Filed under: Massachusetts, government, politics | Tags: income tax, Massachusetts, Question 1
It’s a wild idea that I’ve been giving serious consideration to: abolishing income tax for Massachusetts residents. My friend Michael posted a link this morning to the article from the New York Times outlining both sides of the proposal. In my opinion, the journalist seemed to favor voting “no,” however, emphasizing the negative responses from the people he interviewed.
Those who are against the proposal fear the loss of income to the state would worsen our financial crisis.
Those who support the proposal seem to view their vote as mostly symbolic, expressing their anger at government waste.
How would saving “the average taxpayer about $3,600 a year” a loss of about $12.5 billion a year, “roughly 45 percent of the state’s budget of about $28 billion” actually affect Massachusetts? Would schools suddenly shut down, hospitals and police crumble? Or would those things that make our state function–unnecessary jobs and wasteful goods–be organically pared away?
My only caveat about this proposal–”Question 1″ on the ballot–is the possibility of higher property taxes. Depressing.
Funny thing that I didn’t realize is that seven states do not impose income tax, among them New Hampshire. Makes you wonder, if these states can manage without individual income tax, why can’t Massachusetts?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: florida, great schlep, jew, obama, sarah silverman
Listen to Silverman: she's got good advice for a better America
This is absolutely hilarious. Sarah Silverman is one of those wild performers who combines shock with wit. In this brief video, she cajoles all you Jews to make “The Great Schlep” to see your retired, vote-eligible nanas and poppies in Florida and to talk them into voting for Obama. It’s a great idea–plus you’ll get a free vacation in the meantime.
The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.
It’s admirable that you’re voting for Obama, but what about all your friends and neighbors?
Filed under: politics, pop culture | Tags: colbert, fist bump, jon stewart, obama
Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert may just be the funniest guys on TV
How meta can you get? On this week’s cover of Entertainment Weekly, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert recreate the controversial cover depicting a militant Angela Davis-type caricature of Michelle Obama and an Islamic militant Barack Obama giving each other a fist bump in the Oval Office. Pure genius.
Another hilarious article by Colbert, if you didn’t catch it, is this article he wrote for Esquire this past summer, entitled “Stephen Colbert’s Guide to White Male Oppression.”
Filed under: politics, racism | Tags: anti racism, barack obama, john mccain, tim wise, white privilege
The cover art for Francine Prose's seminal anti-racist novel A Changed Man
There are many truthful–yet not easy to digest–points made on the viral essay called This is Your Nation on White Privilege, going around the Web and written by Tim Wise, an anti-racism scholar. Some of the facts that I did not know: John McCain has referred to Vietnamese as “gooks” and “will always hate them”; Sarah Palin attended four colleges over six years (after failing out of one of them); Palin’s husband belongs to an extremist organization that wants to secede from the United States; Cindy McCain obtained drugs illegally (actually, I did know this fact because there’s a great profile in The New Yorker this week explaining how McCain forged the signature of the doctor who worked for her charitable organization–and this little tidbit has been buried by the media in comparison to the media frenzy from Obama smoking some pot in college).
White Privilege is a challenging notion to grasp, but I like Wise’s approach. And the opposition to his views have been downright nasty.
It’s always interesting to me to flip the idea of racism on its head and focus not on how people of color are oppressed, but rather on how whites receive invisible benefits.
On a somewhat related note, Francine Prose wrote a great novel last year called A Changed Man. I absolutely loved Prose’s novel (almost as much as the National Book Award finalist The Blue Angel). A Changed Man is about a racist skinhead who has done a 180, after being released from prison, and then seeks to work for an Elie Wiesel-type figure who survived the holocaust. Good satire, great storytelling.
Many of us have been quietly observing the way in which media pundits and bloggers (even celebs like Matt Damon and Margaret Cho) have questioned the credentials of the Republican VP candidate, Sarah Palin. I’m a person who likes to give others the benefit of the doubt; when I’m teaching, I’m constantly asking my students to question their own beliefs, to play Devil’s Advocate, to spin the Rubik’s Cube around to find a new angle on the subject. Same with Palin: benefit of the doubt.
Margaret Cho is only the latest public figure to speak out against Palin
In the past couple days, however, I’ve learned several facts that worry me about our potential second-in-command, namely:
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Palin obtained her U.S. passport in 2007. This fact means she ventured outside the United States for the first time only one year ago. I want a leader–a Vice President, nonetheless–who has more global experience than me.
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Palin inquired about banning certain anti-religious books at the Wasila Public Library, and threatened to fire the librarian who disagreed with her. These actions seem to me outside the purview of an elected official, completely self-serving, and veer on abuse of power.
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Palin’s church promotes a “conversion therapy” camp for gays and lesbians to become straight. From this, I can’t say that Palin herself holds the same faulty view, but her past veto attempt against gay rights in Alaska lead me to assume she holds the same anti-gay views as her congregation.
This last point is the most troubling. One of my students in Ghana this summer asked me if I could ever live there. There were many things I admired about the country–its welcoming people, the developing economy, the potential for seriously making an impact with my skill set. However, the deal-breaker for me was that homosexuality is against the law in Ghana. This part of who I am–not the only part, of course, but an absolutely incontrovertible part of my identity–is illegal. I could never voluntarily choose to live where I’m not welcome. Not to mention a criminal.
Same goes for those who represent me. In the same way that I couldn’t live in a country that does not affirm me (in Massachusetts, the law validates my right to marry the person that I love), I can’t elect a person whose beliefs, at their core, invalidate so much of who I am.
