Being popular is the most important thing in the world
-Homer Simpson
Being Popular is the Most Important Thing in the World
When I was in 8th grade we had our annual student body elections. The race for student body president was your classic “popular kid” vs. “the loser that everyone was voting for just as a joke.” Of course the loser won. Those who elected this loser put him in a position of high-profile mockery. During times like lunch and class breaks, when teenagers normally socialize, he would go around and try to be included in all of the popular cliques in school. Many of the popular kids pretended to be his friend because it was great fun to ridicule him. And what was the point of their ridicule? Answer: that he thought he could actually be their friend. All through high school this kid tried to be friends with the popular kids and the athletes. I remember the jocks tying him up with ropes and hanging him upside down from the basketball hoop in gym class. Despite daily events like this, he still tried to fit in with these groups that were hostile to him. As a disinterested onlooker, I couldn’t figure out why someone would shamefully continue to be friends with those who made him feel so worthless.
When I taught Freshman English at a university, I had a student in one of my classes. He was from Venezuela. His family had fled to the United States after Hugo Chavez came into power. All of their private property had been seized by the government. They weren’t rich oil tycoons or drug lords. His family was an average member of the Venezuelan middle class who owned a home and a small piece of land. Chavez seized their home and their land and pretty much kicked them out of the country for opposing his policies.
Apparently, after Obama left Europe last week, European leaders have been making fun of him behind his back. Classic junior high politics.
Now Obama is down in South America trying to fit in with that “oh so cool” group – South American Socialist Dictators. I am crossing my fingers that we get to see Barack Obama tied up, hanging upside down from a basketball hoop and him saying, “I’m cool, right guys?”
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Chavez is a thug but Obama is too busy on his 2009 Apology Tour to care.
Harrison’s last blog post..Follow the President on Twitter?
Your posts are anecdote heavy, analysis-light. Like previous posts, the real challenge is to know where to begin to address your post, because there are so many egregious problems in so many places. Obama is your Jr. high president who people voted into office as a joke? Venezuela is run by a dictator BECAUSE you knew a guy once who moved and told you a story? This is phenominal. Let’s just stack up stories contradicting each other, if this is how your arguments are structured.
Chavez is a thug, and I say this as somebody who worked for a long time with the OAS, but you don’t seem to be saying much at all. And thug or not, what is gained by shunning him? Or, we could back another coup a la Bush’s failed 2002 attempt (thwarting a democratically elected leader, btw, a policy we would consider an act of war if somebody else attempted it here)?
I’m no Chavez fan. In fact, I’ll have a Chavez hate-off with anybody, and I guarantee I have more good reasons to hate on this man than you do. But you border on the incoherent. Your posts are tautological: bad stuff is bad, good stuff is good;we’ve labled a, b, c, and d as bad, therefore they are bad, and we’ve labled e, f, g, h as good, therefore they are good.
I’m amazed you’re not embarrassed. I’ll go ahead and be embarrassed enough for us both.
I think at times you and Jake might be accidentally mistaking my blog for something like an academic journal, which it is not, and I never intend it to be. At most times, I don’t even try to make it an exercise in reasoned discourse.
I enjoy dealing in abstractions. I enjoy putting seemingly disparate things together, which is arguably as intellectually valuable as composing a series of coherent and reasoned arguments. You are mistaking my post as an argument, when it is really just stories stacked up. Whether they contradict each other or not isn’t the point.
You can dismiss tautological anecdotal analogies, but I can’t help you if you choose to read them literally and then get frustrated when everything doesn’t line up in a neat little row.
“Who said I like right angles. These are not my laws. These are not my rules.”