Anna Nicole Smith

As the song says:

I don't want to die a cartoon/
in a cartoon graveyard.

So it goes.

There are plenty of others who have done more elequoent elegiacs than this one will be, but I felt I had to at least mention the passing of Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut is of course the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, among other novels. I first read S-5 when I was a senior in high school. A friend had given me a copy and recommended it right before he left for college, and he mentioned something about space aliens and time-travel. The book left a deep and permanent mark on me. It is one of a handful of books that changed the way I think about the world. It remains my stock answer to the inanswerable question: what is your favorite book? The book is a diamond, constructed of short, hard sentences. The structural integrity is unimpeachable.

Vonnegut has more clarity, empathy, and humor than almost any writer you'll come across. He is both a cynic and a humanitarian; a moral innocent and a wizened old crank. He tried to warn the world about its insane impulses but was able to find joy in the strangeness of human interaction. He will be missed more than I can express. I'll leave you with some quotes from the old man:

• Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

• Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

• I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

• If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

• True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

• One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

• 1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

• Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

• (talking about when he tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

• I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.This is it:"Nothing."

• The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.But the Gospels actually taught this:Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

This could go on forever, so I'll just try to pick an appropriate one to end with:

• The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

Book Review

Over the weekend I finished Foxes in the Henhouse by Steve Jarding and Dave "Mudcat" Saunders. I don't have the book in front of me right now, so this review will have to be off of memory--sorry if there are no quotations at the ready.

FITH clocks in at right around 350 pages, making it an entirely manageable length, and the writing style is straightforward and easy to understand. It's a more or less typical, moderate Democrat screed against the Bush administration and the Republican control of Congress for the past few years previous to the elections of 2006. It is not a scholarly work, though Jarding is a sometimes lecturer at Harvard University.

The critisim that is both easiest to make and most cutting is that the book has all the faults you would expect from something written by a moderate Democrat. The authors are perfectly willing to lambast the Republican party all day (for good reason, of course) but any criticism of Democrats is muted and strictly limited to strategy. To Jarding and Saunders, the Democrats stand for all that is good and holy. In reality, though the Democrats have not held political power for a few years, they certainly deserve their share of the credit and blame for the state of affairs in our country. To steal a quote from Chomsky, Democrats are the less reactionary of the two business parties.

Don't expect this kind of commentary to come up. Instead, what you will find is a blueprint for a way the authors believe the Democrats can be competitive in traditionally "conservative" states. The book relies heavily on the experience of Jarding and Saunders running Mark Warner's successful gubernatorial campaign in Virginia and tries to extend the straties employed there to all states. I'd suggest there are two main points the book tries to stress: first, Democrats must not write off large parts of the country (like the South) from the get-go. Second, Democrats can compete in these areas provided they speak in economic terms and are respectful of the local culture, even if they are not actively members of that culture.

To the first point: I agree and disagree. Howard Dean's 50 state stategy is good politics, and there should be an effort to have some form of an active party in every area. It is a part of long term planning that is necessary and long overdue. But I don't think it's something that is going to be paying dividends for a while yet. In the short term, especially in presidential politics, I tend to agree more with Tom Schall's Whistling Past Dixie. Schall suggests that it does not make sense to actively campaign in the South at this time for Democrats. The South is a region of the US that is least likely to vote for Democrats; in the long term ideological struggle, the South is likely to be the last region to come around. It makes much more sense to try to win in the Southwest states like New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. Gore won New Mexico in 2000, and Kerry was in striking distance in 2004. Resources should go to those states first. That does not mean, though, that Democratic candiates for offices more down-ballot cannot run vibrant and successful campaigns in Southern states, too. But the low hanging fruit should be the first fruit the party goes after.

As to the second point: of course. But it's easy to say that candidates should speak to the people where they live, and a lot harder to do it. I think all candidates naturally do this, some better than others. If you campaign in a state that has a lot of hunters, your candidate will try not to offend hunters. That's not exactly a revelation. And then there's the old canard about how Democrats need to focus on economic issues to draw attention away from social issues. Democratic strategists have been saying this for a thousand years and candidates have been trying it. Sometimes it works and sometimes not--and there are a lot of variables involved. But it's definately not a cure-all. There are plenty of red-staters who will vote against gay marriage and abortion and live with lower wages and reduced government services, even though to outside observers it seems irrational and there is simply nothing to be done about it.

So I guess I wouldn't go so far as to recommend the book. It doesn't really tell the full truth about modern politics, and the tactical advice is more or less old hat. There are some good statistics (the abortion rate has gone up 25% during the Bush presidency? Whoa!) and the authors are occasionally funny, but on the whole the parts don't really add up to much. A note of personal interest: Jarding is originally from South Dakota and touches on the 2004 Daschle race several times, an area of personal interest for me.