I humbly submit that our democracy could be better

Here we are on the eve of Election Day! Tomorrow, everyone will be cheering like sports fans and coloring in states like third graders; Wednesday everyone will be pretty irrational about the results and what they mean, and after that half the public will go back to not caring about politics, so I’d like to use this window of opportunity to suggest some improvements to our political process.

Primary Structure: Sometimes I wish we could return to the smoke-filled room days when party bigwigs selected the candidates. This year’s primaries were flawed. Too much influence is given to Iowa and New Hampshire, smaller states that are not necessarily representative samples of the country as a whole. Plenty of states moved their primaries up to compete with them, and as a result we had a crowded set of January and February primaries but an overall season that absurdly stretched until June.

The advantage of starting in a few states is that a candidate with limited resources, like Mike Huckabee, can catch on with a small group so that the rest of the country can give him a look. The disadvantage is that voters in following states often blindly follow the Iowa and New Hampshire selections since they then become more “electable.” This most obviously happened in 2004, when the Democrats went with John Kerry because he won Iowa and thus seemed like a winner. And he wasn’t good at all. In 2008, Huckabee and McCain had states that were made for them, and they were able to crowd out Romney, Thompson, Giuliani, and Paul, all of whom were superior to them in my opinion. The advantage of an extended primary season is that it shows how candidates can deal with failure and provides a more concrete week-to-week barometer than national polls.

Political writer Michael Barone has suggested using a 10-week primary system, with 5 states per week, the order randomly selected. We could even weight the pool so the big states are spread out or regions are clumped together to make traveling easier. And it should start in March. January is too cold and too close to Christmas.

Two-Party System: I sometimes hear complaints about America only having two parties, but this seems like the most orderly way to organize preferences. Multi-party states aggregate into governing coalitions themselves, after all, and they still have a hard time keeping things together. However, there are some things we can do to open the process to third parties. For one, states should lower the standards for getting on the ballot. Parties like the Libertarians and Greens have to spend most of their campaign season canvassing for signatures, so they don’t really have time to introduce their ideas. Two, many voters agree more with third parties than with the big two, but they have to vote with the major parties because they consider it a more effective way of getting roughly what they want. Perhaps computers are advanced enough now that we can address this with a scaled preference system for voting. To explain, I’ll go to a new paragraph.

Duke Student Government had a lot of trouble running elections, but the basic apparatus was something I really liked. You ranked the candidates for an office (typically there were three to five) from first choice to last choice. Finally, votes were counted. If any candidate had more than 50% of the first choice votes, he won. If not, the candidate with the least number of first place votes was eliminated; everyone’s ballots were automatically reordered to reflect this; and votes were counted again. This process continued until someone had a majority (which has to happen when there are only two candidates left). If we did this, people could vote with their heads and their hearts at the same time; third parties wouldn’t be spoilers, and we’d have a better idea of what kind of support the ideas of various third parties have.

Negative Campaigning: Do you remember all the people talking about how tired they were of the Democrats’ negative campaigning against George Bush in 2004? Me neither. But I don’t care because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with negative campaigning, especially in a two-person race. (Just like there’s nothing wrong with short selling on the stock market.) Attacks and negative ads are a necessary counterweight to all the promises and self-aggrandizing claims one’s opponent makes. As long as you’re honest, then whether you make yourself look better or you make your opponent look worse, you’re being equally effective, and you’re informing the voter. Will negative campaigning from both sides dampen the opinions the people have of their future president? Sure, but the executive branch is so massive now that we could use a little skepticism.

Debates and Advertisements: Our political aesthetic is too weighted toward clever turns of phrase, avoiding gaffes, and emotional impressions. During both the primary and the national election, we should organize forums where each candidate can talk about a given subject (foreign policy, economy, and the like) for 20 minutes. If you think this is boring, the AP can sum it up for you later. If we do debates, perhaps they shouldn’t have moderators. Just let the two candidates run the argument themselves.

Voter Fraud: When we ran Iraq’s election, we used deep purple ink to mark everyone’s fingers and make sure no one could vote twice in the same day. Why can’t we do the same thing here in America? It seems like the simplest way to deal with the problem of homeless voters, dead voters, etc. It would also look patriotic.

Regardless of how tried and true our democracy is, I think we can agree it could be better. Or at least less frustrating.

Thinking About the Presidential Election

What happened to John McCain’s lead?  Some people say it’s the financial crisis; some people say it’s Palin; some people say it’s McCain’s personality, but no one has synthesized these things to my liking so I’ll have to do it myself.  Trying to guess what a hundred million people are thinking, even if they’re your countrymen, is insanity, but here goes.

To begin with, thanks to anger with Bush, McCain is running his campaign in heavy gravity.  He can’t be merely equal to Obama; he has to be clearly better.  McCain hasn’t managed to argue he’s philosophically better than Obama because outside of loving his country, the centrist/maverick McCain’s philosophy isn’t very clear.  (When a random plumber from Ohio can make your case more clearly than you do, you have to admit philosophy isn’t your strength.)  He could have argued that he is an honest public servant (earmarks) while Obama is a machine type (Chicago history/farm bill), but he hasn’t run with the yin of his argument.  McCain was most comfortable with the argument that he had more experience and would be a steadier hand in a time of crisis.  Obama’s choice of the career senator Biden seemed an acknowledgment that McCain’s experience argument had some merit.

People say the Palin choice nullified McCain’s argument because it proved he didn’t value experience after all, but he overtook Obama in the polls after choosing her so I don’t think this is quite right.  Instead, I’m going to be topical and say that McCain -leveraged- his experience creds by choosing Palin.  He was basically saying he had so much experience and so much leadership that he could afford to develop a minor leaguer on the bottom of his ticket.  It showed moxie, and people respond positively to that.

