Love, Marriage and Human Nature

To me, one of the cool things about anthropology is that it can help us understand human nature. My interest in human nature pits me against most of the Brainy Ones of the discipline today. According to the most admired anthropologists these days, we should forget about broad issues of human nature; instead we should study specific individual cultures where we can “identify the deployment of discursive strategies of negotiated dynamic gender hegemony blah, blah, blah.” Or something like that.

You might say that if you’re not talking about power and exploitation in specific cultural contexts in anthropology these days, you’re part of the problem, or so the anthropological heavyweights would have us believe.


Despite the current obsession with human variability, I’m still interested in things that all people do and that they do because these are rooted in their biological nature. Consider marriage and love, for instance. Almost every society known to anthropology expects most adults to get married at some point and to symbolize this marriage with a public wedding of some sort. But then there are the Mosuo, an ethnic minority from the picturesque mountains of western China. The Mosuo (aka Moso, Mosso or Na) are lovely people and very friendly as I found out when I visited them in 2008 along with my friend, Professor Wei, and three of our students.*




Mosuo Houses on Lugu Lake, Western China







 
The Mosuo are sometimes described as matriarchal, but they are not, as is evident as soon as you walk into a Mosuo household and notice the women doing most of the household chores. Could women doing most of the household chores be a basic, invariant feature of human nature? Just Kidding.









Mosuo Lady with Grandchild











Anyway, what most Mosuo do, instead of getting formally married, is follow a practice known in Chinese as “walking marriage,” in which men visit women in their bedrooms late at night when the household is asleep. There are no ceremonies in which a man and a woman acknowledge this relationship and it can be ended at any time by the woman refusing to admit the man into her boudoir, or by the man not showing up to visit the woman.











Young Mosuo Couple - Just Friends











So “getting married” is not a universal cultural precept. But falling in love might nevertheless be a universal feature of human nature. Many Mosuo do seem to fall in love. This substantiates a point that my friend, Professor Jankowiak of the University of Nevada has been arguing for decades: Humans are biologically wired to fall in love, and most people do so at least once in a lifetime.

The Mosuo are only different from every other culture in the world because, even when they fall in love, they don’t always institutionalize their affections in a public wedding ceremony. Actually, some Mosuo do get married, and some get married only at middle age after pursuing various “walking marriages” in their youth. Others develop such a close and enduring relationship that they might as well be considered married, even though they don’t formalize their relationship with a public ceremony.

Falling in love, it turns out, has a lot to do with brain chemistry. It appears that surging dopamine and falling levels of serotonin can be found in the bloodstreams of people who are madly in love. These chemical traits are also found in the bloodstreams of people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Surprise, surprise.

I wonder if the day may come when people who have fallen out of love may be able to annul a marriage on the basis of induced insanity.

Plaintiff: “Your Honor, the defendant discombobulated me by flooding my brain’s ventral tegmental area with waves of dopamine through her cunning deployment of an irresistible smile and a little black dress!”

Judge: I find for the plaintiff. Defendant is hereby directed to refrain from similar provocations in the future.

 
But if all of us are programmed to fall crazily in love because of our brain chemistry, what makes human marriages so variable? This is where cultural differences come into play. There are almost as many different ways to get married across the globe as there are Mormons in Utah.

Speaking of Utah, that state harbors a conservative splinter group of Mormons who follow the original teachings of Joseph Smith and who therefore favor polygamous marriages. In fact, among this Mormon minority, the more wives a man has in this life, the higher his status will be when he gets to heaven.

It seems a little depressing to imagine that status competition could continue for us even after we get to heaven, but some men might say they would be willing to endure this if it involved a triple marriage to, say, Laura Linney, Isabella Rossellini and Salma Hayek.

Of course, this leaves aside what the women in these marriages face. They, after all, will also enjoy elevated status in heaven only if they share their husband with lots of co-wives.

My main point is this: I think we Homo sapiens have some basic wiring that shapes a lot of our behavior -- though I grant that the big shots who rule the anthropological roost are right to say there is a need to explain all the variation we find as we look at one culture after another. It’s just that for me, things that are the same everywhere -- like love -- are a bit more interesting than things that vary dramatically from culture to culture -- like marriage.

