Joe Six-Pack, the Man Who Was Not There

October 20, 2008 – 9:45 am

I have spent the past weeks trying to find Joe Six-Pack, AKA Joe Average, AKA the real American, a political heavyweight with more aliases than the average Wu Tang Clan member.

I’m in a pretty liberal mountain town but there are still some W stickers on cars from 4 years ago, and some war vets, cowboys, and bikers who live here and frequent local establishments and wouldn’t take kindly to a fellow diner/drinker in a “Bush lied, they died” shirt (which are also produced here).

I’ve been led to believe that Joe, if he was to be found, would be found amongst such folk.

So I started my search for Joe, with the intention of getting his views on the election and possibly buying him a six-pack.

I live in a sort of economic limbo between Flagstaff’s main drag and the ghetto. If I had to guess I’d break my smallish neighborhood down roughly into equal thirds White, Latino, and Native, my wife representing the only Asian presence I’m aware of and two nearby neighbors representing the only obviously Black faces.

You don’t see a lot of Tibetan prayer flags like you might have a mile east, but you also don’t see a lot of Confederate flags on trucks. We do have a gang in the neighborhood, but they generally won’t bother you if you don’t bother them. This is where I started.

I began with people I knew, mainly Native (I at first assumed Joe would be White, but this was a baseless supposition), using a two-pronged approach of asking questions about lifestyle and politics.

Joe certainly would not have to be a political conservative but he would, according to his advocates, tend to avoid intellectualism and go for similar, Six-Pack Americans like Sarah Palin and John McCain, who very likely got a cut of the last six-pack Joe bought. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in election 08, north america, politics | Comments (3)

Running Away Screaming from the GOP

October 15, 2008 – 5:50 am

Why is the election so ugly right now? Why have McCain rallies recently seemed reminiscent of a Skrewdriver concert?

I gained some insight the other night while sitting on a dirty couch eating Mexican food, mainly because they’d failed to hold my reservation at the Liberal Elite club and I was reconnecting with the common people.

Being at a friend’s house often means that, in terms of food, entertainment, etc, you are more or less at their mercy. On this night, it was a mixed bag; tacos and the local Fox News affiliate. I’ll let you guess which one I am fonder of.

This evening, the station in question was talking to a political focus group. Because, apparently, politics are a matter of roughly the same concern as what shape of ketchup bottle consumers find more pleasing, and a handful of people grabbed from a mall in the valley will give sharp insight into which way America goes come November.

One man, almost stereotypically Southwestern looking and a few years north of middle age, started to surprise me. I think we need change, he was saying, and the last eight years have not worked out. I was interested since I would have laid money on him being a Republican. Then he continued that Obama is almost certainly a better choice, paused and added “but I’m a Republican, so I don’t know”.

I felt like breaking the TV. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in election 08, north america, politics | Comments (1)

America’s Prison Problem: If Iron Bars Were Cellophane

March 3, 2008 – 3:31 am

America loves prisons. Not just in the sense of just thinking they’re a good idea, or that we need to build more of them. No, prisons appear to American voters much the way strippers appear to drunk businessmen at 12:07 a.m.; irresistible, shiny, and worth throwing money at.

We also treat strippers and prisoners alike as deserving recipients of rape when it happens to them, but perhaps I’m stretching the analogy too far.

Prison reform is not a sexy topic to most people. If you suggest that maybe, just maybe, building more prisons is dealing with the wrong end of the supply/demand problem, it sounds to people as if you just suggested that they should let someone slit their throats and go sell their TV for crack.

If you suggest that maybe we should try to make prisons a less volatile, criminalizing environment, you may as well have personally signed the order for Willie Horton’s furlough. I try to avoid this conversation, because I’ve been treated to one too many Bronson-esque tirades about how “they’re animals and belong in cages,” or “no, if anything, prison is too good for them,” etc. But America can’t afford to continue avoiding this conversation.

It shouldn’t be a hard one to have, after all; how many of us have had a relative or a friend do time, or done it ourselves? Statistics say quite a few of us. From a cold, practical standpoint, how many of us are looking at an ex-con moving into our neighborhood at some point? Statistics say much the same thing. How many of our tax dollars go into building and maintaining more of these things? You probably don’t know an exact figure, but you know it ain’t cheap.

Ignoring the statistics on how many prisoners are inside for non-violent drug offenses, or how many are serving time for a questionable conviction, or even how many are guilty but serving ridiculously long sentences because of bad legal representation or a legal panacea like three strikes laws (all three situations seeming to correlate somewhat with race and class, but I digress), we still need to look at the function of prison in American society: Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, Society, north america, rape | Comments (5)

Disliking the Demi-God: The Dalai Lama and the Cult of Personality

February 17, 2008 – 2:22 am

He’s an informant for the FBI
Whack the Dalai Lama

- The Dickies, “Whack the Dalai Lama”

Okay, I don’t actually advocate harming the Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, and don’t hold serious animosity towards him; that Dickies lyric merely seemed like a good opener.

I think the Dalai Lama is an alright guy.

I don’t think he’s the re-incarnation of a demi-god though, and I don’t think he’s an infallible sage or “the premiere moral presence of our time” (yes, I have seen this claim in print). And I hate, hate, hate the cult of personality that has surrounded him, and consequently, distorted the terms of debate over the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the issues pertaining to it.

Since I’m an advocate of self-determination (to some degree), I suppose it seems hypocritical to not throw in behind the Tibetan cause to any real extent, but that’s because I’ve done something a lot of the Dalai Lama’s supporters actually have not: I’ve read some Tibetan History. And furthermore, I’ve taken in excess of three seconds to evaluate the Dalai Lama’s wishes for a free Tibet, and realized that he wants a Theocracy that he can be the ruler of. His cause for a free Tibet is not entirely a selfless mission.

My main beef here is that Americans look at Buddhism in general, and its Tibetan subset in particular, through rose-colored glasses. This probably sounds weird coming from someone from an Abrahamic background, when all of the branches have some blood on their hands (yep, Judaism, you too). Yet, the Abrahamic faiths are re-examined all the time, while Buddhism gets a pass. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, east asia, human rights | Comments (5)