Cara Ragazzi

Cara ragazzi,

I've had about a year to think about it, and I'm able now to articulate my thoughts on steroids in baseball -- catalyzed by Rafael Palmeiro, the first big-name baseball player to test positive for steroids in this first season of mandatory regular testing. He's just come off his ten game first-offense suspension.
( click. )

Cara ragazzi,

The 2005 baseball season is about to start, with the opening day game between the Red Sox and the Yankees played at Yankee Stadium (the rematch will be the opening game at Fenway).
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Cara ragazzi,

re: the Superbowl. It was just a nipple. You couldn't even really tell it was a nipple.

Please don't know what I'm talking about.

Yrs truly,

Cara ragazzi,

If you're a guy, then you're welcome. Yes, what you've read in the history books is true: mine is the generation that invented the quadruple-bladed razor. Yes, they told us it was mad. Yes, they warned of extravagance. We didn't listen, and the future will be more cleanly-shaven for it.

All right, it's January 2004, which means the primaries are upon us. The incumbent president, seeking re-election for his second term, is George W Bush, the second of the Bush presidents. The front-runner for the Democratic nomination was, until the other day, Howard Dean: the governor of Vermont, with that state's gay civil union as a strike against his electability. I don't like Dean. He's very popular on the internet, and is probably the first presidential candidate to successfully use the internet to furnish his grass-roots campaign -- it's the kind of thing Jerry Brown or Ross Perot probably attempted and failed. That isn't why I don't like him, but it might be a factor -- Dean has the same kind of wide-eyed smarminess I associate with the worst elements of internet celebrity and online punditry. He doesn't seem to stand for anything beyond Not Being Bush, and hey, Not Being Bush is something everyone on the planet -- with a margin of error of one-divided-by-the-planet -- is expert at.

Vermont's that kind of state, though, sometimes -- the kind of state where "trendy" should be a political affiliation (it's a more specific and accurate descriptor than "conservative" or "liberal"). I don't like the reports that Dean's supporters are blocking access to his opponents' rallies, and shouting down said opponents when they speechify. I don't like the fundamentalist-esque paranoia shown by his supporters every time those reports -- or anything else negative about Dean -- come up: the "this is an attempt to discredit him!" bullshit, the just a shade shy of "it's a right-wing media conspiracy!" bullshit, just a remix of the sort of dumbthink that prevailed over third-party politics in the 90s, and has gradually become more and more mainstream as even moderate liberals fall into it.

I don't like Dean. But I'd vote for him against Bush.

It might not matter, though, which is why I thought to make this entry: once a primary's over, once an election's over, it's not long before everyone except the newsniks forget what happened along the way. So here's what happened: Kerry won the Iowa caucus, and Edwards (who I'm not sure was even being taken as an especially serious contender) came in second. Dean came in third, and Gephardt -- who everyone figured was Dean's main opposition -- came in fourth. Clark -- the general who's a little conservative to be a Democrat, and a little Campbellian in the vagueness of his "forward-thinking" plans, like maybe he read a lot of science fiction books in high school and kinda sorta remembers that the future is supposed to be shiny -- opted out of the Iowa caucus, so it's hard to tell how he'll do until the New Hampshire primary.

This is what Bush wants to see, of course -- if there isn't a clear, early leader in the Democrats' race, then they have to fight amongst each other, which often -- always? -- leads to negative campaigning: campaigns which focus on the bad things about one's opponent instead of the good things about oneself. Negative campaigns are tricky, and rarely work on the national level, but can be effective when done regionally: the problem is that, like Mike Brady would say, no one likes a tattletale. When you tattle, you're really tattling on yourself, or something like that. You might do 4X amount of damage to your opponent, let's say, but you're taking X amount of damage in the process.

And so by the time the primaries are over, Bush has taken none of that damage, and his opponent has already been dragged through the mud -- by other people, people ideologically associated with him and perhaps now even explicitly supporting him.

I don't expect Bush to win this election, but I'm always surprised by how popular -- or at least accepted -- he is. The right-wing didn't expect Clinton to win re-election, after all; it's easy to project, and to misunderstand what other people will overlook, forgive, or deem irrelevant.

I'll update you if anything interesting happens along the way.

