Prop 16.67: Who Cares?

On the first Tuesday of every November, citizens across the country are asked to visit their local polling place and cast their ballot in the time old tradition passed down from our founding fathers. Yet year in and year out nearly half of the country doesn’t give two rats asses to take fifteen minutes out of their day to do this simple task. This past Tuesday, only 16.76 percent of all San Franciscans showed up. Sure, it was a small ballot with no big names or sexy ballot measures, but 16 percent?! No one cares if the city renames Candlestick? Why doesn’t anyone give a damn that the budget will now be written every two years; they don’t know how to write it and get it right for a twelve month period so I’m guessing this is a clever way to push off that responsibility for 23 months.

This isn’t just for local elections, when there are huge issues or offices on the line, a large chunk of the population still finds a way to sit at home and stick their heads in the sand. Last year, which will be looked upon as a watershed moment in our countries history, 64 percent of the population voted. That means that 36 percent of eligible US citizens either made a choice not to show up, or couldn’t find the time. There is never going to be 100 percent turnout, not even when 100 percent registers, but 64 percent is unacceptable.

What does it say about us as a society that we are willing to wage war in the name of democracy and government accountability yet we don’t care enough to fully realize this belief at home?

The only solution is to turn Election Day into a federal holiday, affording those who work long hours day in and day out the luxury of exercising their natural born right as citizens. There would be long lines, anxious anticipation for exit polls, a sea of little red stickers parading down every street, people would pay attention to the issues and everyone would be accountable. The only problem with that is that it would be put on a ballot measure and nobody would show up.

The perversion of news

I must find my voice! No, I'm not sick and I haven't lost it in anyway, its just eluded me for the most part and now it is imperative that "it" and I get to know one another. As a wannabe journalist, it has been very trying having to mold and carve out some sort of persona being that I am still not all that comfortable or trusting of blogs or opinion writing. I love my own opinion and there's nothing I love more than listening to myself, but the format and direction this new medium is headed towards frightens me. Traditional opinion writers like Jon Diaz of the San Francisco Chronicle are not what scares me. His is the long established reporting intensive method that is slowly disappearing in the mainstream media now overrun by talking heads and party-line homers. What he was taught and what we are learning is a dying art. Unfortunately, newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur leaving only TV and the Internet as the main sources of news. With a blog (and apparently cable news!), people don't have to do any of the real reporting normally involved, leaving them to cannibalize someone else's work and spout their opinion however it best suites them. I'm not breaking any new ground with this argument, but when Mr. Diaz spoke to my opinion writing class Thursday it got me thinking of the many ironies of the Internet. Not only is it taking away dollar after dollar from the print industry, but it is perverting the very art of reporting the news. The thoughtful, responsible ideals that Mr. Diaz spoke of, such as honesty, responsibility, humility, and accountability (to yourself and the reader), are foreign words to most mainstream bloggers. I don't mean to vilify all who blog, but most popular sites have a motive, they have a voice and agenda. The op-ed pages of a newspaper might have a tone, but editor's op-eds aren't going out of their way to blast President Obama or the tea baggers/"activists" every other day fueled by malice. The search for my voice is obviously going to be a tricky one since I will have to walk this delicate tight-rope between responsibility and bull-headedness (which comes so naturally to me), and judging from my previous two posts, it isn't going well.

I'm Not Bitter...

I've been giving a lot of thought over the past week about the direction I might take with my next blog. I wasn't sure if I wanted to just choose random topics or set out each week with a goal or theme and write about that. After little deliberation, I chose the latter, specifically this week, the epically disgusting fruit I tried called the durian. It took awhile for me to find the thorny fruit, it had to thaw out, and the taste lived up to its putrid reputation. Needless to say I had plenty to work with and it would've been really easy to write about.

However, after sitting through another baseball game in which a specific team's fans made me more angry than the game itself, I have decided that the durian must wait. I cannot sit back while the sports world is under attack by an enemy from the North East. An enemy that touts his or her team's sports wear at funerals and weddings, a team that has attracted every fair weather sports fan from across the country. Ten years ago, I could only be talking about one fan base: Yankees fans. Anyone who follows pro baseball or has a functioning cerebellum has heard of this team and their obnoxious followers. They are loud, they instigate fights, walk around at games (that the Yankees are not a participant in) wearing their team's gear from head to toe. Their only saving grace is that their team has won the most championships of any other team in North American sports history. As much as you hate them, they are tolerated; loathed, but tolerated for the simple fact that their team produces. They produced yesterday, today, and unfortunately, those S.O.B.'s will be producing for years to come.

