Some Unbiased Politics Talk (I Promise)

1. It's almost October and Obama holds a small but significant lead in the polls, so I think it's a fair time to think macro about this whole election business. I say this now from a completely unbiased perspective: it's pretty damn exciting to think that Obama--a black man--might actually become President. Exciting in a general sense and exciting in a historic sense. Exciting like it was exciting during the recent Olympics to consider that Michael Phelps had a real shot to win eight gold medals. And whether or not you were completely turned off by Mr Phelps's incredibly annoying speech impediment or his huge Michigan douchebag quotient, you were no doubt influenced by the mere spectacle of what he was trying to do.
We're talking about a black President here. This is not a small thing. And he beat a woman to get there. Suddenly it seems almost anything is possible. Remember that just recently it wasn't at all extraordinary to ask whether there would ever be a black president in the US.
So I guess this election in some basic and non-cheesy ways really is about hope and change. Not the adopted and bastardized "hope" and "change" that have been enlisted for the joint purpose and glory of power and of course party, but the real, simple meanings of the words. Hope for any marginalized entity. Hope that something different, or something unexpected, or something unentitled can break the paradigm. It's probably not "Change you can believe in," but it's still an honest-to-goodness change, and that's all we really need. The rules really are changing, if at least superficially. Small steps, you know. Unfortunately people are going to pick up on these larger issues and they're going to focus on them and generalize. But as long as you don't completely buy into the manufactured image, and see past the pomp, and don't get carried away by people falling over themselves to say something iconic about the event, you can hopefully sit back and quietly appreciate what may be happening. It's quite certainly never going to be the same again.
2. (for the liberals) Let's face it folks, if he's elected, Obama is going to disappoint you. He's going to be indecisive sometimes and he's going to stutter and stammer and sound unprepared at a press conference. He's going to go off-the-cuff sometime and say something stupid and/or insensitive. He's going to make a horrible appointment based solely on party affiliation. He's going to compromise his--and your--values more than once. He's going to lose touch. He's going to sell out to the conservatives. Let's repeat that one: he's going to sell out to the conservatives. He's just a man, and he'll be trying to do a difficult job in a difficult time and place. There is only so much a president can do, good or bad. Let him have his failures and his successes and don't begrudge him for them.
3. I'm way late for the party on this one, but this whole Palin circus has gone from funny to discomforting to almost frightening. Traditionally, the election is not about the VP, it is never about the VP, they have virtually no effect on the votes or the policy of the eventual winner (let's excuse Mr Cheney and the ridiculously-expanded-power-for-the-executive-branch zealots for a moment here). But there are two very important things that make this election somewhat unique (actually one super important thing that is multiplied by another thing):
a. Sarah Palin might very well be less qualified than I am, and
b. John McCain is very old and in case you haven't heard has lived a fairly difficult life. You can be fairly sure that today's medicine and doctors wouldn't let the maverick kick the bucket in the White House, but some things can prove unavoidable.
I'm not sure who the worst Vice Presidents ever are, but what I do know is that none of them ever became President. 99 times out of 100 who the VP should be irrelevant when choosing a President. This is that one time. She's so clearly inept and he's so clearly incapble of getting cheap life insurance that for once you really do have to consider the running mate.
Supposedly, there is actually a chance she's replaced on the ticket, but if that were to happen it wouldn't really matter who the replacement is cause McCain would have no shot unless Jesus Christ reappears (sorry Jews--"appears") and starts talking about the dangers of big government.
4. (to the liberals and ambulence-chaser-types) I hate to break it to you, but Ms Palin is not going to explode in a blast of incompetence in the debate Thursday night. She probably won't even get demolished. Her recent struggles have served to bring expectations of her to essentially zero, so by definition her performance must improve. She will have had the most intense preparation and coaching that probably any prospective national-level debater has ever had by the time she hits the stage, and much like all politicians will appear more informed and likable than she/they really is/are. She will also have the benefit of everyone tuning in just to watch her, so as long as she can stay upright and lets the moderator do his/her job in sending questions around equally, people will naturally be inclined to believe her and more importantly sympathize with her. Most importantly, after she completes the debate respectably, the media will be so itching to get out a story to counteract all the justifiably negative stories they've been running that they'll overcompensate and give her loads of credit for merely being passable. Joe Biden will be absolutely crushed if he attacks her and so will be left answering direct questions with indirect and circular answers (which will bore watchers) or with constant attacks on McCain (which will turn off watchers). His presence will at best be inconsequential for the Democrats, so if they're smart they'll feed him a few prepared sound bites and just wait for his opportunity to release them. There is almost no chance that this debate will be nearly as entertaining as it potentially could be.

Truth Hurts

We're kinda average.

Why in god's name is Ohio State's football team currently ranked in the top 25?

Really: 13th? Why?

