Annual Civic Sabotage

I went to vote early Tuesday morning. Champaign's 15th precinct is one of two that have set up a polling place at a Lutheran church on Prospect Avenue not far from my house, so Election Day is the only time you're ever likely to catch me in a Lutheran church. (Nothing particularly against the Lutherans, who are very likely fine people and such and make some pretty amazing casseroles out of that Campbell's cream of mushroom soup. I just don't do monotheism.)

After the deed was done, on my way out, an attendant handed me a small sticker, presumably to wear on my lapel. It was oval-shaped and had on it a flag and the words "I VOTED TODAY." I accepted it politely, then once I was outside, threw it away.

I guess the point was to show everyone that you did your civic duty, as if giving your sanction to assholes who are as likely to fukk up the planet and your life as not somehow makes you a superior person. In addition to voting, you are also supposed to wipe your ass after taking a dump, but I don't go around wearing a sticker saying I WIPED MY ASS TODAY, even though I've probably gotten a lot more benefit out of wiping my ass over the years than I ever have from electing people to public office. (I suppose that an I WIPED MY ASS TODAY sticker would have a little toilet on it instead of a little flag, though, the flag might not be entirely inappropriate. You know. "Show your love for America! Engage in some personal hygiene!")

The cliche repeated over and over again is that absolutely everyone who is eligible should vote, and the more who vote, the better off we all are. You've been at a party someone when some little snot comes up to you and opines, "If you don't vote, you don't have a right to your opinion!" (Imagine this with an obnoxious nasal whine, if you will, since that's what you usually get.)

Now, here's a hint for dealing with self-righteous turds like that. In 99.999999999% of all cases, the person saying that is a liberal Democrat. I don't really know why that is, but it's so. Check it out, if you don't trust my word on this.

So when someone uses that line on me, what I usually do is kind of scrunch up my shoulders and hunch over a bit, and I put a hangdog expression of guilt on my face, which liberal Democrats really love to induce in people. And then I say, "You know, you're absolutely right. I've been really remiss in doing my civic duty. So what I'm going to do is the very first opportunity that I get, I'm going to register to vote, and then come Election Day, I'm going right down the the polls and vote a straight Republican ticket!"

This almost always produces a brief moment of astonished, jaw-dropping silence on the part of said voting activist, which is usually long enough to extricate yourself from that particular situation and make for an exit.

This is a roundabout illustration of something I have come to believe. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I no longer believe that everyone should vote. In fact, I think we all would be much better off if some people weren't allowed to vote at all!

Now, I'm not talking about convicted felons, who aren't allowed to vote in quite a few states, as it is. Nor am I trying to finger Republicans or Democrats exclusively -- it doesn't really break down that way.

No, I have some more specific groups in mind. They fall into three categories.

1. People who vote in ignorance. The most common is probably the person who goes into the booth and pulls a lever or punches a punch card without knowing anything about the candidate he or she is voting for.

Folks, if you don't know anything about the two candidates running for the 46th district in the state legislature, there is no law that says you have to vote in that race. There are some countries with laws like that, but the United States is not one of them. You aren't letting down the system by leaving that race blank -- you're probably doing it a favor.

First of all, there really isn't all that much excuse for being ignorant about political candidates. First of all, virtually every local newspaper -- remember newspapers? -- will run something about the candidates prior to the election. That was true when I was growing up, but today it's even easier with the internet. Almost every candidate down to the level of animal control officer will have some sort of presence on the internet today -- it's practically a requirement for winning races today. And if that doesn't give you enough information about who a candidate is and what he or she will do in office, you can bet that someone is blogging about that candidate.

If you still don't know about the candidates in a race and still feel you have to vote for one of them, here's a question to consider: How do you know you're not voting to elect the next Adolf Hitler?

Answer: You don't. Do you really want to be responsible for something like that? It's a karmic universe out there, and sooner or later, what you do comes back to you.

There is a deeper level of ignorance among some voters out there, however, and I am even less inclined to want to see these people voting. I am referring to voters who are completely ignorant about our system of government.

I'll give you a typical example. Recently, I read a Q&A-style interview with the controversial country group the Dixie Chicks. Their lead singer told a story about being interviewed on a country radio station in Dallas -- well, not so much being interviewed as being lectured about what lousy Americans they were. The show host kept trying to make the following points:

* Our boys are over there in Eye-Rack fighting for your personal freedoms.