And I might add that, no matter what Frank Sinatra says, the Mosuo case clearly proves that these two things do not go together “like a horse and carriage.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------
*The Mosuo way of life is well described in Chuan-kang Shih's Quest for Harmony: The Moso Traditions of Sexual Union and Family Life. 

Custer’s Real Last Stand: The Swell-Cool Divide of 1965

I was recently stunned by my freshman class when I asked them if they knew who George Armstrong Custer was, and not a one could identify him. This is not my way of getting all school-marmy on today’s youth about their lack of historical knowledge (I’ll save that for a later post). No, the truth is, as Clay Shirkey might say, the only surprising thing about this scenario is my surprise.




















Custer, for those of you born after 1965, was probably one of the 20 or 30 most famous Americans in history up until the 1960s. He was best known for the Battle of Little Bighorn, universally known as “Custer’s Last Stand,” where he and his entire command were wiped out by a contingent of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by the renowned Sitting Bull.

In a popular 1960 song, for example, Larry Verne portrayed a comically frightened trooper on the way to Little Bighorn pleading, “Please Mr. Custer, I don’t wanna go.” The most memorable line in the refrain was, “A coward I have been called, cuz I don’t wanna wind up dead or bald!”

So, in the old, pre-1960s days, Custer was truly famous. But after all, why should he have been? He was a brave and effective cavalry officer in the Civil War, and continued as a brave and genocidal officer during the wars against Native Americans in the 1860s and 70s. In other words, he was one of dozens of similar but more obscure figures in American history.

What made him famous were his marriage to the daughter of an influential judge back east, and his ambition to become famous and perhaps politically powerful after racking up what he apparently hoped would be impressive victories in the Indian Wars.

Custer’s ambition, his excellent connections and his flamboyant personality did make him famous in his day. But his role in the slaughter of indigenous families turned him into something of a villain during the cultural watershed of the 1960s. Vine Deloria’s 1969 book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, slammed him as did Arthur Penn’s popular 1970 film, Little Big Man. In the latter, Custer is portrayed as a vainglorious loon who leads his men into certain death at the Battle of Little Bighorn because he believes that “a Custer decision” is infallible and incontrovertible.

In other words, whereas the pre-1960s “swell generation” raised Custer to glorious heights, the subsequent “cool generation,” with its openness to Native American viewpoints and suspicion of military conquest, pulled him down into dusty obscurity. This is where he remains today, if my freshmen are any guide. And, frankly, as far as I’m concerned, that’s where he really belongs.*










Sitting Bull - He Had the Last Word











*For more on the swell - cool generational divide, see the Culture World post of December 11, 2010. (Back to the future!)

P.S. For a straightforward account of Custer’s life and personality, I have seen the following book recommended by reliable reviewers: The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick.

When Heaven and Earth Change Places

You know how Frankenstein’s monster felt when throngs of angry citizens came after him with clubs and torches? Well, I do, because I’ve had a lot of experience reading student evaluations of my teaching.

OK, my evaluations are not all that bad (or I would have been fired long ago), but nonetheless, the ones that express dissatisfaction can be harsh. At the end of each semester I dread the prospect of reading a student’s comment that says something like, “Professor Moore is a lot like Bob Newhart would be if Bob Newhart were really boring.”

(Though, since current college students were born mainly in the 1990s, it is decreasingly likely that many of them can now identify Bob Newhart. -- who was not at all boring, by the way.)

For those who may not be in the know, student evaluations are the report cards that students write about their professors at the end of the semester. Unlike the grades the professors dole out, the students’ evaluations are anonymous, as they must be, to ensure candor. Not that we professors all have small, vindictive hearts. (It just seems that way in the movies sometimes.)

In addition to official campus evaluations there are various on-line professor evaluation sites. My favorite student once clued me in to such a site when she said to me, “Hey Dad, someone on RateMyProfessors said you are a Communist.” Of course I have no idea who wrote that anonymous, on-line comment, but whoever it was, they obviously can’t tell the difference between a Communist and a curmudgeon.

