Arguments, Health Care, Ogaga, Jo Bros

After he retired my grandfather would deliberately park his car in spaces where the street signs were ambiguous so that he could contest the resulting tickets in court. My parents first met competing against each other in high school debate tournaments. My first word, reportedly, was no. So I have a certain pedigree in arguing. As a small child I loved verbal sparring and even through high school I would argue with my teachers when I thought they were wrong. But these days I have pretty much given up on arguing about things that don't involve my personal welfare. If someone says something I disagree with, I usually reply with something like, "You're probably right," and let it rest. An even better idea is to use the Socratic method - ask a series of questions about the other person's position without clarifying where you stand - but this is more difficult.

The problem with arguing is simply that it doesn't work, at least not in the way you would like. Ideally both sides would voice their opinions, consider the other person's position, and arrive at an improved grasp of the overall situation. I have met perhaps a few people in my life who could carry out this kind of a discussion. I am certainly not one of them.

Rarely has this been more evident than in the national health care debate. After Betsy McCaughey appeared on the Daily Show, a reader of James Fallows's blog astutely linked the conversation to Money Python's dead parrot skit:

Cleese's character is armed with all that one could ask for: keen wit, boundless vocabulary, perfect presence of mind, and all the facts on his side. And yet, even he can be played to a draw by a liar who maintains a sufficiently unshakable facade of conviction.

Exactly. In this way, arguments actually matter less than games because they lack any way to determine a winner besides stubbornness. At the same time, the way in which arguments are supposed to matter - as a genuine exchange of ideas - is undermined by people like McCaughey who use language as a tactical battlefield where victory is all that counts. So maybe a more precise way of stating the case would be to say that arguments are games, but games that make unsupportable pretensions to meaning while lacking any clear way to determine a winner. Freestyle RPS is argumentation unafraid to own its silliness.

Along the lines of language-as-tactical-ploy, it is interesting to think about the influence faceless copywriters have had on our recent political history. The current health care measures contain no mention of "death panels," yet that phrase seems to have sparked fear and anger in a large number of Americans. It would be difficult to construe George W. Bush's decisions regarding New Orleans or Guantanamo as "compassionate conservatism," yet the feelings associated with that mellifluous phrase swept him into office. Obama's campaign motto "Yes we can" suggested a revolutionary, power-to-the-people approach that his administration has failed to back up in the fights over the economic crisis or health care reform. In other words, the power of each of these phrases seems to owe to a particular arrangement of words, not to any reality behind them.

As nonsensical and spittle-flecked as the objections to health care reform have been, the arguments in favor have not been any better. I haven't seen Obama (or anyone else) clearly lay out what is wrong with the current system and how the new plan would make it better. Like many, I was deeply disappointed in Obama's decrepitude on this issue. The whole thing is such a big, dumb mess that it makes me glad that I've more or less opted out of American polity (living in France, playing a game for money).

It seems to me that Obama's problem is largely one of image and in this respect he could learn a thing or two from Lady Gaga. Gaga burst onto the music scene with an abundance of rowdy sexual zingers and a paucity of clothes (as measured in amount worn at any given time, not overall range). Whereas Katy Perry, after scoring a number one hit about kissing a girl, primly denied doing anything of the sort, Gaga was refreshingly frank about a variety of sexual experiences and desires. When she said she'd like to have a four-way with the Jonas brothers it was pretty funny, but more importantly it helped establish her image as someone who would say or do anything and not apologize. And she gets away with a lot of provocative behavior with a minimum of media recrimination because she's established provocation as a baseline for dealing with her.

Sidenote: What is the appeal of the Jonas brothers? Are they even good looking? I don't get it. Teenage female readers, chime in!

Nick "The Ivory Douche" Jonas

But Obama has taken the opposite approach of trying not to ruffle anyone's feathers. He got to where he is by being sane in a shitstorm (my personal Obama slogan was not, "Yes we can," but, "Neither a lunatic nor a retard," and that was more than enough) but he seems to be mired in expectations of moderation. I think it would have been better for everyone if, on the day of his inauguration, Obama challenged Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to a one-on-one game on the hoop behind the White House and dunked on him. I imagine it going down something like this.

Then Obama could get as crazy as he wanted with health care reform, and no one could say anything but, "At least he's not dunking on McConnell." At this point I don't know how he can turn it around short of sexting pictures of himself to Fox News. But I guess the real take-away is that Obama doesn't want to get that crazy.

Not crazy like, say, Mark Leyner in My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. In the chapter three, "Fugitive from a Centrifuge," lays out the narrator's life story spanning from his days in the Wilford Military Academy of Beauty ("I'd never forget the Four Cardinal Principles: Teamwork; Positive Attitude; Hair That's Swinging and Bouncy, Not Plastered or Pinned Down; and Hair That's Clean Shiny, and Well-Nourished") to his romance with a woman named Olivia, which goes wrong when she has sex with a vagrant impersonating a delivery man, or perhaps when she buys said vagrant an ultrasonic humidifier instead of a gray turtleneck ("Did I make a mistake?"), to a heist story involving "the DeFrancesco Diamond - a 63.19-carat gem worth $1.5 million" - to the narrator getting the electric chair for allegedly using the DeFrancesco Diamond to bribe the pilot of his transcontinental flight to crash the plane into a cruise ship carrying Olivia and her new boyfriend, and just as I'm wondering what it all means he flashes back to his days at the Wilford Academy...

" We'd been standing under the brutal sun for hours as our drill instructor quizzed us.
"Unwanted facial hair?" he barked.
"Electrolysis, sir!" we chorused.

Well, here I am, sir. The most unwanted hair on the face of the earth."

And I realize that Leyner started with the punchline and worked his way back through the story, crafting every vicissitude to maximize the effect of that unwanted hair line. I don't blame him, it's a killer punchline. And likewise you have already realized that this post had no other purpose besides dissing Nick Jonas. Because he dumped Miley. Dick.

Don't be afraid to use the comments.