* Therefore, you are not allowed to criticize President Bush.

Now, leaving aside the question of whether or not severely brain damaged people should be hosting radio programs, the truth is that you probably know someone who thinks exactly that. Actually, you probably know more than one person who thinks that and should actually bother to read the text of the First Amendment. That is, if they can read.

Some of these same ignorant people listened to Bush address the nation the day after the 9/11 attacks and declare that the United States is at war with terrorism. "Yup, yup," they thought. "We're at war all right. The president said so. Better start watching what we say cuz it's wartime..."

Well, in a word, no. The Constitution is extremely clear about how the United States may go to war, and it is not by presidential decree. Not ever. How is it done legally? Go read it. It will tell you. Just because you spent your junior high school American history class doodling dirty pictures in the margins of your textbook instead of listening to those interminable, boring lectures on the Constitution doesn't mean you can't look it up right now. You can even find the complete text of the U.S. Constitution on the internet. Do a Google search. Type in "U.S. Constitution."

While I can't excuse that kind of ignorance, I guess I can sort of understand it. These days, when a kid graduates from high school after 12 years of unannounced locker searches, censorship of the school newspaper, random drug testing, and constant monitoring of his or her internet activity, it's probably no surprise that this kid believes that the authorities can do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, without any limits or anything you can do about it.

Nevertheless, do you really want people who think that you're not allowed to criticize the president expressing their opinion at the polls? I don't.

2. People who vote according to a narrow personal agenda to the exclusion of all other factors. I grew up in Cleveland during the 1950s and 1960s, which at the time, was a city of many solidly ethnic neighborhoods, and there was a lot of this sort of narrow-minded voting going on. If you grew up in the Slovenian neighborhood, and you saw a Slovenian name on the ballot, you automatically voted for the guy. (Back then, almost all candidates were male.) And if you saw some Croatian bastard on the ballot, you would never vote for that person.

My late father would sooner have cut off his own cock and swallow it than vote for a black person. He had some other odd opinions, too, and needless to say, we had a lot of arguments about elections.

There's less of that specific sort of thing these days, but today, narrow-minded voting tends to vote around specific issues. Abortion is probably the biggest one. You've heard this sort of voter talking: "Congressman Porkbarrel has a very solid record against abortion, so of course, I'm going to vote for him. Sure, he beats his wife and children, favors seizing my house and turning it over to shopping mall developers, and the voices keep telling him to launch nuclear missiles against the Minions of Satan, but by god, he's against abortion, so he's got my vote!"

This sort of anti-abortion voter is a big part of the constituency that provided enough votes for Bush to steal the 2000 and 2004 elections -- and you know what's ironic? Six years later, you can still get an abortion legally in all 50 states. Even in South Dakota, where they made a very serious effort to outlaw all abortions in the last election. When it comes right down to it, that kind of single-issue voting doesn't really work. Once they're in office, they have no obligation to listen to you. And mostly, they don't.

For the sake of honesty here, I'm a bit of a hypocrite on this, because I have my own single issue, although I think it's a pretty broad one, overall. My issue is personal liberty. If you're being elected in office will increase my personal liberty, I will vote for you. If it won't, I won't.

3. People who don't vote as they believe because they think that candidate can't win. Folks, get a clue. This is not a $2 bet on the fifth race at Arlington Park Raceway. This is a statement of who you are and what you believe, and if you can't do that inside a voting booth, then you are committing an act of fraud, and you should not be allowed to vote. Period.

This is a big bugaboo of mine because I keep getting told year after year after year that if I vote for the Libertarian candidate, then I'm throwing my vote away. BULL-FUCKING-SHIT!!! A vote for the Libertarian is a vote for the Libertarian, nothing more and nothing less.

First of all, if you don't vote for the Libertarian, he or she certanly won't have any chance of winning. Duh!

That aside, a simple thought experiment any six-year-old can do should dispel any notion of "wasted" votes.

Suppose you are a complete supporter of the two-and-only-two-party system. You believe wholeheartedly that you should vote only for a Republican or a Democrat, because only a Republican or a Democrat has any chance of winning, and voting for a third party is a wasted vote. So you vote for the Republican. Then the Democrat wins.