Different institutions handle student evaluations in different ways. The administrators at my own college, in a spirit of fiendishly sadistic exuberance, encourage every student to evaluate every single professor in every course. Naturally this comes back to torture them when they have to sit down and read all these comments at the end of the year. Ha!

The thoughtful professor always knows how to “interpret” the comments that students may make in their evaluations. For example, if a student writes, “Professor Moore is too difficult!” I interpret that to mean, “The level of difficulty in Professor Moore’s class is just right!”

I interpret the comment, “Professor Moore is disorganized,” to mean, “Anyone who gives me this much homework has no regard for how badly this disrupts my ability to improve my Grand Theft Auto game skills!”

If a student were to write, “Professor Moore is a lot like Bob Newhart would be if Bob Newhart were really boring,” I would interpret this to mean, “Professor Moore is a lot like that lovable TV character, Bob Newhart!”

Of course there are other ways to respond to student evaluations. If I were to order in popular breakfasts for my morning classes, say a box of warm Krispie Kreme doughnuts and a case of Diet Coke, this might well improve my evaluations, though some might consider this response on my part to miss the spirit of self-reflection. Cynics.

On the other hand, it might also make sense for me to respond to student comments by trying to improve my weak points. On the matter of organization, for example, I happen to have the perfect plan to overcome this perceived peccadillo right here among the papers on my desk. Well actually it might be here in one of these piles of papers, or it could be in one of my file cabinets. In any case, if I ever find it, I will be able to transform myself into a veritable organizational genius. Then we’ll just see who deserves to be flogged with such harsh and callous comments as “could use a little work in the area of organization.”

Tea and Koch

Get ready, my fellow Americans, to see a bit more of your freedom slip away. Corporate money, which already dominates our political and economic landscapes, is preparing to dominate it further, and to do so with the help of the Tea Party.

Tea Party activists tell us that the democracy established by the founding fathers and strengthened by presidents like Lincoln and FDR, is the enemy of freedom. But our democratic government is not our enemy (at least not when it is relatively free of corporate influence).

The real threat to our freedom comes from the concentrated wealth of big corporations, those elitist bastions that are governed by the principle of “one dollar, one vote.” And the Tea Party is an extension of these bastions.

The leaders of the TP, of course, claim to be ordinary Americans, representative of grass roots anger aimed at unresponsive politicians in Washington. But the fiction of the TP’s grass roots has been thoroughly debunked, not once, but over and over.

Jane Mayer’s August 30 New Yorker article, for example, revealed the influence of the billionaire Koch (sounds like Coke) brothers on the TP movement, a measure of influence that they tried to keep concealed. Mayer writes that "By giving money to 'educate,' fund and organize Tea Party protesters, [the Koch brothers] have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement."

I imagine that most of the ordinary Tea Party foot soldiers are not aware that corporate money is behind their activities or that this money is designed to serve its own particular economic interests. They seem to have simply bought the right-wing ideology that portrays democratic government as the enemy of freedom, and so they march against "Washington" unaware of the moneyed interests that fund and help organize their activities while scheming to -- literally -- profit from them.

More evidence for the Tea Party's special interest funding comes from Frank Rich’s telling October 3 article in the New York Times, where he writes, “Big money rains down on the ‘bottom up’ Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret.”

Rich points out that most of these wealthy donors have succeeded in hiding their identities, but he then goes on to list those whose names have been recently uncovered by reporters. He also notes that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, in addition to directly funding the TP with $2 million, provides it with what amount to free advertisements on the Fox Network and in the Wall Street Journal.

Fox News is to the Tea Party what Pravda was to the Soviet Communist Party: a public relations operation pretending to be a news source. If it weren’t for Fox News and the billions of special interest money that fuels the TP, it would most likely amount to no more than a scattering of conservative voters upset that they lost the last election.