Just as McCain was cresting, though, something unexpected happened: an actual crisis.  Unfortunately for McCain’s argument, it was an economic crisis, not a foreign policy crisis.  He made a lot of noise, even calling off his campaign for a week, but still failed to successfully interpret the problem or produce a result people liked.  McCain’s standing diminished, he came to look more like a gambler than a confident risk-taker, and his choice of Palin was re-evaluated in this light.  Obama did not distinguish himself in the crisis, either, but voters weren’t expecting much from him.  He hid in the bushes, Tao-style, and people assumed good things about him.  So McCain and Obama ended up looking like the same thing, which really means McCain is losing.

So why isn’t the race over?  Perhaps voters realize that a Democratic Congress + a Democratic President = A Lot of Democrats.  Thus the big question about Barack Obama – Is he a pragmatist who pretended to be a liberal, or is he a liberal pretending to be a pragmatist? – is very relevant.  The Bill Ayers and Joe the Plumber arguments point in this direction.  A few conservatives believe in Pragmatist Obama but there are enough skeptics (including your faithful narrator) that polls still average 7% undecided, the AP gets outliers like 44-43 Obama, and the race won’t be resolved until Election Day.

Just one question about yesterday’s bailout

Now that Uncle Sam owns AIG, can we put our flag on the breast of Manchester United’s jerseys? That would totally be worth eighty-five billion dollars.

Original photo courtesy of Yahoo! UK

Barack Obama is Just Another Politician

Here’s Barack Obama’s résumé: four years in the U.S. Senate, eight in the Illinois Senate, senior lecturer on con law at the University of Chicago, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, associate for three years at a 12-attorney law firm, positions on the boards of various foundations in Chicago. He has no academic publications to his name – nothing for the law review and nothing for Chicago – but he did pen two bestselling memoirs. His greatest accomplishments as a Chicago community organizer were to convince the city to put a jobs placement office in the far South Side and to remove asbestos from Altgeld Gardens housing project. This is a fairly good record for a Harvard lawyer, but it doesn’t explain why so many people think he’s Pericles reborn. We can attribute that to his charisma and his rhetorical skills. His speeches, however, aren’t that substantive; he just throws around a lot of abstract nouns with positive connotations, plus he makes as many gaffes as the last guy. I think we’re witnessing a classic cult of personality, the kind of thing that used to happen in Latin America or Maoist Asia. “He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh…Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves,” says one admiring journalist. This blog is tracking Obama worship exceptionally. And the candidate is feeding it. He reformulated St. Paul’s three cardinal virtues, Faith, Hope, and Love, as “Faith, Hope, and Change” for a campaign advertisement. A couple of my favorite quotes:

“… A light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany … and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama.” –January 7

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.” –June 3

All politicians want you to believe they’re different from all the other politicians. Sadly, ninety percent of politicians are liars or thieves, and that goes for the young, handsome, and charming ones as well. A review of Obama’s record should remedy the perception that he is political Jesus. Sure, it’s misleading of him to call his entirely leftist Great Society platform a “new politics,” but that’s elementary compared to the rest of his duplicity.

Shady Land Deals: You’re not a real politician until you profit from a shady land deal. Barack Obama purchased his mansion with the assistance of now-convicted felon Tony Rezko. He then used his state senate seat to award subsidies to this developer and his ilk, and the resulting housing projects failed and inflicted misery on Chicago land tenants.

Gerrymandering: Now that Obama holds a statewide office, he is free to denounce gerrymandering, the practice in which a ruling political party redraws district lines to make their own candidates more likely to win elections there. After losing a 2000 House primary challenge to Bobby Rush, however, Obama schemed with John Corrigan, the Democrat in charge of gerrymandering Chicago, about how to create the “ideal map” for him.

Lobbyists: Lobbyists are Obama’s scribes and Pharisees, but his credentials on this issue are pretty questionable. Perhaps most egregiously, the candidate who pledges to “throw the lobbyists out of Washington” voted for the 2008 farm bill, which was written by the farm lobbyists and which was one of the most inhumane bills in American history. We are literally starving people in other parts of the world because Congress has voted by a veto-proof margin to turn our corn into ethanol, prop up our food prices to double or triple reality, restrict food imports from poor agricultural countries that can’t sell anything else, and wipe out local farmers with free U.S. grain every time there’s a humanitarian crisis (instead of buying from said farmers). It’s absurd that we have any farm subsidies at all in a country in which half the people are overweight and the restaurants dispose of enough food every night to Panama. This bill encapsulated everything I despise about government. Isn’t standing up for the poor a basic requirement for being a Democrat?

Federal Election Funding: Obama promised he would accept federal funding for the election. This would have capped the amount he could spend on the election at under $100 million. Then his campaign became the biggest money-making machine in political history, on pace for $500 million, so he broke his promise in order to money-bomb McCain in the fall.

DC Gun Ban: I have this flip on video. During the DC primary, the former constitutional law teacher supported the city gun ban and thought it was constitutional. When the Supreme Court struck the law down this summer, he agreed with the decision and said it was unconstitutional, and he averred he’d always felt this way.

Civil Liberties: Obama promised he would vote against unauthorized government wiretaps, which rallied war protesters and libertarians to his cause. When the issue came before the Senate, that’s not what happened.

Iraq: 2007 Obama:

“We cannot impose a military solution on what has effectively become a civil war. And until we acknowledge that reality, uh, we can send 15,000 more troops; 20,000 more troops; 30,000 more troops. Uh, I don’t know any, uh, expert on the region or any military officer that I’ve spoken to, uh, privately that believes that that is gonna make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.”

“I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

2008 Obama:

“I had no doubt, and I said when I opposed the surge, that given how wonderfully our troops perform, if we place 30,000 more troops in there, then we would see an improvement in the security situation and we would see a reduction in the violence.”

NAFTA: Ran against it in the primary, then moderated his position for the general. My favorite part was the story about an Obama advisor calling Canada to say “j/k, j/k” after one anti-free trade speech.

Welfare Reform: He opposed the 1996 bill that slashed welfare rolls nationwide, yet he takes credit for this reduction in his campaign ad.

Working His Way Through College and Law School: Apparently Obama’s life story is also subject to editing when it is expedient.