I was surprised as hell to find out this morning that David Foster Wallace has died. You’re never quite prepared for death, anyone’s death, whether it be a loved one or simply the death of someone that you’re invested in–though you don’t know her personally. It strikes a strange chord. Unexpected.
But when is death ever prepared for?
Apparently, Wallace hung himself on Friday night. He was discovered by his wife at their home in California.
I heard Wallace many years ago when he gave a reading to a packed audience at the Boston Public Library. I wasn’t necessarily interested in his work, but felt a need to go because he was such a young lion. He’d just published Infinite Jest, his seminal work, and the audience–mostly kids in their twenties and solidly hipsterish–were gaga. I didn’t recognize him at first because he was sitting in the audience in a shabby dress coat and sort of with his shoulders hunched like he didn’t want to be there. As the Q&A went on, however, and Wallace’s young fans rolled out their detailed, obviously admiring, questions, I began to see him relax. I could sense a great internal sigh, an affinity with the audience, and his initial reluctance to fully participate fade slowly away.
Alden’s been on my case to read Girl with Curious Hair for years now, and I’ve always pushed it to the bottom of my reading list. Though I’ve loved his story “Mayfly” and taught it in my creative writing courses for many years (it’s a great example of voice and mystery), I’m going to go back and read his short work in earnest.
We’ve lost one of the great ones.
Addendum: Nellie sent along this link to Foster’s commencement address at Kenyon College; I found this wonderful “appreciation” from David Gates in Newsweek.
I’m not ashamed to admit a few of my guilty pleasures. McDonald’s french fries. Out magazine. And yes, cheesy love ballads.
It’s not that I’m a fanatic Celine Dion fan or anything, but I appreciate a moving melody when I hear one. Came across this impromptu performance by Dolly Parton. She was in the audience of the new musical of her film 9 to 5 in L.A., and on opening night there was a malfunction with the set. So Dolly gets up from her seat in the audience and gives an impromptu performance of “I Will Always Love You.” Probably the hokiest love ballad ever written, I think, mostly because it was so god damned overplayed. But Dolly has a real soulfulness and beauty to her voice, and the cheesiness of Whitney Houston’s version is eradicated by Dolly’s original sound.
It’s FLAG flag football time. What’cho talkin’ about, Willis? Let me explain:
My friend Michael cajoled me into joining a gay flag football league three years ago, and against my own instincts, I thought, What the hell. My first day of play on the M Street Fields in South Boston, lined up shoulder-to-shoulder with about 40 other guys (who were bigger, badder, and definitely more athletic than me), I was scared shitless. It was Kirn Junior High School P.E. class redux, 16 years later. I didn’t have cleats, felt like the smallest kid in the class, and knew I was utterly unprepared in both skill and knowledge.
My first year playing football with my Maroon with a View teammates
Still, in 2005, my first year playing, I was part of the underdog team Maroon with A View, and my teammates welcomed me and my inexperience with open arms. Flag football isn’t rocket science; yet, it also isn’t jumping on a treadmill and pushing the green Quick Start button.
Tonight, I’m excited for the Meet Your Team party because it’s the unveiling of the 12 teams’ names, all based on the color of our jerseys. I’m on the “royal blue” team; this means that we need to incorporate this color into our team name. I’m lobbying for Royal Pains in the Ass. I’m doubtful if anything can beat last year’s team name “Orange Tropicana Whoopass”.
So I’m sick at home (I just woke up from 14 hours of sleep) and watching lots of television and reading lots of blogs. On The View this morning–yes, I was watching The View–there was an interesting coffee clatch about Sarah Palin. The great point made was that we’re not voting for the Vice President. It’s an Obama/McCain race, isn’t it? When did it become an Obama/Palin race?
The best thing I’ve found from the blogs about Palin was this Good Morning America segment in which her four of her closest friends were interviewed. Three of them wouldn’t commit to voting for her. They disagreed with her pro-life views and her refusal to put polar bears on the endangered species list while she was governor. I’ve gotta say I’m not a Palin fan.
On the flip side, hearing Barack Obama speak to a group of high school teachers in Virginia this morning, I was again invigorated by Obama’s intelligence and candor. Here’s a clip of him talking about his education policies, how he’s enacted legislation for more charter schools and early childhood education, as well as contrasting his education policies with those of McCain…which are practically non-existent.
I’ve been meaning to reflect on the way that time moves at a snail’s pace elsewhere. It’s go, go, go here in the States, of course, especially on the East Coast. But when I’m travelling (and the luxury of travel only extends my conceptions of time), time seems to unfurl itself leisurely–no hurry, no rush. Time becomes an abstraction, something you’re not trying to wrangle into a solid shape but something more organic, something you feel in your bones and stop worrying about, as if seconds were grains of rice.
One of my favorite memories of Togo was a morning I spent on a farm with Kosi’s children. Here’s the three of them below.
Morning with Kosi's children on the farm
Little did we worry about when lunch would be ready, or how we would prevent ourselves from boredom (we didn’t speak the same language), or what other people were doing. There’s no one else around! There’s no place to be! There’s nothing that I’m missing out on!
I’m back in the rat race, and though I don’t have as much work as I will a week from now (it’s still the beginning of the semester and my students haven’t turned in essays yet), I’m feeling stressed. I have to clean my house, pay my mortgage and car payments, walk Lucy, etcetera etcetera etcetera. Never seems to end.
I miss the luxury and freedom of living by the light of day, the seasons, the earth.