In fact the TP follows the conservative Republican (and Fox News) line slavishly even when this line contradicts itself. Start with the initial TP complaint about the deficit. If the deficit were the real motivation of TP leaders, they would have vilified Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (whose economic policies created the bulk of our current national debt) and then heaped praise on Bill Clinton for balancing the budget and creating a surplus.

Why don’t they? Apparently because Fox News and the other corporate interests behind the TP have other interests.

Currently the Bush tax cuts that helped create our huge deficits are scheduled to expire. The Tea Party and conservative GOP line says that we must not let any of them expire, but keep all of them in place, even those for the very wealthiest Americans. These tax cuts for the wealthy -- who do not face the stresses of unemployment and foreclosure -- would increase the national debt by more than a trillion dollars in the coming decade. But no matter, the TP wants to hand this money over to America’s corporate elite even though it will fall on the rest of us -- and our children -- to cover the debt these tax cuts create.

So, is the TP really concerned about the deficit? Or is it simply a well-organized and funded front for the same Wall Street tycoons and corporate millionaires who have dominated American politics since the 1980s? And who, by the way, through their domination of American politics over the past thirty years, have managed to siphon most of America’s accumulated wealth into their own coffers while holding middle class incomes down.

When conservatives say they favor “small government,” what they are really saying is that they favor a government so weak that corporate and Wall Street money can continue to have their way in screwing the American middle class. And the Tea Party is here to help them, while hiding the debt this movement owes to its behind-the-scenes benefactors.

We have seen what the domination of moneyed interests does to us all as recently as 2007 and 2008 when our inadequately regulated economy took a nosedive that we only pulled out of through the effects of the 2009 stimulus. Well, brace yourselves, amigos, and get ready for more of the same, as the pro-corporate special interests lick their chops in anticipation of a November takeover of a big chunk of Congress. Those of us who trust George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and FDR more than we do Charles and David Koch will do what we can to hold off the attack, but if I had to choose a word to describe our prospects, I don't think it would be "optimistic."

Who's Left? Who's Right?

Lately I've endured a couple of rough weeks here on the Rollins Plantation, meaning I've had to attend endless committee meetings and face stacks of papers that require grading. If I could somehow eliminate grading and committee meetings altogether, I might keep this job forever, even without pay. (If an administrator happens to read this posting - JK.)

Anyway, I have a brief chance to write a few words this weekend, and I will use it to respond to a friendly note I received from my old pal Bob from Colorado who just discovered my blog. Bob said he would leave a comment sometime if I would "promise not to get mad at him or have Guido break his knee caps or something like that if he leaves a comment from a conservative perspective."

Of course I can make no such promise, Comrade Roberto. But please note that we liberals would obviously never use Guido-type thugs in such a way. My own liberal sleeper cell, for example, uses elegantly dressed thugs with names like Arianna, Stephane and Daphne to kidnap our conservative archenemies and hold them in tastefully decorated, fern-garnished lofts where we break their resistance by forcing them to watch Jane Fonda work-out tapes round the clock. Most effective.

Alas, I won't have time to write a full-length item today since I'll soon be off on a road trip to visit Dear Old Dad. However, instead of posting something new, I'll put up a piece I wrote for the Fort Lauderdale newspaper (aka The South Florida Sun-Sentinel) eight years ago.

I came across this old forgotten column by accident. Last June an angry left-wing commentator (whose name I forget) responded to an article I had written about Afghanistan by accusing me of being a colonial anthropologist. I wanted to see if his attack was still up on the web, so I googled "Robert L. Moore" "Afghanistan" and lo and behold, one of my old moth-eaten pieces from the Sun-Sentinel came up. I think it's appropriate here, because it says something about what, even today, I see as significant differences between liberals and conservatives. So here it is:



Who's Left, Who's Right?
Robert L. Moore
South Florida Sun-Sentinel, June 10, 2002

Rush Limbaugh has moved to the left. At least that's what billboards all over Central Florida have been proclaiming ever since Limbaugh began appearing on a new radio station a few notches down on the FM dial. The joke hinges on our knowing right from left, politically speaking, and recognizing that Limbaugh always leans hard to the right.