We've played four games. We had an average game and soundly beat a D1-AA team. We looked terrible and beat OU, an average-at-best MAC team. We were pounded on the road by the best team in the country. And then we scuffled around and beat an above-average Sun Belt team. You take "Ohio State" and "Preseason top 5 ranking" off the top of that resume and you're not left with much. Just look at the results, or--more damning--the play on the field and we're talking about a Wake Forest or Oregon State or Texas A&M or Iowa or--god forbid--TCU or Fresno type performance. Are those teams consistently ranked? No of course not cause more often than not they're jokes.

Look, I love that my team benefits from name recognition and consistently favorable preseason poll positioning, but those things are probably the top two things wrong with college football. It sorta pains me to say it, but Ohio State currently represents the worst of the NCAA football structure.

Let's roll around in my own depravity for a moment now. Have a look at Auburn, just one of more than 100 teams ranked below us right now. They're also 3-1. They didn't play any 1-AAs yet but they beat in average-ish performances two overmatched teams, then got an ugly win against a conference opponent. Their loss was to the current #5 team in the country after leading most of the game. I'm sorry but that's a better showing so far than us. Now let's try Ball State. They outclassed an 1-AA team, snuck by a 2007 bowl team, beat an average MAC school, then defeated a Big Ten school on the road. Still that's better than us. Going further, go ahead and scan the results of schools like Kansas, Maryland, UConn, hell even Duke and tell me with a straight face that they couldn't have produced the same results as us with our schedule.

I'll list those again: Kansas, Maryland, UConn, Duke. I'm talking about football, not basketball. Would anyone ever consider ranking Duke 13th in the country?

Just think about that one when watching Pryor open up our Big Ten schedule this week, and hope he helps to start bringing our performance in line with our spot in the polls.

my favorite living author

pretty sure i've talked about david foster wallace here before. he hung himself last friday. he was 46, so he beat hemingway by a decade and a half. this certainly wasn't my first reaction but it was a reaction: he certainly didn't seem like the kind of guy for which "attempted" suicide would apply. rather much more detail-oriented than to fail at really anything he tried. also not my first reaction but less whimsical and therefore more instructive of my overall reaction: there is an absolutely spectacular passage in infinite jest where he describes in first-person an attempted suicide by drug overdose. i've never attempted it myself but the hazy disconnect between human-brain, human-human, and human-world was so well-done it was literally chilling for me to read it. i don't know how you respond to books or written words but finishing reading that passage was maybe the only time in my life where i had to stop and put the book away. it was too much and i just had to stop for the day. too much. it's something the very same character says and something of a melancholic motto for me. it's also a central theme of the book, which might be all the explanation that's required in conveying my love for it. i'm not going to take this time to do any sort of intelligent review of infinite jest, not least because any thoughts on it necessarily can't be separated from the so-recent demise of its author, but i can say with measured emotion that it's one of the handful of best books i've ever read and maybe the best book since the spread of modernism. actually if you've read much of his own opinions of literature you'd agree that it can be silly to compare works with regard to literary era or even to label such eras, so maybe i ought to simply stick with my first statement and leave it at that.

that a man has died is not of much consequence to me. people come and go all the time, and, while it's perhaps pretentious for a 27-year-old to act flippant on the subject, i currently possess neither the disposition nor the experience to philosophize any deeper. what's personally interesting is the depression and obviously therefore the disconnection present in this man that could cause such an outcome. to write as he did requires an incomprehensibly huge amount of emotional depth. to truthfully express both exultant and utterly despairing feelings through mere words requires a man to possess a dangerously massive range of emotions, and therefore all the subsequent vulnerabilities that come with them. i guess i'm saying that suicide from such a person as this should not ever be a surprising result. tragic of course, but not surprising.

there are people--artisans of various types--that transcend simple human existence through their ability to create fully-formed existances for others. these people don't really exist simply as people, as private entities; they belong to the world that they've rendered almost obsolete. i would personally consider bob dylan another such person. he's not who he was born as, he's something else now. wallace i consider similarly. and that's why it's tragic to lose him. more interestingly, though, that's why it's difficult to understand his discontinued existence. here is someone that beat the system, someone who became for the world around him something more than simply alive. so how could he be dead? his output is and will always be alive, it's the creation that has died. or dried up. i don't know. maybe i'm getting carried away but it makes sense to me to think this way.

something else that's somewhat personal about all this is that when you really understand a book or a writer it is impossible not to feel a real connection, as if you know the person. writing and sharing words is an incredibly intimate activity, both for the giver and the receiver. as with every literary consideration, wallace certainly understood this. it makes you wonder if the stress involved in exposing parts of himself was just too much to bear. or, further, if the acknowledgement of his own genius and his own transcendence was too much for his mortal cognition. i know this all seems pretty heady and that real people don't think this way but if there is one person who would have it was him.

it's too bad what happened but in a way it was inevitable. too much. he was too much.