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There’s a good chance that half of you who recognize the name of the blog will remember why I stopped writing it in the first place: I started it four years ago on a whim on dear old MySpazz to get into the groove of keeping up a daily blog. A link to that experiment, by the way, is right here. That blog management section is a little tricky, not the least of which because the stat bars on the lower-left side of the main blog page has a little ticker that tells me exactly how many times the page has been viewed. I started out advertising the new posts pretty heavily– only on Myspace, but enough that my statuses were almost always constantly updated to whatever I had written the day before and, consequently, just about everyone who had an extra five minutes to kill who were on the site in the first place (i.e., everyone on Myspace) checked it out. The hits started out somewhere at twenty per day, and gradually coasted at about a hundred.
Then somewhere around a year into my writing the blog, I got angry. The angrier I got, the more people read. The meaner I got, the more people read; On an egotistical note it was fabulous. I was getting nearly a thousand hits per da with no real advertising, and all I had to do was be a douchebag. As that went on, however, I noticed that I’d made lots and lots of people dear to me very angry. My sister started calling me, angrily. My best friends– each and every one– called to tell me I was being a dickhead. A girl I was seing at the time–God help her– was dragged through the mud, all because I thought I was somehow doing my duty to Art by ranting on a website.
It was bullshit. I shut it down. There are still blog posts, certainly. but I decided that the Myspace blog had to end and, thusly, I give you this, the new run of Geniuses and Junkies. I might or might not go backt o the old format. I haven’t decided on that yet. What I will tell you, however, is that you’ll get more of my political stuff here than anuyone got on the myspace blog, and probably more about the shows I’m doing. One day I’ll get a camera and you can SEE them too, 
In the mean time, feel free to take a look at this: it’s a piece I submitted to a newspaper a little over a week ago. I’m sure my shit-talking will come back, but for now, I’m satisfied simply leaving this out as a calling-card of sorts. below you will see an essay I submitted to a newspaper in response to one of the silliest questions about the President I’ve seen thusfar in print. The question, friends, was “Were you surprised that President Obama wont he Nobel Peace Prize?”
Here’s what I said.
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We were all surprised when we found that Pesident Obama, not ten months into his office, won the Nobel Peace Prize. The better question is: what is he going to do with it now that he has it?
When one takes a long view of popular opinion, we realize that our tendency to jump on bandwagons has been less than successful. Our collective hesitancy into World War II– despite consistent appeals from Europe to do so– enabled Mussolini and Hitler to carve Europe up into little pieces and start baking Poles, Jews, and homosexuals in the largest genocidal ovens in history. The country thought that Harry S Truman was a dolt nearing the end of his presidential career; history has shown that his willingness to buck some popular opinion made him into one of the greatest leaders of our time. By February of 2002, some were willing to elect President Bush King for Life. We begged him to let us into Afghanistan and wholly supported his pet project into Iraq. The latter of those two conflicts has proven to be little more than a distraction from the former, which is on track to become our longest war since Vietnam. In our infinite popular wisdom, we called anyone who questioned the last President’s policies “traitors,” “anti-Americans” and (a personal favorite) “Commies.” At last tally, the policies of Obama’s ever-loving predecessor routed our liberties, froze our wages, killed our credit and mortgage markets, ruined our educational system, and all but obliterated our credibility within the international community. With that track record, it’s a wonder that the Nobel committee didn’t put a total moratorium on Americans’ eligibility for that or any prize for the next twenty years.
Imagine our collective surprise when the Nobel committee announced to us that President Barack Obama had been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Imagine his surprise. A visibly shaken and skeptical President turned an award destined to spur a crazy media backlash into a collective “call to action,” whereas many of the rest of us– supporters, Obamatons, birthers, and Teabaggers alike– entered the blogosphere and new and old medias alike to voice our befuddlement and, for some of us, anger about the award. In no time in any of our memories has the Nobel been awarded to a man based on his vision and potential rather than a long career’s full of recorded deeds, and it’s for this reason that so many of us muttered and screamed “Too soon! Too soon!” when we found out. If you add to this award the knowledge that, not four days beforehand, Saturday Night Live had lampooned the President on his record of accomplishments, (rather, on the lack thereof,) you have what amounts to a public relations mess for this already embattled administration.
A handful of folks have made the argument that the President shouldn’t even be eligible for the award, primarily because he currently seems to be doubling down on Afghanistan and, while the conflict in Iraq is winding down, won’t meet the 16-month withdrawal timeline the President set while he was a candidate. These arguments don’t hold a whole lot of water on their own. As the Obama administration has mentioned (ad nauseum) every time the topic has arisen publicly, these wars began as President Bush’s. Despite whatever the best-meaning war-protesters sometimes refuse to acknowledge, we would be just as irresponsible pulling out of each country as quickly as we went into them, just to prove that the President is different from the last. Afghanistan is a mess, there’s no question about it. But had we handled the rebuilding process in Afghanistan properly twenty years ago, we would never have given an ultra-rich Saudi the training apparatus to enable a quasi-religious terror organization, nor left a group of angry fifteen-year-olds with M-16s to establish a militant theocracy built partly on the notion that we Evil Infidel Americans are only good for making messes of countries that aren’t ours without bothering to help clean them up. Our conduct in Afghanistan now is more important for a lasting peace there and in Pakistan than ever.
The President has now won the Nobel Peace Prize, and whether you approve of it or not, he has said that he will accept it and give the prize money to charity. The Prize comes with a price: he must now back up his message of reconciliation and vigorous debate with responsible and decisive action. Those of us who voted for him did so believing that he was genuine in his conviction to execute his duty with the principles he espoused. The Nobel gives him an international endorsement of those ideals. Now it is time for him to deliver on the promises he has made to (and for) us all.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: Blogs, Myspace, Nobel, Obama