Town Hall Meetings: Obama told Rolling Stone that town hall meetings are his favorite part of campaigning, and he separately said he would debate John McCain on foreign policy anywhere, any time. Yet, when McCain offered to have ten joint town halls with Obama running up to the election, Obama refused and instead offered to hold a single town hall on the Fourth of July, when everyone from television viewers to the townies themselves would rather be outside watching parades and fireworks.

On Small Town Pennsylvania Voters: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The Strange Tale of Trinity United: Jeremiah Wright believes the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to eradicate African-Americans, that September 11 was “America’s chickens coming home to roost,” and that black children are hard-wired to be more musical and oral than white children, who are more logical. From the pulpit, he said “God Damn America” and called the United States the “U.S. of K.K.K.A.” He is a proponent of black liberation theology; a leader of this movement whom Wright cites in interviews, James Cone, said:

“Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.”

Jeremiah Wright was also Barack Obama’s pastor of twenty years, his spiritual mentor who first told him of the “Audacity of Hope,” who married him to Michelle Robinson and baptized their children. Obama donated tens of thousands of dollars to the church. Given how much you and I know about our pastors, it’s safe to say Obama knew what Wright was all about. The audience for his sermons certainly seems used to it. Yet when the press pushed Obama about it, he first said he must have missed the services in which his pastor made such contentious statements; when pressure mounted, he gave a speech on race relations in which he said, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother” (a wonderful person but also a racist, he informed the country). Alas, Wright kept making trouble, so Obama disowned him after all. Oddly enough, people haven’t been quoting that race speech so much lately.

Obama never got around to explaining why he chose this wayward shepherd over all others. It’s possible that he shares Wright’s radicalism, but it’s more likely he chose his church pragmatically. He wanted to make connections in the black community, which he later used for his state senate run, and he wanted to get African-American churches involved in politics. Trinity was the largest and most active black church in the city. It fit.

So, if you’re voting for Barack Obama this fall, do it because you agree with his liberal policy positions, or do it because after eight years of George Bush you can’t stand to see another Republican in office, no matter who it is. Don’t do it because you’re in love. He doesn’t deserve that.

España, Campeón de Europa

What a momentous day for Spain! Its football team won the Euro Cup for its first major title in forty-four years, and as neurotic as so many people are about “The Beautiful Game,” which is the only major sport in most countries, this title means more to the Spanish than it would to anyone else because the team practically constitutes the national identity. Phil Ball, a columnist for ESPN, has detailed this better than I ever could, but I’m guessing you don’t have his book Morbo in front of you, so I’ll give you my own version.

The classical image of Spain – bullfighting, Carmen, siestas – is really that of traditional Andalucía, the southern region. The regions of Spain are more politically autonomous and culturally diverse than even the three countries of Great Britain. Much as Mandarin passes for “Chinese” in textbooks, what we call “Spanish” is truly Castilian, the language of a region in the center of the country. Galicia in the northwest is more similar to Ireland (in looks) and Portugal (in language) than to Andalucía and its counterparts. Cataluña was a buffer between France and Islam in the Middle Ages, and it’s still half-French today. The Basques have an extra bone in the back of their heads, an inscrutable language that sounds like it came from the depths of the earth, and a coterie of citizens with such fierce feelings of regional autonomy that they have terrorized the rest of the country for fifty years as the paramilitary organization ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna: sounds real Spanish, right?).

The various regions of the Iberian peninsula were allied in resistance to the 781-year Muslim occupation and united by a series of clever political marriages during the Renaissance, culminating in the person of King Philip II, whose DNA entitled him to the kingdoms of Castilla, León, Navarra, Aragón, Granada, and Portugal, not to mention the Netherlands, Naples, and Milan. The countries you recognize slipped out of the bargain by the 18th century, but for the others, the Hapsburg dynasty initiated centuries of suffering under Madrid’s bad decisions. Only Franco was openly hostile to regional culture, but Basque and Cataluña, the first to industrialize, had seethed about paying tribute to the backwards and incompetent central government for generations before him.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is also extremely relevant. “Guernica,” Picasso’s portrayal of the Nazi bombing of a Basque town, is a cultural touchstone. The last cities to fall to the Nationalists were the Aragonés cities of Barcelona, Tarragona, and Valencia, as well as Madrid, which would be Franco’s headquarters for the next thirty-five years. Even now, the people of Spain seem to be split 50-50 on the war, and the power struggle between Madrid and the other regions, clandestine in Franco’s time, is basically the country’s foremost political issue. It plays out on the football pitch, as well, in a fashion more intense and personal than any rivalry in America. Real Madrid was Franco’s ambassador to Europe, his pride and joy, and the club benefits from shady land deals even today. Josep Sunyol, president of FC Barcelona during the Civil War, was murdered by Franco’s soldiers, and Franco’s regime pressured Barcelona to throw a league cup game to Madrid in 1943 (score: 11-1). The stadiums of Barcelona and Bilbao were long the only places in which the fans could speak their native languages.

All this makes for some cracking club football, but having a successful national team is pretty difficult when so many of the players don’t want to be a part of the nation in the first place. Cataluña and Basque have their own national teams, but the Spanish government doesn’t let them play anyone besides each other (as the United States learned when it tried to schedule Cataluña for a match this year), so the regions’ best grudgingly come out for the red and gold. International critics have called the Spanish side mentally fragile, but in my opinion, if the team fell apart it was because they weren’t comfortable playing together in the first place. The players were all technically skilled, so they made beautiful football together, but they didn’t care about each other or the cause enough to dig deep and win when rough teams like the Italians took the fun out of the game. Germans, on the other hand, very much like being German, and their national team is renowned for its teamwork and achievement. I usually hate generalizations like this, but in a game like football, which is so dependent on imagination and harmony among the players, and in a country like Spain with such a troubled history, my explanation is certainly more reasonable than the cliché that the players, all of whom were steely enough to reach the top of their profession, were cursed or neurotic.