But the torch has been passed. No longer are Yankees fans the most arrogant, vulgar patrons on the prowl. Congratulations New Englanders, you are alone at the top! Red Sox Nation, which has always played second fiddle to their rivals in the Bronx, can now take their place at the top of the list for having the most vomit inducing fans on the face of the earth. Everything about them makes me want to punch a stranger in the face. Their team has only been closely competing for championships for the past five years yet their fan base (which apparently is 25 percent of the country given that every middle aged white male from S.F. to Hyannis Port wears a Sox fan hat and cant wait to tell you how much he loves Big Papi [I wont even begin to talk about that freaking guy]) acts like they've been running the show all along. They are kind of like that kid you played pick up basketball with in high school who loses time and time again but once he finally wins one, you never hear the end of it.

I'm sure you're telling yourself, "Ppssshhh, this guys probably a Lakers or Angels fan who's just bitter about the Angels losing to the Red Sox the last two nights." Very good reader, well played. I am in fact a Lakers fan, and I am also an Angels fan, but despite having to sit through four hours of my team choking versus Satan's cavemen on national TV, me being a fan of their rivals has little bearing on this post. I am not alone in my distaste for these chowder-heads. Anyone with two eyes can spot a fair weather fan who got caught up with them "reversing the curse", and ask anyone at any ball park which team's fans are universally hated and nine times out of ten they'll tell you the Sox. This would never have been the case a decade ago, but the fact is that New England sports fans are now the worst and to say that we on the West coast are sick and tired about them is an understatement. Freaking ESPN is based out of Bristol, Connecticut! That means if their coach Terry Francona has bad gas from a meatball sandwich he had the night before, Sportscenter is goning to run fifteen minutes of coverage every hour on the hour till we get a dugout report telling us he's alright. Not to mention the bums that came out of the wood work to grab some spotlight once the team started to produce. I mean seriously, who the hell cares who Dane Cook, Ben Affleck, or Jimmy Fallon root for? The aforementioned Jimmy Fallon even had the balls to star in a movie centering around a die hard Red Sox fan. Fever Pitch is in the pantheon of douche, a feat rarely reached without trying. It makes me wish I had that magical ticket from the Last Action Hero so I could jump into the screen and slap everyone involved in the back of the head.

Unfortunately for us all, there seems there is no end in sight. Since these losers have finally won the world series after nearly 90 years, they are happy as clams and there is little if anything we can do until this honeymoon wears off. All we can do is hope they don't win for another 90 years so that this plague of wretched cretins will crawl back into whatever holes they have been hiding in the past century and go back to carrying themselves with some dignity, like cubs fans.
I leave you with a quote by Winston Churchill, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." So go Yankees!

Dragonheart

Wow. After sitting through an hour and a half of Dragonheart on AMC I'm stuck with a feeling of depression and shame. Shame because I spent most of my day indoors on one of the nicest days of the year, and depression because a movie I fondly remember from my childhood has not aged well. In fact, it sucks. It sucks may be an understatement, it is terrible. Xena the Warrior Princess terrible. Its really sad to come across a movie that I loved in elementary school and realize that my taste in cinema used to be shit. It has dragons, sword fighting and Sean Connery, how could it go wrong?! Dragonheart will now suffer the same fate of other fallen heroes such as Predator 2, The Rocketeer, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3, Rock-A-Doodle...the list goes on. These abominations aren't even good enough to make it into the "so bad they're good" category like Kindergarten Cop, Jingle All The Way, Judge Dredd, and Cliffhanger (anything post Terminator 2 for Arnold and after Rocky 4 for Sly). I guess the only real point to my first blog post is to warn my thousands of followers to be wary of movies from yesteryear, especially those starring Dennis Quaid and containing soundtracks more memorable than their storyline.