Well, guess what. You wasted your vote! Your candidate didn't win, so what good did your vote do? Nothing! You wasted it!

The only kind of political system that has no wasted votes is a one-party system. There are plenty of countries around the world that have one-party systems, and you can travel there and check them out for yourself to see what they're like. North Korea and Zimbabwe are two good places to start.

This rant has been building up inside of me for a good long while now, so it's good to get it off my chest. Next time, maybe I'll republish this in advance of the election, so someone reading this might think about some of these issues before going into the booth.

One last election tip. Never vote for anyone who says "nu-kew-lar." Ever.

They Call It Music City, Allegedly

My original idea this week was to go to my Grain Elevator and Processing Society (GEAPS) committee meeting, which was today in Kansas City, and call it a week for business travel, away from home for only one night. (I'm on the Educational Programming Committee, the main function of which is to put together the program for the annual GEAPS convention. For readers who are familiar with science-fiction conventions, EPC is the con com for GEAPS Exchange, which is next Feb. 24-27 in Grapevine, TX.)

My boss, Mark, had a different idea. Without bothering to consult with my or my schedule, he booked me to attend a two-day workshop on ethanol and biodiesel for another one of our publications, Biofuels Journal, to fill in for Susan, that publication's editor. The workshop was Tuesday and Wednesday, in Nashville, TN. This was particularly nasty scheduling, since the workshop would be over at 5 p.m. Wednesday, and I would then have to drive the company car eight hours to Kansas City, getting in well after midnight for a round of EPC meetings that would get underway over breakfast at 6:30 a.m. They don't even do that to interns during their medical residency, or at least, not all that much.

Mark knows that I like to travel, but there are limits. So I sat down with Susan, and the two of us worked out a compromise, in which I would attend the Biofuels Workshop one day only on Tuesday, visit a couple of grain elevators in Tennessee and Kentucky on Wednesday morning, and then drive to Kansas City and arrive at a reasonable hour, which I define as before Hereford House closes, which is one of the finest steakhouses in the United States and a regular hangout of mine when I'm in Kansas City, which is several times a year.

But I'd still have to do two nights in Nashville, and away from my sweetheart on Samhain on top of that. Nashville has never been one of my favorite cities. To get an inkling of why, rent the Robert Altman movie of the same name.

I've never much cared for country music. At best, the music is boring and uninteresting. Should some unfortunate country music composer were ever to slip, say, a fourth chord into a song, country music fans tend to rise up in anger and accuse the hapless songwriter of gettin' all high-falutin and puttin' on fancy-pants airs. Next thing you know, he'll be sipping pina coladas in Miami Beach with supermodels. Vegetarian supermodels! And it gets worse -- he may even start reading books!

The fact that country music seems to have become the official soundtrack of Nazi-Occupied Amerika makes me like it even less. A whole lot less.

Nevertheless, Nashville has become an ever-more popular spot for business meetings, and if you're involved in agribusiness, it's especially so. So I've had to spend my share of time in Nashville, and after a while, I started to find more places in the city suited to my tastes. You have to look for these places -- they're not so obvious as as the places with big cowboy hats and git-tars with five or six tour buses parked out front, but they're around for you if you want to put in the effort to find them.

I left my office in Decatur, IL around 12:30 p.m. Monday. That helped mitigate what often is the worst day of the year for me -- the first Monday after daylight savings time ends. Something about having it get dark before you leave work is either heinous or egregious, your pick. This way, I got to view some scenery, and the early dark wasn't so bad. You don't often get to view scenery at a time of year when you're commuting in the dark, not that Illinois has any scenery to speak of.

The drive wasn't bad, actually. Traffic on I-57 on the heavily-traveled stretch from Mt. Vernon, IL to the I-24 exit wasn't as heinous as usual, and fall colors were still peaking from around Mt. Vernon all the way to Nashville. I got to see a fair amount of them before night fell.

The Biofuels Workshop was being held at the Opryland Resort -- the world famous one off Briley Parkway. It's a fabulously luxurious place, if you can ignore the country muzak constantly blaring over the loudspeakers everywhere you go, like Big Brother's broadcasts in Oceania. (I've never actually stayed there, so I don't know if they pump that stuff into the rooms or not. I bet they do.) Rooms also cost $300 plus a night, so that was a little too pricey for my company, especially given my taste in meals.