The coach of this year’s squad, at seventy years of age, was too old to care about curses or politics. Even his name was perfect, though no one has ever noticed it before: Luis Aragonés, his surname descending from the <i>other</i> famous kingdom of Spain, contending for more than half his tenure with Castilla’s bureaucrats, scribes, and flagship club. The reason for the discord? He refused to include Raúl, the top scorer in Spanish history, and Guti, a genius midfielder, both lifelong players for Real Madrid, on the national team. Tactically, the decision was puzzling because both were brilliant this season, but from an emotional standpoint, it was a masterstroke. Spain has always had talent, but Aragonés wanted chemistry. If the players enjoyed each others’ company enough, they’d win for each other and leave politics out of it. Guti is a space cadet who can’t inspire others. Raúl is arrogant; he plays favorites, and while he is full of nationalism, it is the rah-rah Castilian kind that whitewashes the indispensable contributions of the rest of the country. This team, freed from Raúl’s presence and personality, could come into its own. By all reports, it was loose and jovial throughout the tournament, and it was notably superior to its predecessors.

The complexity of Spanish nationalism was evident throughout today’s game. The national anthem, sung before every national team match, does not have any lyrics: Franco provided his own, but the state is understandably uncomfortable about using them. The king and queen were on hand, but understandably they mean more to some people than to others. The Socialist prime minister, Jorge Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, was born and raised in Castilla but perversely supports FC Barcelona. The Spanish crowd was boisterous from the start, but it was conspicuously quiet from the seventieth minute to the end, as if it couldn’t believe that a side which had suffered from so many officiating travesties, penalty kick defeats, and inexplicable meltdowns could actually win a major tournament. I was reminded of the people I saw in the Madrid subway the night of the nation’s defeat in the 2006 World Cup: faces to the floor, flags drooping from their shoulders, the young wondering how the world could be so cruel and the old wondering if they’d ever see another title in their lifetimes.

They didn’t have to wait long, it turned out. The team is in a zone. It hasn’t lost since fall 2006 and hasn’t conceded a goal in 360 minutes of play. Its dazzling one-touch passes, mocked in defeat, are now the toast of the continent, and because the team was the second-youngest in the tournament, there’s a good chance the country could soon do something it never has before: win the World Cup. The negative energy which buzzed around every tournament is dispelled. The manager’s term is up, but his replacement, Vicente Del Bosque, had a very successful run at Real Madrid, and since the Madrid crowd has stabbed him in the back before, he shouldn’t be too beholden to them.

What makes me glow the most, however, is the way this team’s success has united the country. The last title literally came under the auspices of Franco. This was the product of an actual state in a more joyful time. These people, who have never truly been together, have seen that without the contributions of every region, this beautiful moment could have never happened. That is as important for the Madridistas as it is for everyone else. In a time when the EU security umbrella is encouraging some countries, such as Belgium, to split apart, the Spanish have a new collective memory to solder them together.

The Year

It’s New Year’s, and that means it’s time for an omnibus blog post about the year that was.

Discernment Blues
2007 is almost gone, and oddly enough, I didn’t stop to think about it until this moment, when the world is already cradling baby 2008. Well, I could just say I’ve been busy, but that’s an incredibly vague term, especially at a place like Duke where it’s the defining emotional characteristic of more than half the student body. I’m not literally booked every hour of the day (I know too much news and sports to get away with that lie), but I can’t just be a college student anymore; I have to live with one eye on the future. So, I’ve had trouble taking satisfaction in many of the things I do: either I beat myself up over mistakes I made, or I’ve already moved on to the next case. I can’t be carefree, but I can’t continue living with this sickness, either.

My vocation was my biggest source of anxiety. It boils down to this: I would like to (1) write novels, (2) have a family, and (3) have financial security (defined as enough money to send my kids to college – is it crazy to worry about this when you’re 21? Or is it appealing?). Addressing all three of these at once would be impossible, so by the time I’m thirty, I need to either break through as a writer or make enough money so that I won’t have to worry about it anymore. I haven’t written much material, but that’s because I’ve subjected myself to the Duke system in order to become a thinking machine. I now have a logical, systems-type brain, and that can make some money.

At first I looked at law, and I got so serious about it (or more accurately, my parents goaded me so much I couldn’t stand it anymore) that I took the LSAT. I even skipped Rockbridge, a retreat I’d been anticipating for two years, for the classes. This killed me – I had the feeling something great was going to happen there, and now I have to get along with out it – but my parents forbade me to go, and for better or worse I honored their wishes. My score on the test was good enough to make a top-tier school but not well enough to convince myself I’d be the best lawyer in the world. The only school that interested me, though, was Columbia. My pre-med friends will go to any med school as long as they get in because they want to be doctors. Perhaps I just wanted to go to Columbia because it was in New York City. Furthermore, law school would require three years, plus another year to study for the bar. There was no way to make it shorter. After graduating, I’d probably have to work as a paralegal for a couple years before the money truly started to roll in. So really, law was not a path to easy money at all. I may have the brains for it, but I don’t have the burning desire some of my friends do, so at the moment, it doesn’t make sense.

How about investment banking and consulting? These jobs are hot among Duke students, and they’re the only ones our Career Center is good at recommending. Applying for these jobs simply didn’t occur to me until after recruiting ended, but I’m not kicking myself over it. Yes, the pay would have been good, but the hours are through the roof (70-80 for consulting, 100+ for banking), and I’m not committed to destroying my health for some silver. Last week, however, I met a friend of my father’s who trades stock options for a living. His work seems like an interesting, flexible, and systematic way to make money, so I’m going to research it for a while. Perhaps this is my path to independence.

The long term is still unresolved, but I’ve found something to satisfy me in the short term: I applied to JET, or Japanese Exchange & Teaching. Under the auspices of the Japanese government, I would teach junior high or high school English, and in return I’d receive a stipend, see a new part of the world, learn the language, and have time to write. How many chances will I have to do this? I’m excited about the opportunity, but I don’t find out if I’m accepted until April, so I’ll have to pursue more opportunities in the meantime. The Career Center hasn’t been helpful, so I’ll ask around myself. I’d prefer not to return to my father’s law firm, where I did database work this summer. It was a decent job, but it has little else to teach me, and wills and trusts don’t excite me as much as they excite my father. I am sure about this, at least.

