A Double Standard on Political Affairs

This week, former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has been (rightly) criticized after finally admitting to having an affair with a woman who worked on his campaign. While much of the coverage on this story focuses on the possibility of an illicit love child born earlier this year, I find marked inconsistency from right-wing blogs (and to some extent, the mainstream media) in coverage on this event. Let us not forget that John McCain, too, cheated on his wife, divorcing her after she was in a car wreck and later marrying a woman 20 years his junior.
I'm not saying that either of these men can be defended for what he'd done. Cheating in any circumstance is completely wrong, but it is even worse when your spouse suffers from some sort of affliction (Elizabeth Edwards - cancer; Carol McCain- disfigurement from car crash). The fact that McCain ended up marrying his mistress does not change the fact that he cheated on the person he was married to at the time. The fact that he's been married to her ever since is not an ablution to the stain of the original sin.
Both of these men cheated on their wives. Time notwithstanding, one is getting off lightly, and another is being strung up on the front pages of every major publication in the world. Now tell me: both crimes being equal, how is that a balanced response?

A Different World View

My baby girl hasn’t even come down the chute yet, and I’m already turning into an overprotective father figure.
The ultrasounds were pretty clear, when Evelyn wasn’t squirming around or playing with her hands. The clarity of the image was striking – and a clear line between her legs made any doubt we had about her gender assignation seems moot. She is very obviously a girl, and part of me sat there watching the little TV baby knowing that my view on being a parent had shifted gears from “carefree” to “serious” in a matter of minutes. In a matter of minutes, I felt something within me change. I was well on my way to becoming like Walter Stratford, the protective (to put it mildly) father figure in the 1999 movie “10 Things I Hate About You.” Stratford, a gynecologist, is obsessed with keeping his daughters safe on prom night.
“Kissing? That's what you think happens? I’ve got news for you. Kissing isn't what keeps me up to my elbows in placenta all day long,” he says. “I’ve got news for you. I'm down, I've got the 411, and you are not going out and getting jiggy with some boy, I don't care how dope his ride is. Mamma didn't raise no fool.”
I love his character for two reasons – one, he obviously cares, and two, he lamely tries to relate to his teenage daughters using “hip” lingo, which, as happens when most parents seems attempt it, turns out sounding unintentionally hilarious, like listening to tourists two almost, but can’t quite, carry a conversation in English. Since my wife has been pregnant, I’ve looked at things in a different way. Those movies scenes where a guy’s family is held hostage? Yeah – not funny anymore. Little kids gone missing? No longer a subject that provokes little response in me. Now, the empathy is heartbreaking. On our way home, we saw two teenage boys on bikes waiting for a stoplight to change. They were skinny and slightly insolent looking, wearing aviator glasses and plaid shorts. Normally, I would have just seen “teenagers.” Now, knowing I’ll be the parent of a daughter, I saw something else: “sexual threat.”
This sensation reached its apogee last night when Karla and I were watching a Wal-Mart commercial (of all things to find meaning in) featuring a mom dropping her daughter off at college. We, soon-to-be-parents, started to cry. We get it now.
Seriously though, finding out that I’m having a girl makes me look at things differently. First, my mind is burdened with the thought of what it is going to be like when she is a teenager, when teenage guys (who can get girls pregnant merely by being in the same state with a girl) will start calling for my beautiful (of COURSE she’s going to be beautiful!) little girl. I’m going to be that CIA-style dad who interrogates every date, who insists on regular communications checks with his daughter and who waits up until she gets home.
Yes, I’m going to be the biggest jerk those teenage boys have ever seen. And I can’t wait.

"Everybody's talking...and I can't hear a word they're saying"