Sometimes it's hard to tell left from right. In a recent CNN.com article, Hong Kong writer Willy Wo-Lap Lam declared that "leftists" or "ultra-conservatives" in the Chinese Communist Party were blocking the admission of wealthy capitalists into the party ranks.

But Lam is confounding leftists and ultra-conservatives here. If these protectionist party leaders are "ultra-conservative," they lean to the right and cannot, by definition, be "leftists."

It's true that the Chinese Communist leaders used to be extreme leftists back when they fought to bring down the rich and lift up the poor. They no longer do this, but instead spend most of their energy defending their power base. This means they are no longer leftists. They are conservatives.

The backbone of conservatism is group loyalty, and most conservatives belong to some group -- racial, religious, moneyed or empowered -- that enjoys privileged status. There is no group in China more privileged than the members of the Communist Party, and by narrowing their mandate to the defense of their own privilege, they have redefined themselves as conservatives.

Left and right are often confused here in America, too. In her February speech to the Conservative Action Political Conference, Ann Coulter goofed when she said, to an appreciative audience, "We need to execute people like [American Taliban] John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals "

But Coulter would have a hard time making the case that the Taliban are liberals. The Taliban have an unshakable faith in the superiority of their own religion, and this kind of self-assurance in religious matters is a hallmark of conservatism.

Liberals tend to be more open-minded about these things. In fact, Robert Frost said that a liberal is a man who is too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Of course, being ostentatiously broad-minded has its drawbacks, too. The liberal's selfless appeals to justice and compassion strike some observers as hypocritical posturing, and it could be argued that this is just as nerve-grating as the stubborn selfishness of the conservative.

Recently I've noticed some cars sporting "Jesus was a Liberal" bumper stickers, a claim that can't be more than half-true. Certainly Jesus' single-mindedness on religion is conservative, while his compassion and sense of justice make him liberal on social issues. As a social liberal, it's unlikely he would look favorably on Enron-style capitalism, a point he vividly demonstrated with his Ralph Nader-style action against the moneychangers in the temple.

The liberal-conservative switch made by Republicans and Democrats since the Civil War has caused some confusion over the meanings of liberalism and conservatism here in America.

Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans were liberal in the 1860s, while Jeff Davis and his pro-slavery supporters were conservative Democrats. Abraham Lincoln, the liberal, expanded the power of the federal government in order to rescue the victims of slavery. Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee, as conservatives, took up arms against the United States to fight on behalf of an entrenched and privileged group (which, by the way, is exactly what John Walker Lindh is accused of doing).





Jefferson Davis - Democrat and Die-Hard Conservative

For a hundred years the Democratic Party was closely identified with the slave-owning aristocracy of the Old South. It wasn't until the civil rights era that white Southerners began to vote GOP in large numbers. Richard Nixon promoted this trend with his Southern strategy in 1968, a strategy that saved the Republican Party from being marginalized.

In short, if Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis were alive today, each would have to switch parties in order to feel at home with his principles.

All this raises an important question. Should the Republican Party continue identifying itself with a raging liberal like Abraham Lincoln? Given its new conservative coloring and Nixon's success in winning over the old Confederacy, the time is ripe for the GOP to stop calling itself the Party of Lincoln, and begin referring to itself by a new and more accurate label: the Party of Nixon.














 





Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy made the GOP a kind of reborn Confederacy

Bourgeois Blues

My friend John R., who knows a thing or two about music, recently forwarded to me the “Rules of the Blues” (see below). The rules, I’m afraid, are bound to put a damper on my longstanding dream, which was to form a blues group and make a living singing about my troubles. Some years ago I even went so far as to compose a verse or two. OK, if you are going to insist, I’ll offer you some samples here:

From “Academic Blues”
(copyright pending by Bipolar Bobby Buchanan)

I got the academic blues, my book is hot off the press,
Yeah, my theory is wired and my book is hot off the press,
But the dean just fired my ass,
He don’ like the way I dress

(Impressive guitar riff here)


Back in Pueblo, Colorado, in the 1980s, I played soccer on a city league. I put together a few verses then for which Brother Becker, our most memorable goalie, played the guitar licks in our post-game gatherings. The verse I remember best came after we suffered a 3-0 blowout, and it goes something like this:

Got Stomped Again Blues

Some folks’ll tell ya, they don’ care ‘bout the score,
Yeah, some folks they say, they jus’ don’ care ‘bout the score,
Well, I don’ care either,
As long as my team got more.