This does not mean my year was miserable. Owing to my temperament, my ability to meditate has suffered, but I have embraced a God of small things: Christmas cards, letters, enthusiastic smiles and hellos. I also found joy and peace through playing worship and pop songs on my guitar. Coordinating the Awakening Retreat with Jessica Palacios was an experience I’ll never regret. I helped bring the Holy Spirit to more than a hundred students, and I also proved to myself that I can organize and lead huge and complicated endeavors. Reuniting with my best friends at Duke was wonderful, and I’ve met some interesting new people as well. Does anyone in the world have friends as good as mine?

Academics
My sophomore year, I decided to pursue a Philosophy major with Math and Spanish minors. Since then, I’ve been filling in the blanks in my matrix and the back ends of my pre-reqs. I wonder from time to time if I should have taken an English major, like all other aspiring writers, but for now, I am satisfied. I would have loved to increase my reading background, but I learned the rules of criticism in my excellent high school classes; English as a sole major doesn’t look spectacular on a resume; and Philosophy has drilled into me a systematic approach to arguments which is helpful in all fields. So my conclusion is that if I make up for lost time in the next ten years, I won’t feel badly about skipping my reading here at the university.

Responsibility (spring), Philosophy of Law (fall): Now I know why Bob Dylan hasn’t made a significant album in thirty years. Golding is an accomplished professor and an entertaining lecturer, but he is an old man. He returned to the same ideas, the same questions, even the same self-deprecating jokes, week after week.
Latin American Literature: I forgot a lot of the Spanish words that don’t have Latin roots, but I’m still fluent. I appreciated the introductions to Borges, Márquez, Neruda, and so forth. My spring professor was an interesting person: a young, bald Basque who was so frustrated with his thesis advisor that he was considering quitting in order to become an ambulance driver. My professor in the fall really mailed it in: he was an interesting person who could have taught us more but didn’t exert the time or effort. Anyway, my Spanish minor is now complete. ¡Olé!
Probability (spring), Logic (fall): Math has been my most difficult subject since tenth grade, but here I am, one class from a minor. It gives weight to my diploma and works out the systems part of my brain. As usual, it was slow going at first, but I mastered the material in time for the final.
Chinese 1: With Spanish on the outs, I had time to pick up another language. I’ll write a piece about this later because the class has been high comedy so far. I’ve done a much better job with this language than I did with Spanish; it’s like study abroad reorganized my brain.
Social and Latin Dance: I had a crush on a dancer attended a couple great dance performances in the spring, so I signed up for fall classes in order to learn some moves. It’s certainly been worthwhile. Dancing isn’t necessary for any job, but it’s bound to introduce itself in important situations. I’d like to thank high school band for giving me the rhythm necessary to hold my own on the floor.
Chem 83: Three cheers for science! This class felt like a half-credit, but I learned a decent amount in it.
LSAT: Yes, you have enough time after LDOC to study for the June test, even if you have a full-time job. However, the curve is a little more difficult in that month: it pulled my score down three points from the raw value.
My eclectic tastes will come together some day. Hopefully.

Writing
My production was better than usual this year but still not enough. On top of my sporadic blog production, I wrote in my personal journal every day. I finally finished a collaborative story I started with my friends Jericho and Aaron ten years ago, and we feel great about the conclusion. I visited the writing Career Counselor in September. She gave me a list of websites and suggested I try to get published (helpful, huh?). I ended up making a play for the undergraduate publications, which lead to:

“Spain, Standing Still,” in Passport, the international magazine. I jumped into this group the day of the publication deadline. I wrote a piece in a couple hours, sent it in, then did a major rewrite a couple weeks later which made this one of the most legit pieces I’ve written.
“Rurouni Kenshin: Finding the Word in Unexpected Places” in Religio, the religious magazine. The theme of the issue was “Christ in Fiction and Film,” so I wrote a piece about this Japanese series’ implicit rejection of bushido in favor of a Christian ethic of forgiveness and nonviolence.
“I Almost Survived Thai Torture” in Carpe Noctem, the comedy magazine. I attempted to eat twelve large, hot, super-spicy wings in thirty minutes. Hilarity ensued. I published this piece here a few months ago.
“Tsuki,” about the challenges our changing society have caused for male identity. I submitted this to Voices, the gender publication, and haven’t heard back from them. I’m also waiting for a response from them to the stimulating discussion we all had about gender and the Ben Stiller classic “Night at the Museum.”

In June, I wrote an eight page short story called “Noche de San Juan.” This night, which falls on the summer solstice, is a celebration of magic, witches, romance, and so on in Spain. We don’t have a holiday like this in America; Halloween is more a costume party than anything, sadly. I figured one big reason is that we now spend so much time inside, caught up in work, that the mystery of the outdoors is lost to us. So I wrote about an investment banker going into Central Park that night and encountering all sorts of adventures, even fighting a dragon at the end. It was a fun write, and when The Archive, the literary publication, hit its deadline, I sent them the story. I’d read past issues, and the submissions were so morose that I figured they could use a change of pace.

Then, at the recommendation of my friend Aileen, I started attending Archive board meetings and going over the submissions. As usual, sex and death were the order of the day. One of the pitfalls of young writers, in my opinion, is the attitude that to write something significant, one must write about the most significant topics. Unfortunately, that perspective glosses over 90% of life. The joylessness of the submissions was also significant. Everyone’s a critic now, even the creators. There’s a huge opening out there for artists who writers who have love in their hearts. Sure, a lot of artists pay lip service to compassion, but it comes out sounding stilted and plastic, like “All You Need is Love.” We need to reach deeper.

My story was the last prose piece to be cut. The biggest problem is that it was too long: it would have used at least ten pages of a 48-page publication. This was bound to happen, but may it be a lesson for you all: a two-page tale is much better for publication because it doesn’t require as much of a commitment from the editors. Save the ten- and twenty-pages for your anthology.

