates.

"So you don't care that other people will decide how your government works?"

He paused, then replied, "It's not like I would make a difference anyway."

This, my friends, is the tragic reality of why California is often considered "that blue state" which will never awaken from its long, liberal stranglehold. Much talk amongst conservative commentators has been directed towards Obama's admittedly brilliant if not destructive ploy of exploiting class, race, gender, and other differences in order to bring a rough coalition of votes in for his party. Yet I would like to identify one final division that our political culture is creating that will ultimately favor liberal politicians: that between the politically minded and un-minded.

One of the most often cited statistics with regards to elections is the terribly low level of confidence Americans have in their government. As a result, an overwhelming number of our citizens have become discouraged over their prospects of actually making a difference in the political system. And hey, it's not like politics has any real effect on our lives right?

Here is where our left-leaning friends have the advantage: as more and more Americans, especially our youth, have little to no understanding of broader political culture, all it takes is one emotionally-energizing cause to swing their undecided vote into the Democratic camp. Take, for instance, the Occupy Movement. With college unemployment levels at record highs, our otherwise pampered and spoiled young generation has had serious difficulties making ends meet. When faced with the prosperity that some of our elders, such as Mitt Romney (and the Obamas, for that matter) have been able to attain through hard work and perseverance, our un-focused "adults" are only too eager to demand their "fair share."

Dennis Prager's new book Still the Best Hope correctly identifies emotional zeal as a conduit for much support of Leftist causes, and I have been personal witness to far more secular firebrands throwing the word bigot at those opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and the like than any hate-filled "Bible thumpers." But hey, maybe I'm just a sheltered conservative, right? In any case, this sort of emotional passion is igniting segments of our young population who would otherwise be "bystanders," if you will, to the political process. After all, isn't "denying the right to love someone" more effective a political tool than "supporting business freedom and smart economics?'

While I greatly admire Mr. Prager and others' work in bringing clarity and common sense to those tuning in on the radio or on TV, conservatives as a whole must find more outlets to reach the younger generation. Twice in the past two months I've been a guest at speaking events by Anne Coulter, Hugh Hewitt, and Mr. Prager himself. In not one of them have I been able to identify anyone else in the audience of comparable or younger age to myself.

It is not enough to convince yourself American values are the best in the world. Those following in your footsteps most likely are oblivious. And if they don't care about politics now, your local DNC body will be more than willing to make them care later.

I'm Back!

Senior year of high school has been much more difficult than I imagined-not because of work or even the college search but rather just the continuous chore of balancing my time. As such, I apologize for taking a rather lengthy holiday from blogging, but I am making it my goal to, from now on, ensure that I post something new once a week, at the very least. Once again, I remind you that it's my intent to balance out the harsher edge of my "critical" commentaries with a positive or encouraging story every other post.

This morning, in particular, I was delighted by the news that numerous Catholic institutions have finally banded together to bring legal complaint against the absurd Department of Health and Human Services mandate that would force them to cover numerous treatments and services that violate Catholic social and moral teachings. As of now, the magic number of institutions or diocesan bodies of Catholic faithful that have filed lawsuits against the government is 43, and I hope and pray that number continues to rise. I've personally bashed Notre Dame University in particular for its occasional violation of a wholesome, Christian identity, yet I give them a pat on the back for joining in this great movement. I encourage anyone reading this to send support, written or otherwise, to Notre Dame's administration for boldly breaking from their somewhat inconsistent reputation.

On the other end of the spectrum is, of course, the infamous Georgetown University, which went forward with plans to have HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius speak at their commencement ceremony despite widespread outcry from Catholics nationwide, including their home diocese of Washington, D.C. Despite the rather gloomy course our friends at Georgetown seem to have set themselves on, I am nonetheless spirited to hear that William Peter Blatty, the author of none other than The Exorcist, has come out against his alumni, Georgetown, and is suing them under Catholic Canon Law on the question of their status as a "Catholic" college. May this wave of pressure continue to rattle the school whose proud past is done shame by their current missteps.