I don’t know, but it seems to me that living a middle class life in suburbia shouldn’t rule you out from singing the blues. I mean, even though we may be bourgeois, if you prick us, do we not bleed, and all that? So, how about this, then?


Got No Right to Sing the Blues, Blues

The rules, they be harsh, they say we can’t sing the blues
Yeah, they harsh and they heavy, they say we can’t sing the blues
But I ain’t hiding ‘neath no bushel,
To follow these rules, I refuse.


















The Great and Famous Blues Brothers.
They're from Chicago which makes it OK for them to sing the blues.



-------------------------------------------

OK, now for some amusing "Rules for the Blues" forwarded to me by John. (He does not claim to have written them!):

If you are new to Blues music, or like it but never really understood the whys and wherefores, here are some very fundamental rules:

1. Most Blues begin with: "Woke up this morning...."

2. "I got a good woman" is a bad way to begin the Blues, unless you stick something nasty in the next line like, "I got a good woman, with the meanest face in town."

3. The Blues is simple. After you get the first line right, repeat it. Then find something that rhymes, sort of: "Got a good woman with the meanest face in town. Yes, I got a good woman with the meanest face in town. Got teeth like Dionne Warwick and she weigh 500 pound."

4. The Blues is not about choice. You stuck in a ditch, you stuck in a ditch...ain't no way out.

5. Blues cars: Chevys, Fords, Cadillacs and broken-down trucks. Blues don't travel in Volvos, BMWs, or Sport Utility Vehicles. Most Blues transportation is a Greyhound bus or a southbound train, usually described simply as "the next thing smokin'." Jet aircraft and state-sponsored motor pools ain't even in the running.

6. Teenagers can't sing the Blues. They ain't fixin' to die yet. Adults sing the Blues. In Blues, "adulthood" means being old enough to get the electric chair if you shoot a man in Memphis.

7. Blues can take place in New York City but not in Hawaii or anywhere in Canada. Hard times in Minneapolis or Seattle is probably just clinical depression. Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City are still the best places to have the Blues.

8. A man with male pattern baldness ain't the Blues. A woman with male pattern baldness is.. Breaking your leg 'cause you were skiing is not the Blues. Breaking your leg 'cause a alligator be chomping on it is.

9. You can't have no Blues in an office or a shopping mall. The lighting's wrong. Go outside and sit by the dumpster.

10. Good places for the Blues:
a. highway
b. jailhouse
c. empty bed (preferably with rocks in it)
d. in a hollow log

11. Bad places for the Blues:
a. Nordstrom's
b. Starbucks
c. gallery openings
d. handball courts

12. No one will believe it's the Blues if you wear a suit, 'less you happen to be an old person, and you slept in it.

13. Do you have the right to sing the Blues?
Yes, if:
a. you're older than dirt
b. you're blind
c. you shot a man in Memphis
d. you can't be satisfied
e. you're fixin' to die

No, if:
a. you have all your teeth
b. you were once blind but now can see
c. the man in Memphis lived
d. you work for Goldman-Sachs

14. Blues is not a matter of color. It's a matter of bad luck. Tiger Woods cannot sing the Blues. Sonny Liston could have. Ugly white people also got a leg up on the Blues.

15. If you ask for water and she gives you gasoline, it's the Blues.
Other acceptable Blues beverages are:
a. cheap wine
b. whiskey or bourbon
c. muddy water
d. black coffee

The following are NOT Blues beverages:
a. Perrier
b. Chardonnay
c. Snapple
d. Slim Fast

16. If death occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack, it's a Blues death. Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is another Blues way to die. So are the electric chair, substance abuse and dying lonely on a broken-down cot. You can't have a Blues death if you die during liposuction.