Since submissions are anonymous, I got to hear what people thought of it. Literary critics are an articulate but cold-hearted bunch, so this was interesting. Half the board loved it; another quarter were indifferent, and another quarter hated it. The former thought it was a great and funny change of pace. The other half thought it wandered, that it didn’t have a message, and that it was ludicrous for Puck to speak Spanish. I would have responded (1) everything’s there for a reason, just read more carefully; (2) I spelled it out on the last page; (3) Puck is an international fictional character, not a creation of William Shakespeare, so that is ludicrous. But I thought it would be unethical for a member of the board to defend his own work, so I stayed in my chair and listened to lines like this: “I’d like to call this guy and ask what kind of drugs he was on. I think he’s a crackhead.” “Honestly, I think this was submitted to us as a joke. If the writer were here, listening to us seriously discussing publishing this, he’d be laughing at us.” It would be petty to plot revenge against The Archive, so instead I’ll say I hope I can write something shorter in time for the spring deadline.

Sports
This was my best running year since high school. When I returned home in May, I got onto a four-days-a-week schedule, and I stuck with it even after school started. Every other day is enough to stay in shape but not enough to burn out or to justify skipping days. Consequently, my weight and cholesterol (which were feeling the pain after all that chorizo I ate in Spain) dropped to high school levels as well. I must say, aversion to fattiness is a big motivator for me.

The Colts won the Super Bowl! After twenty years of suffering for Indiana sports, somebody came through, and it feels wonderful. Any time I get down, I can remember that victory over the Patriots; the trick is remembering it. Now that I think about it, it’s a lot like my attitude toward the resurrection of Christ: when I remember that event, I forget all the pressure and sin in the world and feel only joy. But it slips my mind all the time. That’s a great reason to have holidays, I’d say. And this is getting pretty theological for the sports section of the paper.

I finally got into Bill Simmons’s column on ESPN.com, giving me something in common with millions of other Americans. Well, make that millions of other collegiate and working-class male Americans. ESPN is also the best location for live soccer scores, and I used it often during Real Madrid’s surprise run to the Spanish championship. My five favorite sportswriters were Spanish soccer writer Phil Ball, SI standard Paul Zimmerman, economist Dan Berri at Wages of Wins, insurance adjuster Ken Tremendous at Fire Joe Morgan, and whoever handles sports for The Onion.

Finally, thank you to Joseph Addai, Maurice Jones-Drew, Kellen Winslow, Santonio Holmes, Greg Jennings, Marques Colston, Anquan Boldin, Calvin Johnson, Donovan McNabb, Jay Cutler, John Kitna, Najeh Davenport, Adrian Peterson (Bears version), Rob Bironas, and the Pittsburgh and Seattle defenses for making this a special year for my fantasy football team. I won that league and finished 2nd in our NCAA basketball pool. Let’s not talk about my fantasy baseball team. Or the Orioles, Pacers, Duke football, and Josh McRoberts, for that matter.

Politics
This was the year I gave up on George Bush. I’ve been unhappy with him since late 2005, but now I just don’t care anymore. He’s just the guy who lives in the White House. The much-needed change of strategy in Iraq and the abject failure of his immigration bill did me in. The latter was especially unbelievable. Millions of class-A candidates all over the world play the lottery every year to get into the country, most of them without ever succeeding, and it takes several years to even get a marriage visa, and we’re supposed to believe INS could process the papers of 8 million illegal immigrants in a matter of months? Wow.

The current Republican field has me in better spirits.  Where were all these guys in 2000?  My first choice is Mitt Romney and my second is Rudy Giuliani.  Both are extremely competent executives, and with the executive branch as big as it is now, that’s a requirement.  Indiana doesn’t vote until May, though, so I’m left to following the horse race.

My main sources for news and opinion are National Review Online, the Wall Street Journal, the Drudge Report, and Rush Limbaugh’s website, in that order.  The Corner at NRO has exceptional political coverage, but its frequent philosophical and historical discussions are the real draw.  The WSJ is far superior to other newspapers because it actually pays attention to the business world, and since most people spend their lives at work, what happens there is just as worthy of our attention as the game of thrones which is played in Washington and Whitehall.

Art
There are so many entertainment options out there that the writers’ strike means nothing to me. Here are some notes on pieces I experienced this year, some of which were produced earlier than 2007:
Tres sombreros de copa (Three Top Hats) by Miguel Mihura: an affecting coming-of-age story. The chaotic last scene is especially poignant.
Morbo by Phil Ball: a superb and entertaining introduction to Spanish football, whose local politics make it one of the most fascinating sports leagues in the world.
J-Pop: I wrote several months ago about the vast amount of international music that’s easily available on YouTube. I liked blues artist Masayoshi Yamazaki enough to order his greatest hits collection from Japan. Another song I liked was “Just When I Needed You Most,” a Chinese tune by Wilber Pan. The lyrics sound great, and they flow in a way that isn’t possible in English. Rationalists of the early 20th century, like George Bernard Shaw, hoped there would some day be one language for the whole world. If that came to pass, however, we’d lose all our poetic richness.
John Legend: A great musician. I’m happy that someone with his tone color can still make it in pop music given the moribund tastes of today’s major label execs.
Otis Redding: Everyone knows him for “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” but the rest of his catalogue is strong, as well. Soul music is still exciting, my friends.
Yo-Yo Ma: His richly varied music suggests there is a beautiful spirit underneath.
Ella Fitzgerald: How did I go so long without knowing her voice? How did she sound young and clear for so long? “Pure Ella,” a one-disc collection, was the best album I bought this year. In addition to featuring her perfect voice, it introduced me to several iconic jazz numbers.
Kodomo no Omocha: Mentioned this series in my post about art for young people. It treats issues that are important to its target audience (teenagers) in an intelligent and entertaining matter. The protagonist even inspired me to start running at night.
No Country for Old Men: Subdued pieces have been popular with the Academy lately, so I expect this film to win Best Picture. I’d be satisfied with that choice.
Shaolin Soccer: In American movies, when the man tells the woman about all the things he’s going to buy for her one day, it usually doesn’t have the desired effect, because one of the top ten rules of our films is that money isn’t important. In “Shaolin Soccer,” on the other hand, the scene was touching, and the movie didn’t cast any aspersions on the monks for placing such importance on the tournament’s prize money. Perhaps the poor, Stephen Chow’s audience, cannot dismiss money the way Americans do.
The Namesake: Like all Indian movies, it has a lot of music, and it’s a little long, but no matter! It was an intelligent picture, and it especially affected my mother, a second-generation Hispanic who had much the same experiences as Kal Penn.
The Blues Brothers: The ending sequence is incredible, but the film’s love of African-American community and culture impressed me more. It feels ahead of its time and ahead of our time, as well. It meanders, but I don’t mind because this leads us to some great songs.
Spider-Man 3: The cheesiest movie of all time.
Joel Apatow Films: They exemplify the classical idea of comedy: bawdiness and ridiculousness drive the humor, but the story ultimately reaffirms the community and its values.
Leon Fleischer (pianist): He visited Duke in November, and his performances were exceptional. Aging and pain have calmed his playing. I would like to write a short story about him and the young girl who was turning pages for him.
My New Haircut: The YouTube video of the year.
24: I watched seasons 1-3 (excellent) and 6 (forgettable) this year, but I’m letting my parents do Season 4 without me because the show’s philosophy is now clear to me. I’ll explain later; in the meantime, I’m happy this show exists.
Lost: I skipped this season. I hate it when writers waste my time.
The Office: Each year, I miss a comedy that is so popular, I end up hearing all the jokes from friends and acquaintances, anyway. I absorb everything through the prisms of their personalities, so when I finally get around to the original, I end up learning about my friends instead. I’ve seen a couple episodes of The Office, but to me, Dwight is Robert Won, and the screwball jokes are my sister’s, and I’m perfectly happy with that.
I will clear the Quixote before I die.