Yet whatever denomination or creed you profess, even if you profess none at all, the very right of religious freedom so sacred in this country has been attacked and the Obama administration has refused to back down from this assault. Whatever Georgetown and other Catholic schools decided to do, it is up to the Catholics, Christians, and others who make up them and this country to never waver in their efforts to change the course of this country and our academic institutions therein.

The spark is alight, my friends. Keep it roaring through Election Day and beyond.

The Virtue of Patience

Here at thatotherconservative, I generally consider myself pragmatic and consequentialist when it comes to views on political change and the avenues one must choose between to effectuate change. Yet it must be said that the way we come to make these choices has to be based on some sort of general principles to guide those specific case-by-case analyses we then attempt. One such principle which the American system of politics has seemed time and time again to ignore is that virtue generally known as patience. The ability to step back and wait for the opportune time to act based on the best information or recommendations seems generally forgotten by the mainstream media or the general public to whom they cater. Despite the casual disregard for thoughtful decision-making as a thing of the past and the more credible urgency with which politicians must act to avert impending socioeconomic crises, I will make the case that a return to simple patience must be the first step in getting to the root of our current problems, whether these patient moments manifest in the early formations of law-making or a campaign or even as the ballots are cast in the polling places or within a Congressional chamber.

No, this is not passivity or even political incoherence (as I have recently indicted the Occupy movement for falling victim to) but rather the forceful and immediate transition of political focus away from the cycle of bartering and compromise to a genuine discussion of political opinion schemas at their core. To take pieces of legislation and inject into them not merely the back and forth rain of sound bytes but rather real and responsive debate of the kind we seldom see anymore.

"How is this patience?" one might ask. Well, perhaps what I'm calling for is not patience in and of itself. At least not patience in some conventional definitions of the word. My point is that I am just as guilty as you when it comes to easily becoming plugged into Fox News or whatever ideology channel you tune into which, while entertaining, fails to accomplish much of anything except leaving a bad taste in my mouth about the way this country is headed. As such, we need the patience to turn off the TV, read through those propositions on your local ballots, and not take someone else's word for it that X policy or X candidate MUST be passed/elected now. I plan on discussing in the future more about the failure of our capitalism system to develop a truly functional system of consumer awareness to actually enforce democratic accountability where the government has so utterly failed. It is this same collective compulsion to be patient and to understand the issues for themselves that must be realized here and now.

Barack Obama rammed through the stimulus like it was a cake walk. Nancy Pelosi declared that Obamacare could be evaluated just as soon as it was passed. And who can blame them? In such an immature fashion, the American people fell for that ever elusive lure of "change" and in doing so wrote the Democrats a blank check to wreck havoc on the political sphere for as long as they did. And now we're reaping the rewards.

But it doesn't have to be this way. We can and should hold those in Washington accountable for all the experimentation with which they have clogged our economy, our culture, and our values. I sincerely hope that in these presidential debates all those watching, left or right, have an open mind toward the positions these candidates articulate. Many of us have pre-conceived notions of candidates, and they may very well be right. Yet it's not that hard for inclination to turn into devotion (as I have noticed in many supporters of certain candidates thus far). And such a cult of personality is what got us into this socioeconomic mess in the first place.

In a nutshell: Don't be passive. Don't be shy to speak your mind. But have some patience, please, in all your political decisions. The future of our country is, quite literally, at stake.

The Failure of Political Incoherency in OWS

As much as I would like to let Occupy Wall Street embrace the slow, somewhat agonizing death it deserves without more disturbance or attention, I did feel it relevant to counter one particular political philosophy that seemed embedded within the movement: that impulsive desire for "non-binding consensus based collective decision making" (in the words of OccupyWallSt.org). This attractive methodology for enacting whatever form of change the demonstrators hoped for may prove alluring to the quasi-enlightened mind, yet in terms of legislative productivity, it is utterly bankrupt.


The most credible attempt at defending this lack of cohesion is an attempt to connect the "occupiers" with the protests that occurred in the name of the Civil Rights movement and later withdrawing our armed forces from Vietnam. These movements, it is argued, did not have any strong, specific policy proposal or platform, yet achieved a dramatic level of change within their day merely by citing a given flaw in the status quo, which is ultimately how the Occupy protests have been framed. 