My musical absorption has been off-key since I bought my first iPod in 2006.
It was a tiny silver 2 GB Shuffle model, packaged very cleverly in a plastic box with instructions so simple that anyone with half a brain could figure out how to use it. I wondered at is sleek lines, its logically arrayed controls, and above all, the hours and hours of music I could store on it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Let me explain.
Musical technology has changed a lot over the years since I bought my first record album (“Thriller”) in 1984. While records were always around me growing up, I didn’t feel any true appreciation or ownership of an album until I received my first tape deck in 1987. The first album I ever bought was the “Beverly Hills Cop” soundtrack, and I can remember being very proud of having that off-white cassette with black writing on it. It was something cutting-edge, something I could take around as a badge of coolness. I used cassettes for the next eight years, learning how to dub and do my own remixes of songs using two different players. By the time I’d finally joined the CD revolution in 1994, I was at the height of my mixing powers.
CDs had been around for years, but for me, they took ownership to a new high. Not only did the album come with its own plastic case, it came with the promise that they shiny disk it contained would provide crystal-clear sound forever. The height of this “CD love” was reached in 1999, when a friend of mine tried to borrow my copy of New Order’s two-disc “Substance” set, and I was unable to part with it for more than 12 hours. The sad part was that I was utterly serious; I could not bear parting with something that had bored itself a tiny home deep within my soul. It wasn’t just New Order. I felt the same way about my Joy Division boxed set, and especially about my Germs “Complete Discography” album, which I loved so much I carried the booklet around and memorized.
I purchased my first digital album (two albums by the German electronic group And One) last year. I felt futuristic at the time, but upon reflection, the experience was lacking, and empty. Digital music is exactly that – it is digital, meaning there is no physical product to take home. There is no “thrill of the hunt” with iTunes. It’s not like hunting for a rare CD or vinyl album. If it exists, chances are that it can be had, which isn’t as great as it seems. If something is really rare, there is probably a reason for it (like there isn’t enough demand for it to actually be made on a mass scale; the “Terminator” soundtrack and TSOL’s “Beneath the Shadows” fit this scenario in my experience. Both were better in theory than in fact).
With iTunes and Internet music blogs, there is so much to listen to that I really doubt I am really hearing any of it. It strikes me as an endless all-you-can-eat buffet with multiple servings. By the end of the “obtaining” process, you are so gorged with food (or in this case, product) that you can’t remember if you were even hungry to begin with. For me, the temptation on my iPod to try to listen to everything at once is simply too great, and it is rare that I make it more than three songs into any particular album. Some days, it just seems there is too much to hear at once.
More than ever, portable music is the soundtrack to our lives. But is it a soundtrack, or a backdrop? Are we really listening to the sounds we hear?

A year later, bridge collapse shakes foundations of confidence

A year ago today, a bridge crumbled in the August heat, taking with it a bit of our confidence in the system we’ve built over the course of years and take for granted.
I was getting home from work. After changing into work clothes and making my way to the Nordic Track, I was stopped by a phone call from my friend Adam, asking me if I was all right. At first, I was confused; why wouldn’t I be all right? I asked him why, and he told me that the Interstate 35W bridge fell down.
“Which part?” I asked.
“The whole thing,” he replied, sounding oddly fascinated.
My heart sinking, I raced out of the room to flip on the TV. The scene was the same on every channel; footage from helicopter nose cameras showing smoke pouring out of crushed vehicles, dazed survivors being rescued by people unconcerned by tons of tipping concrete and re-bar. The talking heads of the TV news stations babbled over this surreal scene, but their words were not needed. The photos told the whole story – which wasn’t so much about the bridge collapsing as it was about the every day event that had gone horribly wrong that day. Commuting has become a part of American Life, and every time we buckle our seatbelts, we subconsciously assume that our commute is going to be two-way; otherwise, why would we do it? The bridge collapse not only snarled traffic for weeks after the disaster, it punched a hole in the idea of the mind-numbing typicality of a daily commute.
For the survivors, it became a game of “what-ifs.” For the rest of us watching our TV screens, it became a matter of “how many.” In the end, the toll was remarkably light (13 dead) considering how many people had been on the bridge at the time. As with any disaster, response from political leaders was to blame the other party, and use this tragedy in the shameless way most politicians use tragedies. The story spread all across the world; I even recall reading about it in Der Speigel, a German news magazine. There was a very good reason the world found this story so interesting: bridges don’t fall down in America, pure and simple. We’re the most powerful country on the planet, and things like this seem completely impossible for a might eagle built on a foundation of steel and concrete.
The whole thing made me wonder how strong our infrastructure is. Infrastructure is a natural last-choice for funding; people can’t usually see the repairs the way they can a shiny new building. Infrastructure is like bathroom fixtures – so long as everything works, people don’t think about it, or how it all goes together to make modern life possible. The new 35W bridge, built in record time, should be open by September. I’m not sure what I think about this – I almost wonder if the hurried pace of construction will lead to another tragedy down the road. I’m no engineering expert, but common sense would lead me to think that rushing anything, from a batch of brownies to a multi-million dollar bridge, is probably not the smartest idea. I’m hoping time proves me wrong.
All I know is that every time I drive over that new bridge, I’m going to remember the sounds and images of a hot day in August 2007, when our hearts plunged along with a falling span of concrete over the Mississippi River.