Finally, this was the year the power of Wikipedia became terrifying. Writers may never have to return to the library for general background research.

All right. Now I can turn the calendar. Happy New Year, and may the blessings of heaven be upon you.

Five Minute Guide to the Presidential Primaries

This is my attempt to explain the current presidential race to a politically ignorant friend.

In the last fifty years or so, the major parties have chosen their candidates through primaries. That is, the members of the parties in each state vote from a slate of candidates, and the state’s delegates go to the winner – it’s like the electoral college. Unlike national Election Day, primary elections are spread out over three or four months. Once in a while, we have to go the distance to get the winner (Ford v. Reagan in 1976, for instance), but usually matters are settled in the first month, after which voters from the later states jump on the leader’s bandwagon. For this reason, the states that traditionally hold the first primaries (Iowa, then New Hampshire, then South Carolina) get a lot more attention than bigger ones like California.

The voting begins in January.

DEMOCRATS – As far as I can tell, they agree on all issues but diverge on how passionate they are about each one. I think this race is going to come down to personal differences, not policy.

1. Hillary Clinton – The current front-runner because she’s receiving support from people who want her husband to be president again. Senator of New York and former First Lady. Running as a centrist. Voted for the Iraq War before turning against it. Currently the national front-runner but trailing in Iowa. She was considered the inevitable Democratic candidate, but lately she has slipped.

2. Barack Obama – Great personality, light record. More liberal than HRC. Running as a uniter, not a divider. Senator of Illinois. Young people are very excited about this man, and so are others like Oprah Winfrey. Trailing Hillary nationally but leading in Iowa. Always opposed the Iraq War.

3. John Edwards – John Kerry’s former partner on the ticket is running as a populist. He says there are “Two Americas,” one for the rich and one for the poor, and he wants to bring them closer to each other. He’s basically only campaigning in Iowa, so if he doesn’t win there, he’s out. Voted for the Iraq War before turning against it.

Those are the people with a viable shot. Then there are…
-Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, respected Senators who haven’t excited many people
-Bill Richardson, respected governor of New Mexico and former ambassador to the UN who would like to be Clinton’s running mate
-Dennis Kucinich, hero of the peace-and-love crowd
-Mike Gravel: this advertisement is his biggest contribution to the campaign so far, but to be fair, it’s pretty awesome.

REPUBLICANS – They have some nerve to be running anybody for President next year, but I suppose they have to do it, and they could still win this.

1. Rudy Giuliani – Leading nationally, trailing in the early states. His plan is to sweep the big, centrist states like New York and California. Former mayor of New York who is often credited with saving the city. Smashed the NY mafia. Not drawing the social conservative vote because he is personally pro-choice.

1. Mitt Romney – Leading in the early states, trailing nationally. Founder of Bain Capital, credited with saving the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, and former governor of Massachusetts. Appealing to the conservative vote, but some people doubt his sincerity because he ran to the center, not the right, in MA. Also, he’s a Mormon, and some people think this is a problem, but it’s not certain how many.

3. Mike Huckabee – Sweeping up the social conservative vote right now because he’s a conservative Christian and also a friendly and compelling speaker. Former governor of Arkansas. Financial conservatives (ie pro-free market) are terrified of him, however, because he’s a populist. I think of him as George Bush, Part 2.

4. John McCain – Senator of Arizona who finished 2nd to George Bush in the 2000 presidential primary. He is respected by both parties but doesn’t appeal to conservatives due to his “maverick” reputation. He is also 72 years old. He is now the authoritative voice on the Iraq War, having done a much better job of defending and critiquing it than the sitting President.

4. Fred Thompson – Former senator of Tennessee and actor on “Law and Order.” Once upon a time, conservatives were very excited about his candidacy because he shares their beliefs on all subjects. However, people have doubted his energy (his campaign is more low-key than the rest) and his qualifications (he hasn’t accomplished as much as his peers.)

6. Ron Paul – Representative of Texas. Pure Libertarian. He is appealing to people who want to abolish the federal government and think the Republicans have abandoned their small-government principles. He is also appealing to anti-war liberals because he wants the US to be non-interventionist, ie not have troops in other countries. These two groups are extremely devoted and are raising him lots of money though he is still trailing in polls, and pundits do not take him seriously. He also wants to return our monetary system to the gold standard. I must admit his campaign has been fun, though, and it’s good to have libertarians around.