Two glaring flaws open up in this argument. First, for all its bluster, the momentum garnered by the various sites of occupation is exceedingly small in comparison with its alleged predecessors. Granted, the widespread and global nature of the protests is a bit of a novelty, but at any given time the actual numbers of such gatherings rarely top over a few thousand, with the most exaggerated claims coming from Oakland, California, where one protestor was cited as believing up to 30,000 people being in attendance (although police estimates were nearly a tenth of that number). Contrast this with the 200,000 minimum estimates for, say, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington, or protests from 1967 through 1973 against Vietnam, many of which topped the hundred thousand mark or verged on a million in participance. Polling for the movement, with questionable accuracy, has at best ascertained a massive indifference towards the protestors, with majorities of respondents more often than not remaining neutral on the subject. The fact is that the nation's workforce is simply not about to go on a coordinated strike nor will our students ditch en masse over the cries of the protestors, however legitimate one finds their message to be. 


My second point is that the process by which the occupiers could hope to create change, even with a massive base of popular support, is far more murky and prone to failure than any other successful grassroots protest they attempt to emulate. Whereas massive pressure on the federal government could and did change institutionalized forms of racial inequality and led to the withdrawal from Vietnam, one cannot directly apply democratic accountability towards Wall Street. You can't vote out the 1% in the next election cycle so you have to resort to regulatory action on the part of the government in order to accomplish anything. This disconnect between the target of the occupiers' ire and the actual agents of change that could be of assistance is only exacerbated by the fact that they claim no endorsement of any politician or policy proposal. For all the cover ambiguity might give, it allows those individuals who do make up the movement to return to their local ballot boxes come election day willing to punish a fat cat or two but not certain of how to do it. 


Yet success aside, this presents the hidden danger of the co-option such an organic, fluid movement was designed to prevent against in the first place. As much as they might not wish it, there will be a list of candidates to choose from in November 2012, and if the Occupy movement proves as decisively relevant as its believers would like, it isn't much of a stretch of the imagination to see politicians running under the OWS banner, grafting their personal agenda onto juicy rhetoric all too easily spun as fitting within such parameters. Only when an agenda is made public, with the potential for needed scrutiny and evaluation, does it become relevant and hopefully feasible to enact.


Perhaps this is what the protestors feared all along. Indeed, as the Obamacare debates proved, hiding behind a mound of ink that can be rushed in on a whim can be a winning strategy as opposed to legitimate deliberation. In my personal experience of policy debate, it's hard to lose if you are a moving target and don't defend anything specific. "What, you're challenging that? No, no. What I really meant was..."


And so it goes on. I'm intrigued to see how the last fading moments of the movement are spent, specifically given the emerging situation with OccupyLA and questions of those eviction notices. Will the fuss about Wall Street go away? Of course not. But to think it started with OWS is an even sillier supposition. The gridlock on Capitol Hill, worthy of blame on both sides, will not be parted like the Red Sea when a city council or two extends the eviction date on their respective Occupy camps. Hopefully the American people are beginning to catch on that we need policy focus, not impotence, in order to right the legitimate abuses that have been done to our system.

Those Silly, Simple Joys of Life

It seems like forever since I was able to sit down and have some quiet time in which to write. The few moments I considered in the past just didn't seem to present me with what I considered sufficient subject material, particularly given my pledge to stay positive in every other post I get through. For the longest time, I struggled with the belief that I couldn't come up with something worth writing about. That maybe my sense of optimism was misplaced, and that I might as well jump on the bandwagon of cynicism, given how much easier it is for one operating under such a framework to churn out seemingly endless amounts of text to perhaps an even larger body of dissatisfied people.

Well, salvation came (as it always seems to do) from the most unlikely of sources: a simple, white stain of paint on my jeans. To put a bit more context to my story, I should point out that today was one of the "set construction" days of my local theatrical production, which left me not exactly spotless after I had helped get primer onto several of our major set pieces. So as I began to type this evening, I found myself continually glancing down at my stained, dirty pants. Not exactly the most enlightening scenario, I agree. Yet this visual manifestation seemed to be trying to teach me something beyond just the obvious "take better care not to spill the paint next time, you idiot." After a few moments of reflection, it dawned on me that stains, like any other mark, can be just as much of a signifier of one's work as it is their particular failure.

