Getting Out the Vote — What Works Best?

Polling place on Election Day

I’m eating my dessert first, and starting with my conclusion. If you’re an individual who wants to do Get Out the Vote work, but you aren’t sure which method is most effective?

Do whichever one you want.

If you’re a campaign organizer, it’s a lot more complicated. (In short: Read the book I’m reviewing here, it really gets into the nitty-gritty.) But if you’re a volunteer trying to maximize your impact? Do the method you want. Phone calls, texting, writing postcards, door-to-door canvassing — all of them work, none of them is a magic bullet, and if you judge by how many votes you’ll get out for every hour you spend, they’re all more or less comparable. I’ll get to specifics in a sec, but the basic message is: Do what works for you.

So now I’ll geek out in more detail. Continue reading “Getting Out the Vote — What Works Best?”

Getting Out the Vote — What Works Best?
{advertisement}

Rewriting Paul Without the “No Homo” Jokes

Horizontal banner ad for movie Paul

We saw Paul the other night. Buddy comedy: two best friends from England (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, of Shaun of the Dead fame) visit the U.S. for ComicCon, go on a road trip, and meet a chill, foul-mouthed space alien. Pretty good movie. Cute, funny, crass in a mostly good way, predictable in some places but very original in others. Lots of creative swearing. A good time.

Except for the “no homo” bullshit — the running jokes about how everyone thinks the main characters are gay and it freaks them the fuck out. The movie even used the F-word, more than once: no, not that F-word, the other one, the anti-gay slur. It was jarring, it was exhausting, it was totally unnecessary. So much of the movie was bro-y in a good-natured way, even loving and sweet, and it bugged me that their “nerd-bros don’t have to be reactive shitheads” message didn’t extend to queerness. It almost felt like they had to be heavy-handed with the “no homo” stuff to feel comfortable with the bro-y affection. (The thing came out in 2011, so there’s no excuse.)

And I started thinking: How could they have written this differently?

What if there was a running joke where everyone thinks the main characters are gay — and instead of freaking out, they’re totally used to it by now, and don’t care?

Continue reading “Rewriting Paul Without the “No Homo” Jokes”

Rewriting Paul Without the “No Homo” Jokes

Judging the Past

Thomas Jefferson Birth of a Nation Gone with the Wind

“You can’t judge the past by the standards of the present! It’s not fair. We’ve advanced so much since then. People back then didn’t know better!”

I see the point. But also — no.

Of course we can judge the past by the standards of the present. That’s how we move forward.

We look back, at history or old movies or whatever — and we say, “Wow. That was messed-up. Let’s not do that again.” We read history about slavery and colonization; we watch old movies depicting queers as pitiful and disgusting; we hear old songs that romanticize sexual assault; we see old cowboy shows where Native Americans are shown as savage enemies. We cringe. We cringe so hard it makes our faces turn inside out.

And we say, “That was some fucked-up garbage.” We learn. We pay attention to patterns. We learn how to see bad patterns, in ourselves and our society. We learn how to prevent, how to interrupt, how to intervene, how to resist.

Judging the past is how we move into the future.

Continue reading “Judging the Past”

Judging the Past

Law and Order (The Concept, Not the TV Show)

“Law and order” means order. Not law.

Since the federal indictment of Donald Trump, I see a lot of political commenters beating their breasts about his hypocrisy, how he’s spouted the language of law and order while flagrantly breaking the law and acting as if he’s above it. And yes, it’s hypocritical as fuck.

But the concept of “law and order” has been around for a long time. And it has never, ever, actually meant that.

For decades, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, public figures espousing “law and order” have shown a deep indifference towards the law. They think it doesn’t apply to them. They think they can break it with impunity, in the name of “national security” or “traditional values.” If they don’t break the law themselves, they support and even glorify when law enforcement officers flagrantly, violently break it.

“Law and order” means order. Not law.

Continue reading “Law and Order (The Concept, Not the TV Show)”

Law and Order (The Concept, Not the TV Show)

The Difference Between Daniel Ellsberg and D****d T***p

Pentagon Papers book cover
Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, 2023. He was famous for, among other things, the public release of the Pentagon Papers, top-secret government documents detailing a massive pattern of government lies about the Vietnam War.

Lots of people see him as a hero. I’m one of them.

So how does the illegal retention and dissemination of classified documents make Ellsberg a hero — and make T***p a villain?

I think it’s pretty obvious. But I want to spell it out.

One: Ellsberg retained and disseminated classified documents, not for his own personal gain or aggrandizement, but for a serious and important matter of principle.

Two: He did this at considerable risk to himself.

Ellsberg knew he was committing a serious crime, and accepted the consequences. He knew he was almost certainly going to prison, probably for a very long time. (He avoided prison only because White House staff illegally wiretapped him and ordered a break-in at his psychiatrist’s office, leading to the case against him being dismissed.)

He did all this because of the specific content of the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers showed that the U.S. government had been systematically lying to its citizens about the Vietnam War. Among many, many other lies: The government knew the war was not winnable. And they kept pursuing it anyway. Nobody wanted to be responsible for losing the war — so they kept sending people into the meat grinder.

Ellsberg could do something about it. So he did. At great personal risk.

I have no freaking idea why T***p took those classified documents. The inside of his head is chaotic and baffling, and his motive is one of the great mysteries of this case. Was he planning to sell them, or use them as leverage in power games? Did he simply like the feeling of power and entitlement they gave him? But whatever his motive was, it sure as hell wasn’t government accountability or the preservation of democracy.

That’s the difference.