The other Republicans technically running are Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo, who are campaigning against illegal immigration, but they just don’t have any support. Alan Keyes is running, naturally. Campaigning for public office is his hobby.

Two sports notes

Tidings from the Bayou
LSU 28, Florida 24
Kentucky 43, LSU 37 (3OT)
LSU 30, Auburn 24
LSU 41, Alabama 34
Arkansas 50, LSU 48 (3OT)

I’m going to miss LSU. It has produced five unforgettable prime-time games in a single season, and in my opinion, that makes the Tigers the team of the year regardless of which Midwestern school wins the national title in January. Thanks for the drama, guys. The media may call you a disappointment, but you’re the reason people watch college football.

Tidings from Nippon
The Japanese baseball season ended in a remarkable fashion this year, and I’d like to tell you all about it. The Chunichi Dragons won the Japan Series 4-1 over the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters (sadly, Nippon Ham is the team’s sponsor, so they’re technically the “Fighters,” not the “Ham Fighters”). The Dragons’ 1-0 victory in the fifth and final game was unusual, though, because it was a combined perfect game. Starting pitcher Daisuke Yamai threw eight perfect innings, striking out six. The closer, Hitoki Iwase, then retired the last three batters for the save.A combined perfect game has never occurred in Major League Baseball, and for good reason: if a pitcher has retired every single batter, and he isn’t injured, why would he be removed? Even if he were tiring, a perfect game is one of the greatest accomplishments a baseball player can have. There have been only 17 in the 130 years of top-flight American baseball, and no one ever does it twice. Yet the Chunichi manager seemed perfectly comfortable with denying his starting pitcher this feat. What did he say to his pitcher? “You’ve been perfect so far. I would seem to have no reason to remove you from this game. But being the closer is not your job. It is Iwase-san’s job. So I’m going to let him do it.” More incredibly, the media seems perfectly okay with all this. I’ve heard that playing baseball is as much a public ritual of self-sacrifice as it is about winning for some Japanese, and events like this indicate there’s truth to that. Anyway, congratulations to the Dragons for this title and for their subsequent victory in the Asia Series. They’ve had a tremendous year, and we’ll likely see their star player, Kosuke Fukudone, in the United States next year.

On the passing of Paul Tibbets

Then the LORD said: “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave, that I must go down and see whether or not their actions fully correspond to the cry against them that comes to me. I mean to find out.”

While the two men walked on farther toward Sodom, the LORD remained standing before Abraham. Then Abraham drew nearer to him and said: “Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city; would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to make the innocent die with the guilty, so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike! Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?”

The LORD replied, “If I find fifty innocent people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

Abraham spoke up again: “See how I am presuming to speak to my Lord, though I am but dust and ashes! What if there are five less than fifty innocent people? Will you destroy the whole city because of those five?”

“I will not destroy it,” he answered, “if I find forty-five there.”

But Abraham persisted, saying, “What if only forty are found there?”

He replied, “I will forebear doing it for the sake of the forty.”

Then he said, “Let not my Lord grow impatient if I go on. What if only thirty are found there?”

He replied, “I will forebear doing it if I can find but thirty there.”

Still he went on, “Since I have thus dared to speak to my Lord, what if there are no more than twenty?”

“I will not destroy it,” he answered, “for the sake of the twenty.”

But he still persisted: “Please, let not my Lord grow angry if I speak up this last time. What if there are at least ten there?”

“For the sake of those ten,” he replied, “I will not destroy it.”

The LORD departed as soon as he had finished speaking with Abraham, and Abraham returned home. (Genesis 18:20-33)

Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, died recently. He maintained throughout his life that he did not regret his sortie over Hiroshima, and I understand his opinion. The war was a desperate time, and the government estimated that given the Japanese army’s desperate fighting over distant islands and its citizens’ relatively enthusiastic support for the war effort, a million people would have died if conventional fighting continued. Nevertheless, I pray that such a thing will never happen again.

Postscript: Hitler may be fresh in our historical memory, but World War II concluded over sixty years ago. If you’d like to hear some eyewitness accounts of it, you’d best go find them now.

Abridging the Bible for a literature-minded friend

My writer friend Andrew is looking for reading material, so he asked us to pitch him our favorite book. This was my response:

…Despite my extreme familiarity with Christian theology, every time I read [the Bible], I find something new. I’m recommending it, though, because it has so many stories that are absolutely crucial referents for Western literature. It’s not as popular now, but before, say, 1950, I’d imagine every educated person and most non-educated people had read it cover-to-cover. I know I can’t read twenty pages of Spanish/Span-Am literature without coming upon a Biblical reference.

It’s a long story, so I’m going to do you a favor and pick out the most important threads [from a literary perspective]:

HISTORY
Genesis (skip the genealogies)
Exodus 1-17, 19:16-20, 31-35:19
Joshua 6
Judges 6-8, 14-16
Ruth
1 Samuel 1-3, 8-10, 15-21, 24, 26, 28, 31
2 Samuel 1, 5-7, 11-12, 18-19:8
1 Kings 3, 8 11:1-13, 18-19
2 Kings 2, 5:1-19; Isaiah 39:5-8 (fits here); 2 Kings 24-25
Tobit; Judith 2, 13; Esther
Daniel 1-8, 13-14
Jonah

POETRY
Job 1-7, 38-42
Psalms 13, 14:1, 19, 22, 23 (Good Shepherd), 27, 29, 40:1-3, 84, 100, 121, 122, 125, 130, 137, 139, 144
Proverbs 9:10, 13:24, 15:1, 16:18, 17:28, 23:7, 25:25, 26:7, 26:11, 28:20, 31:10-31
Ecclesiastes; Song of Songs/Song of Solomon; Wisdom 7
Isaiah 6, 40, 52:13-15, 53, 62
Jeremiah 1, 31, 37
Hosea 1-3

NEW TESTAMENT
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians, Revelation. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are rather similar, so you can cruise through repeated stories, but John is quite unique.