Another analogy might be useful. In one of my favorite movies of all time, The Great Race, Tony Curtis' part of the Great Leslie, a masterful stuntman, driver, and womanizer, stands out with his particularly clean white clothes, which seem to dodge every potential mess they might come in contact with. Yet in the end, when he actually gets into the thick of the action in the classic pie fight scene, he emerges covered head to toe in pastry filling. Not only does it deserve a laugh or two, but it shows a level of personality that the normally aloof Leslie seemed to be lacking throughout the film. Now that he has fallen in love with the main girl and has something more to fight for than simple glory, he can't but help take a pie to the face.

As silly as it may seem, it is really these simple joys of coming out of a hard days work with a few stains to show for it that make life a bit brighter. If we never had to worry about the aches and pains of daily life, I'd feel more than a bit bored myself. I'm not asking that we all go out and become workaholics. Quite the opposite. I just feel that in the hustle and bustle of our busy lives, it'd be nice to take the time to look down at the scuffs on your shoes, the stains on your shirts, not as a measure of your cleanliness but as a reminder of the finite, limited, imperfect, yet wonderful world we live in. A world that, when you truly engage it, will have its shares of scratches and aches, but which subsequently is all the more exciting to truly live in.

Love Labour's Lost

For all my somewhat-inflated love of the arts, I cannot claim to always understand or accurately comment on the politics that dominates Hollywood and its associated web of intrigue. Yet for the love of God, my stomach was so sickened by the news that our beloved heroine, the very Kim Kardashian herself, has so hastily snipped the sacred bond of marriage, that I was compelled to say a few words on the matter. Yet I was not the first to notice this lovely piece of news, and so Ms. Kardashian has evidently given a response to her fans concerning the break-up. Here is a brief snippet of the garbage I allowed my screen to be temporarily defamed by (courtesy of SeattlePi):

"When I probably should have ended my relationship, I didn't know how to and I didn't want to disappoint a lot of people," she writes.

"I want a family and babies and a real life so badly that maybe I rushed into something too soon," she says.

The sheer immaturity of these statements is unbelievable, but immature they are. Most striking is the absurd rationale behind Ms. Kardashian's decisions, an indication of her broader priorities. First on this unbalanced list is the not wanting "to disappoint a lot of people," aka I'm a slave to societal demand, even to the point of determining my partner for life. I could continue bashing this pathetic opinion schema yet why do so when, in all honesty, such decision calculus is not at all uncommon in our culture. Open a feminine magazine and peruse for a few moments—it shouldn't be all that difficult to understand the extent to which the self-worth of our women is dictated by popular opinion and the attention they garner from adhering to such opinion.


Yet the will of her fans was not the sole factor in her short span of marriage. No, Ms. Kardashian, like any level-headed woman, wants "a family and babies and a real life so badly." Being the grammar Nazi that I am, I just had to say the use of conjunctions was a bit disgusting.  That aside, there is also the implicit acknowledgement here that her life, at least outside of marriage, isn't exactly "real." At least on this yours truly concurs. Beyond my analysis of the substance (or lack thereof) as presented by Ms. Kardashian, I am thoroughly stunned by this awful contortion of family life. True, in many cases, the couple's relationship seems to selfishly crowd out the equally relevant role of procreation. Ms. Kardashian, on the other hand, goes off the other deep end, implicitly placing her ex-husband on the bottom of the considerations that went into her tying the knot. Not that Mr. Humphries is himself dying from neglect, but any compounding selfishness doesn't make the debacle any better. This urge towards a "real life" also serves to equate the maternal instinct to a time-sensitive compulsion, a "phase," that doesn't do justice to the numerous sacrifices mothers make, even on those occasions in which they don't desire to "so badly" do so.


Whew. As fun as this post has been to write, the subject matter is just too outrageous for me to contribute any further to the god-like status of Ms. Kardashian. The bottom line is that Ms. Kardashian has her life rather out of tune, and its better she let her failures die quietly rather than use them as another excuse to satiate her hunger for attention. Hopefully this abysmal situation is enough to wake up her fellow hedonists to the reality of their sad existence.