So in setting up the trip, I went to bigbook.com and found a Super 8 about four miles away on Dickerson Pike. Now the thing about hotel chains is that they each have a certain range in quality from one franchise unit to the next, and Super 8 is no exception to that rule. This particular Super 8 on Dickerson Pike in Nashville was definitely on the low end of the range. My room on the second floor was recognizeably a Super 8 room, but it was missing some stuff you typically find in this chain. Like a foldout stand where I could put my suitcase, so I wouldn't have to put it on the floor.. Or an iron and ironing board so I could make my shirts look presentable for my meetings the next day.

I called down to the front desk to see if I could get an ironing board. The phone rang and rang, an no one picked up. After the better part of half an hour, I decided to go down to the front desk to see if I could find anyone. As soon as I shut the door to my room, I realized I had locked my key inside. So I definitely needed to find someone.

The lobby was abandoned. A sign on the checkin desk said to use the house phone to dial zero to fetch a clerk. I tried that, and the phone range 30 or 40 times. There was a bell on the counter, and I figured, damn rudeness -- leaving a guest abandoned and locked out of his room was even ruder, so I pounded on the bell for a while. Nothing.

I had my cell phone with me, so I called Verizon directory assistance and got the 800 number for national Super 8 customer service. At the national office, all they could do was the same thing I had been doing. The hotel phone rang for about 10 minutes, with no response.

At this point, I was beginning to get concerned. What if a burglar was threatening a guest somewhere in the motel? What if a guest had a medical emergency? I seriously considered pulling the fire alarm. Before doing that, I decided to go through the four floors of the motel and see if I could find anyone.

Up on the third floor, my shouts of "Anyone home?" finally got a response from some 12 year old boy who came out of one of the end rooms. Turns out, the woman who checked me in was the manager, and he was her son -- they lived in a small apartment in the hotel. He ran off to see if he could find Mom, and I went back to the lobby.

The manager finally came down on the elevator and apologized, saying that she was the only one there and had been cleaning some rooms out of signal range of her portable phone. I finally got back to my room with an iron and ironing board in hand.

All of which goes to say that if you're going to be visiting Nashville and want to stay at a Super 8, there are several other locations in the metro area, most of which are likely to provide you with better service than the one on Dickerson Pike.

At this point, about the only thing that would salvage my evening would be a good restaurant meal, and here at least, Nashville offered a lot of options. I pulled our the yellow pages and selected a place at random, coming up with a place on West End Avenue called Valentino's Ristorante. I guessed from the address, west of downtown near Vanderbilt University, that the place would be fairly upscale. For all of its hick bravado, there actually is quite a lot of money in Nashville (almost none of which goes to the artists, which may explain why so much mainstream country music is so morose and bitter).

I consulted my street map and drove over there. It was a little place on the backside of a Marriott Courtyard Inn. A sign out in front of the restaurant said valet parking only, so I drove around a couple of blocks until I could find a spot on the street

I hit the gourmet jackpot. Valentino's turned out to be a very upscale Italian place, with a northern Italian menu. I started with a warm spinach salad in a spicy tomato vinaigrette, with sliced mushrooms, hard boiled eggs, and big bits of crumbled gorgonzola cheese. About the time I decided to get the recipe from the chef, out came the entree, a pair of pork tenderloins on a bed of mushroom risotto, topped with sliced porcini mushrooms and big shavings of parmesan. The first bite was like an orgasm on my tongue.

If you're in Nashville, Da Zedman sez check out Valentino's Ristorante. Take a shitload of money with you.

This blog isn't really for work-related stuff, so I won't bore you with a lot of detail about the BBI Biofuels Workshop at the Opryland Resort. Suffice to say that I had trouble finding anywhere where the country muzak was quiet enough for me to call my office or Penny and actually hear them on the other end of the line. They did turn it down in the room where the educational program was going on -- a little.

This was Oct. 31, and I had checked on Witchvox.com to see if anyone was doing a public Samhain ritual in the Nashville area. The calendar of events listed a public circle being run by a student group at Middle Tennessee State University in a little town called Murfreesboro, about 25 miles southeast of Nashville. The event was supposed to start at 10 p.m. on a grassy hilltop on the univesity campus.