The Difference Between Daniel Ellsberg and D****d T***p

Michael Corleone and Richard Nixon

Michael Corleone and Richard Nixon

I’ll admit, this is pretty random. I’m doing some deep-dive writing about the Godfather movies, and I’m watching the White House Plumbers show on HBO (hilarious) and reading Watergate: A New History (excellent). My media brain is steeping in these worlds, and of course it’s finding shit to compare and contrast. It’s what my brain does.

So. Let’s compare and contrast. Michael Corleone and Richard Nixon. Like a freshman English paper.

Richard Nixon had a seriously brilliant mind. He had real skills with people, despite his obvious discomfort with them. He had powerful political abilities, with an extraordinary ability to bounce back from defeat. He inspired great loyalty in people who worked for him. And he had something vaguely resembling a genuine interest in public service. The EPA, Title IX, detente with Russia, diplomatic relations with China — that all happened under Nixon.

And he was a total shitbag of a human being. He saw political opponents as enemies, and he saw enemies everywhere. He equated his own selfish interests with the interests of the country, treating threats against himself as threats against the nation. He rationalized his most heinous acts by convincing himself that his enemies were all doing it, too.* He pursued a vile and pointless war, a war he knew was unwinnable, because he didn’t want to be a loser.** And let’s not forget: obstruction of justice, abuse of power, bribery (giving and receiving), tax fraud, election tampering, innumerable violations of his oath of office. His ethics, his concerns about the law and the Constitution, varied from corrupt to nonexistent.

He’s a tragic figure. But it’s the tragedy of wasted potential. I don’t feel sorry for him, except to the degree that I feel sorry for anyone in pain. His tragedy is that he used his power to inflict massive damage, on the people near him and the world at large.

Now. Michael Corleone.

Do I need to spell it out?

Continue reading “Michael Corleone and Richard Nixon”

Michael Corleone and Richard Nixon

White-Collar Grifters and Prison Abolition

Let’s look at a seeming contradiction. I am — more or less — in favor of prison abolition. (I’ll get to what that means in a moment.)

And I also want big-ticket white-collar criminals to rot in jail.

This seems like a contradiction. I think it’s not.

Here’s the thing. Yes, I support prison abolition and defunding police. But I don’t support doing either of those immediately. I don’t know anyone who does. Defunding police doesn’t mean “immediately abolish all police forces and replace them with nothing.” And prison abolition doesn’t mean “open all the prison gates today and let everyone go.” It’s a process.

Prison abolition is a process. And I don’t want that process to start with rich, white, white-collar grifters. I want it to start with people convicted of drug war crimes and non-violent property crimes. I want it to start with dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline, putting the hammer down on racist police abuses, exploding the drug war into a million pieces. I don’t want it to start with Elizabeth Holmes.

Continue reading “White-Collar Grifters and Prison Abolition”

White-Collar Grifters and Prison Abolition

Would Al Gore Have Won? A Popular Vote Fallacy

Group holding vote signs

I’ll get this out of the way first: The electoral college sucks. It’s grossly undemocratic. It sucks for a jillion reasons, and we should dump it.

And also: When people criticize the electoral college, they often make a large, important mistake.

One of the most common arguments against the electoral college is that the person with the most votes should win. Like, duh. But (the argument goes) several candidates for President have lost their elections — even though they won the popular vote. It happened with Al Gore in 2000, and Hillary Clinton in 2016. And that’s not right. If we’d had a normal, popular vote election, the argument goes, these candidates would have won.

But here’s the problem. If we hadn’t had the electoral college, candidates for President would have campaigned differently — which means the popular vote would have been different.

So we can’t say with any kind of certainty who would have won those elections.

Continue reading “Would Al Gore Have Won? A Popular Vote Fallacy”

Would Al Gore Have Won? A Popular Vote Fallacy

Bernie Madoff’s 17th Floor, and the Office of Vito Corleone

I’ve been watching the Bernie Madoff documentary on Netflix, Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. (I suppose I could twit the creators for the unimaginative title, but I’m the one who named my blog Greta Christina’s Blog, so.) And there’s something that keeps jumping out at me, maybe because it’s such a strong visual image in a story full of paper and numbers: the 17th floor.

Madoff had a sleek, fancy office on the 19th floor of a sleek, fancy office building. But he had another office in the same building — the 17th floor. That’s where the machinery of the Ponzi scheme was happening: falsifying documents, cooking the books, flat-out forgery. Very few people saw the 17th floor. But the ones who did all commented on how strikingly different it looked. It wasn’t sleek and modern and classy. It was run-down, badly organized, with old computers and crappy furniture and boxes piled all over the place.

But this was the real office. This is where the real work was done.* The classy offices on the 19th floor created the illusion of brilliant financial minds managing the complex world of finance that we puny peasants can’t even comprehend. The actual work happened on the 17th floor — the work of fraud and deception and theft.

And I started thinking about The Godfather. Continue reading “Bernie Madoff’s 17th Floor, and the Office of Vito Corleone”

Bernie Madoff’s 17th Floor, and the Office of Vito Corleone

The Queer Version Of Get Out?

What would a queer version of Get Out be like? How would you turn the everyday horrors of queer lives into a literal horror show?

When I first saw Get Out, I almost immediately started thinking about what the queer equivalent would be. The women’s equivalent is often seen as Rosemary’s Baby, but Roman Polanski can go straight to hell and he sure as shit doesn’t get to tell our story. There are way better examples: my favorite is probably Season 1 of Jessica Jones, which had me crawling out of my skin, fascinated and repelled, both wanting to turn away and feeling compelled to keep watching. (Yes, that’s a rave review. It’s so good!)

So what would a queer equivalent be? It would probably focus on body horror and bodily control, like Get Out and Jessica Jones and other horror shows about oppression. But what, specifically, would make it queer?

Invisibility and visibility. These keep grabbing my mind, and won’t let go. Continue reading “The Queer Version Of Get Out?

The Queer Version Of Get Out?