Yrs truly,

Cara ragazzi,

( Blogging and celebrity accessibility. )

Cara ragazzi,

I had set Tuesday aside for work, this being one of those times when I was toying with the idea of writing nonfiction for supplemental income. It had to be done by noon on Wednesday, so the publisher could make their presentation to Barnes and Noble -- my book introduction was a key part of that presentation.

So I didn't sleep all that late, and when I got up, I grabbed a caffeinated soda -- probably Dr Pepper -- from the fridge, sat down at the computer, logged on while checking my email, and Kathy told me someone had crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center -- the one in New York, not the one in New Orleans.

The usual website checking, article reading, and channel flipping followed; I went over to Kathy and Mark's to watch CNN and feel sort of glazed, while already debating if this would come to war, and if so, with whom. The draft was immediately brought up, because we're the generation that was told to grow up regretting that we didn't have a Vietnam: would they bring the draft back? Would it ever be possible to need a draft again? Would it ever be politically feasible? What would it take? How would people react? Could the draft be reinstated through executive action, or was an act of Congress required -- or was it required only in the sense that Congress was required to approve of the first Gulf War -- we didn't say "first" yet -- and could the approval be had after the fact?

Would Bush declare martial law?

By mid-day, Rudy Giuliani -- a semi-regular on Saturday Night Live -- was a national hero, although all his previous headlines had been made as the sort of Catholic politician who makes people forget most Catholics are liberal Democrats; he'd cleaned up Times Square for ABC-Disney and CBS/MTV/Nick-at-Nite, and he'd gotten rid of the dirty pictures in the museums.

By evening, the body count varied by factors of lots, and rumors of looting were rampant, although I don't think there actually was much of that, and I don't think anyone was quite sure what Bush had been up to all day, but it was probably something Presidential, like going, "What the shit is this!" a lot.

The Onion summed it all up not long after, with their HOLY FUCKING SHIT! headline. Everything else was sort of the static surrounding the HOLY FUCKING SHIT! channel.

The next morning, I had to get up early, to write an introduction to a collection of Mark Twain's essays on human nature, cynicism, justice, and morality.

I got paid fifty dollars.

Yrs truly,

Cara ragazzi,

Nothing from me this time, but when I was thinking of "things I'd like to have written down thirty years from now," this was one of the first things to come to mind.

( 'Inappropriate' memories of 9/11. )

Cara ragazzi,

That's how each of these entries is going to start. "Dear kids." Whose kids? Who knows. Doesn't matter. The future has children, and everyone's future has children in it: their kids, their neighbor's kids, their brother's kids, somebody's kids. You really can't get away from them. They're constantly sprouting new ones.

My academic background reads like a rap sheet, but most of the training is as a historian -- and so I've been increasingly aware of, and thinking about, the fact that we produce -- and are able to save -- SO much information about what's going to be history before long. Twenty years from now, somebody's kid is going to ask me, "You were around during 9/11"" or "the Second Gulf War?" or "the 2000 Election?" or "when Kelly Clarkson's first album came out?" -- and I'm going to nod, and say, "Yeah, kiddo, you betcha, and I could've had Kelly Clarkson, too..." and then I'm gonna realize, everything I could once have said, I've forgotten.

Two decades of television, movies, Tom Clancy thrillers, age, nostalgia, mellowing, embittering, distance, the enemies of Europa, and black-tar heroin will have ruined my memory. Sure, I'll get a lot of the facts right, but the tone will be wrong. It's already hard to remember how I felt about the first Gulf War when it first started -- that across-the-room-distracted-half-glance first impression, not the mulled-over-several-conversations-opinion -- and that wasn't 20 years ago.

So here we go. Here's the time capsule. It could go somewhere other than the internet, yeah. I'll probably save copies to disk from time to time. Maybe you'll read it. Maybe I will. Maybe the things I think you'll think were important enough to remember won't matter at all. Maybe all you'll care about is whether or not anyone ever thought Such And Such Celebrity seemed a bit dodgy back in 2003, whether we had any idea they'd end up killing Such And Such Their Celebrity Spouse in 2007. Maybe you'll revere the year as the jump-point for the reign of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Action Politician.

It's possible that it should be "cari ragazzi," by the way; I'm not sure if you change the form of "cara" when you're using it in an address like that, instead of as an adjective. (Granted, the "dear" in "Dear John" really is an adjective, but it rarely functions that way).

So, one thing you know now, is that in September of 2003, I don't know much Italian.

I'll tell you more things later.