I'd given the event some serious consideration. However, there were no directions to the site, and trying to find a hilltop in an unfamiliar campus in an unfamiliar town after dark placed two strikes against the notion of going. Strike three was a forecast for rain, possibly heavy. I decided to do something else for the night.

I drove out into the burbs and found an Outback Steakhouse for dinner. My normal policy on business trips is not to do chain restaurants. But in this case I made an exception -- living as I do with a vegetarian makes Outback positively exotic.

Then I drove downtown, found a parking spot on Second Street -- the big touristy section downtown -- and made my way down the street to B.B. King's Blues Lounge.

Of course, the original B.B. King's, owned and named after the blues legend, is two hours away in Memphis, but this would do nicely. With the heavy concentration of professional musicians in Nashville, it isn't all that hard to find genres of music other than country, if you know where to look.

I found this branch about a year and a half ago when I was in Nashville for the International Association of Operative Millers convention. Our Milling Journal editor had quit on us, so as the flour milling magazine's original editor, I took over the job until we could find a sufficiently competent and loyal replacement, which meant I was stuck having to go to the IAOM event. That wasn't so bad, really, except that Milling Journal was one of about two dozen sponsors of the annual "Allied Trades event," which that year was at a Second Street establishment called Wild Horse Saloon. Which turned out to be a world-famous establishment, which of course, I didn't know about until then because I avoid the country music scene like I avoid syphillis.

The event was supposed to be a buffet and dancing, and I pretty much figured there would be country music. My company's contingent walked down there from the convention center. Wild Horse turned out to be a very large club with odd decor, big plaster buck-toothed horses in cowboy hats swilling beer and the like. There was a large dance floor and a big wraparound balcony up on the second floor, where the buffet was served. The food was reasonably okay, and I was getting free drinks, which are the best kind.

Then the line dancing lessons started.

I'd heard the term before, and I was pretty sure that it was connected to country music, and I was pretty sure that it was something I didn't want to do. My instincts were correct.

There was a stage at one end of the dance floor, and the curtain opened to reveal a DJ behind his turntable setup and this woman decked out in country music style with cowboy hat, jeans, and boots, and she started exhorting people to come out onto the dance floor and line up. People lined up in these long straight lines, like kids coming in from recess at the Catholic grade schools of my youth. The woman started teaching them these dance steps, which apparently were performed in unison, without partners. After a while, as the dance floor filled up, it reminded me of nothing so much as those big mass stadium exercises with hundreds or thousands that are performed for Dear Leader Kim Jong Il in North Korea, in order to show that collective beehive behavior is superior to decadent capitalist individualism. It was the stuff of a libertarian's nightmares.

I swear, at one point, the woman shouted out, "ONLY FAGGOTS REFUSE TO LINE DANCE!"

"Better get out there," Pub lisher Mark said to me.

I shot him a filthy look. And I sat up on the second floor balcony, drinking merlot and watching this display below me for about as long as I could stand it. Finally, I excused myself and told Mark I would be cabbing back to our hotel.

I got myself out of the Wild Horse as quickly as possible and turned north on Second Street. After a few steps, I spotted a very familiar sign. I'd been to B.B. King's on Beale Street in Memphis a number of times and never failed to have a good time there. So this blues outpost was like a sanctuary in a honkytonk wilderness.

Back in February of this year, GEAPS Exchange was also in Nashville, and wouldn't you know it? There was a special event at the Wild Horse, and Grain Journal was once again one of the sponsors. This time, though, I knew exactly what to do.

This Halloween night, with about half of the people on the street in costume, seemed like a very good time for some blues. Actually, it wasn't quite that. They had a band called the Soul Searchers -- six instrumentalists and a male and female vocalists -- and they specialized in performing Motown stuff from the 1960s and early 1970s. And they didn't do half bad, either, considering that everyone in the band except the female vocalist was white. I sat back, sipped my wine, admired the paintings of blues greats on the walls, and enjoyed the music for the rest of the evening.

Da Zedman sez check out B.B. King's Blues Lounge, either in Nashville or Memphis. He also sez check out Wild Horse Saloon, believe it or not, but only if you have a strong stomach and really, really, really like line dancing. Blessed Be.