Collected Thoughts 08-30-09

• "Favorite Thing" is one of the most delightfully reckless Replacements songs.
  

• Smoke from the California fires crept into Echo Park this morning. It's eerie.
  

• It's hard for me not to tweet every thought I have that will eventually make it into the next Nerd's Eye View. Sigh, sign of the times.

• I am reasonably certain that my feature article on Leslie and the Badgers for Radio Free Silverlake will run on Friday, September 4th.
  

• HORROR OF HORRORS. Kill them with fire!

• Mythical creature Venn diagram. I like how the narwhal is used both for its fins and its horns.

• I may have been overly optimistic at placing the Colts at 12-4. They'll be healthier this year. I think they'll be more athletic, if a hair less talented (missing Harrison, obviously.) Indy went 12-4 last year and that was with Manning coming off injury. Considering the above, I initially thought 12-4 was a moderate stance.
  
  I also think the defense will be better in terms of players and scheme, but what I didn't consider was the new defensive coordinator. I know it was merely preseason and five starters were out, but Indy's defense looked terribly coached against the Lions yesterday.
  
  There's also the problem of left offensive tackle. It looked much, much better yesterday but I'm still worried about an older Peyton Manning getting sacked more often. The good news is that the new receivers and backup tight-ends are great. The running game is much, much better. Addai looks strong and Donald Brown, the Colt's first round draft pick, is going to be a star.
  
  The offense will be more productive than last year but I'm afraid the run defense issues and special teams weakness have not been properly addressed. We'll see... September 13th!

• Richard Nixon is my favorite US president. Who else has been so true to their caricature? His successes (China, for example) cannot be denied and yet he has probably damaged the United States more than any other man from the oval office, especially when you consider how his lieutenants went on to serve in think tanks and future administrations Reagan and Bush 43. I will never tire from learning about Nixon.
  

• When I was a sophomore in high school I took an outstanding critical thinking class at my public high school. Mrs. Gilbert's class turned me onto Nietzsche, Elie Wiesel, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and Joseph Conrad. That class probably shaped me more than any other I've ever taken.
  
  The most important lesson I ever learned was in the mock election we did. I was the campaign manager for a friend of mine. Our rival was a Jewish student who used the hipness of being a young Jewish man as the angle of his campaign, all in good fun.
  
  I want to preface the rest of this by saying that Indianapolis has a Jewish community center. The culture of Judaism you can find in NYC or LA is entirely absent. I don't think most kids even understood it beyond "Well, they have the same morals as Christians but they don't celebrate Christmas. And Jesus was a Jew." I did not grasp the cultural sensitivities of Judaism the way I grasped the cultural sensitives of African-Americans. (I went to mostly African-American schools growing up.)
  
  Anyways, my candidate and I really wanted to win. My candidate was also a non-practicing half-Jew (his mother, I think) and we used this fact to argue "Hey! That guy can't just own the market on being Jewish! We're Jew, too!"
  
  You can see where this is going. The campaigning escalated and escalated. For everyone, I think, it was all in good fun, but I also think it became harmful. We were certainly, to some degree, consciously emulating the real-world political behavior. A lot of it was unconscious.
  
  In retrospect, some of the things I devised for our campaign were anti-Semitic. Nothing like caricatures of hooked noses, just sketchy language and the ilk. It was really, really easy to do and really, really easy to try to defend as "fair game politics". And while I certainly understood the historical oppression of the Jewish people (Night was the first book we read in that class, for godsake!) having grown-up in Indianapolis, I didn't have any knowledge of the culture, the people, their importance... nothing. (This has obviously since changed.)
  
  To me that guy was my political enemy and his Jewishness was just an identity tag. It didn't have real meaning to me outside of being a playing piece in a political chess match.
  
  This was the lesson we were intended to learn.
  
  When I hear Glenn Beck be himself, when I see a sea of white folks screaming at town hall meetings, or when I hear Representatives from rural states sympathize with the birther movement, I think back to the lesson I learned in Mrs. Gilbert's critical thinking class.