17. These are some Blues names for women:
a. Sadie
b. Big Mama
c. Bessie
d. Fat River Dumpling

18. These are some Blues names for men:
a. Joe
b. Willie
c. Little Willie
d. Big Willie

19. Women with names like Michelle, Amber, Jennifer, Debbie, and Heather can't sing the Blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis.

20. Here's a Blues Name Starter Kit. You should have three names:
a. the first name should be the name of a physical infirmity (Blind,
Mute, Lame, etc.)
b. the second name name should be fruit (Lemon, Lime, etc.)
c. the last name should be the same as a U.S. President (Jefferson,
Clinton, Fillmore, etc.)

A proper Blues name would be:
a. Blind Lemon Jefferson
b. Pegleg Lemon Johnson
c. Clubfoot Cumquat Coolidge

A lousy Blues name would be:
a. Hemorrhoid Lemon Jefferson
b. ADT Kiwi Bush
c. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Lime Washington

21. I don't care how tragic your life is: if you own a computer, you
cannot sing the blues, period. Sorry!

[Editor's note: Damn!]

Lie to me or I won't vote for you

A recent Rasmussen report told us that only 16% of those polled believed Congress's performance to be good or excellent. The report helpfully adds that this is the highest approval rating Congress has had over the past 12 months.

What this shows us is that America is cursed with a particular group of incompetent knuckleheads who know as much about governing as do Larry, Moe and Curly. I'm talking, of course, about the American voters.







Let's vote for the cute one!









When you consider that we, the voters, hire these people in Congress, and that we also review their performance every two years, it's astonishing that over the past five or six years we've generally given them approval ratings below 50% and usually closer to 15%. What kind of idiots are we that we don't know how to hire good people to serve us?

Well I'll tell you what kind of idiots we are: the kind of idiots who require our representatives to pay for their campaigns with money from the likes of BP and ExxonMobil, and then imagine that these corporate-bought lawmakers are going to ignore their benefactors and do what we, the voters, ask of them. Duh.

Of course in their campaigns our office-seekers always promise us that they will work for "the American people," and will stick it to "the special interests," but only a bunch of dimwits would believe they will actually keep their word and "stick it to" the very interests that paid for their campaigns. In effect, we require that our politicians lie to us. If they don't, we will refuse to vote for them.

To illustrate the "Lie to me or I won't vote for you," principle, consider my favorite cartoon show, The Simpsons. (Yes, more fun than South Park or Family Guy, though those shows are cool in their own way.)

Let's say Smithers is running for Mayor of Springfield and the conniving plutocrat and nuclear power broker, Montgomery Burns, is funding his campaign. Burns pays for Smithers' campaign because he wants Smithers, once in office, to eliminate all the government regulations that keep nuclear waste out of the local reservoir -- the source of the public's drinking water. This will boost the profits of Mr. Burns' nuclear power plant, but it is not necessarily good for the people who drink the reservoir water. (Burns presumably has his own water flown in from Evian, France.)









Just Go Ahead and Trust Me











Now Smithers is not going to say, "Vote for me and I will let the guy who is paying for this ad poison your water!" That would be honest, but probably not a winning strategy. So, he takes Burns' money and uses it to run ads saying, "Vote for me and I will clean out the special interests who control the Springfield city hall!" People will vote for him because he is telling them just the exact lie they want to hear.

This is why I can guarantee that once the new Congress is in place next year, though it will surely have dozens of newly minted office holders, it will not enjoy an enduring surge in its approval ratings. People will continue to complain about its incompetence and corruption as they have for years.

But don't blame the people we hire to represent us. We are, after all, their bosses. It's just that we haven't designed a campaign system that allows politicians to tell us the truth, one in which they can fund their own elections with adequate public money instead of needing to rely on money acquired from the very interests that are inclined to seek special favors.

So, next time you hear someone whining about how bad Congress is, maybe you should ask them what kind of nincompoops hired that pack of double-talking four-flushers in the first place.