29 Very Simple Words

Every year on July 4th for the past several years, I've posted a picture of Declaration of Independence to Facebook, along with the following text and my simple thought, that it’s one hell of a mission statement, and it only took 29 words.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

I haven't done the research, so I can't speak to why, but this simple statement, by a very flawed man (ok, he was brilliant, but he did own slaves), was not incorporated into the Constitution.

Maybe it should be. It would probably make things a lot easier if the justices of the Supreme Court, or, you know, the executive and legislative branches, could come back to one very simple mission statement when doing the job that we hired them to do. As it is, lawyers on both sides of issues can't refer to it because it really isn't the law of the land.

Someone I know once told me that I write better when I'm angry. On a scale from "irked" to "murderous rage", I'm probably at "rolling boil"

For years, I had a very simple approach to customer service, advanced by my dad, and later christened as "The 12 Words of Fox":

Don't Lie
If You Say It, Do It
Tell Bad News Fast

We put it into our FAQ as one of the first items, and pretty much anyone who ever worked with me can recite it by heart. Because we incorporated it into the basis of our existence as a company. It was woven into our metaphorical DNA, so to speak.

You know why? Because it solved almost every single problem we had when we didn't have rules / policies to handle the specific problem.

I don't know why I get so exorcised about gay marriage. I've never been gay. No interest. I know a grand total of 2 gay couples which, in Seattle, is nearly impossible to do, and one of those couples lives in Boston. But I did have the pleasure of welcoming one of the two pairs to American citizenship, with all or most of the rights and benefits that I take for granted, on the Friday afternoon after the Supreme Court decision.

The fact that I had to do so at all pisses me off. The fact that the number of groups of people that I am going to do something similar to/for in the coming years is something that really, really pisses me off. These are not really difficult concepts. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has the exact same rights. And responsibilities, too, but that's a separate subject.

It's what we're supposed to live up to. America has done an awful lot of bad stuff. I don't need a list - I'm an amateur historian and can probably provide a longer list than you can possibly imagine.

The decisions to do those bad things were made by people who were flawed in a lot of ways, and a lot of people like to point them out and say that we have no business talking about freedom and liberty given our own history.

They're mostly right. Except for one thing. The good stuff America has done is exponentially larger than the horrific things that we've done while guaranteeing certain rights, like Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Don't send me a list - I'm an amateur historian and can probably provide a longer list than you can possibly imagine.

And we tend, over time, towards fixing the places where we screwed stuff up. It's never fast enough, nor does it solve all of the problems. Sometimes the fixes create more problems than intended, and then the cycle repeats. Maybe it's my IT background, but that sounds an awful lot like debugging to me.

I took a PoliSci course in my senior year of college on a pass/fail basis, which frustrated the professor to no end, especially when I answered 12 questions on the final exam and walked out of the room after about 3 minutes. The one thing I remember more vividly than anything, however, was when we were talking about the Tyranny of the Majority and the risks that it entailed for a democracy and how the Founders were well aware of the problem, so they structured the government that we have now, which is a representative (rather than direct) democracy and had checks and balances between the three main parts of government.

Simply put, this is the tendency of people to subvert or otherwise impede the rights of those who are in the minority of public opinion or race or class or however else we decide to subdivide ourselves. We want to be part of the winning team, the people who come out on top, and the majority tends to alter the rules in their favor to stay in the majority.

Want to know where the real meat of all of the campaign spending that takes place in the next election cycle is going to take place? Ignore the ads. The meat is with the statisticians who are slicing, dicing, and otherwise attempting to figure out the right balance of subdividing so that they can get to 50.1% of the vote, and the winner can then claim that their views represent the entire country. That's the net effect of the Tyranny of the Majority. I have another word for it. Bullshit.

Wait. I'm almost there. I don't have any particularly on-topic ideas about how to fix it short of calling a Constitutional Convention, which pretty much everyone on both sides is terrified of doing. Maybe if we just added those 29 words as the next Amendment. I'd love to see a politician try to make a case against doing so - it would be watching someone commit political suicide, broadcast live on CNN. Or, as I think of it, any Donald Trump news conference. (I'm trying to keep my personal feelings out of this, but that guy is barely qualified to drive, let alone be President).

I'm not advocating a position or a set of policies, or a candidate, other than one single thought that I'll get to very soon. American history has shown a remarkable ability to snap back from extremes on both sides. It has happened before, and it will happen again. All I ask is that you do two things during this ridiculously long election season - remember that while I was making a joke to that lesbian couple welcoming them to full American citizenship (they've been married for pretty much as long as Washington has had same-sex marriage), there was an element of truth and, when you are evaluating candidates, go back to the Mission Statement.

Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. It doesn't get more simple than that.

The GOP Bracket

The Republican Presidential field now consists of 16 candidates - 14 announced, 2 expected to announce very soon. My gambling antennae went up almost immediately, because that sounds like a bracket to me. I actually thought about the seedings for a while, which is unusual, because I usually just fire from the hip. In large part, this commentary is completely ill-informed and likely has no basis in reality, but with 17 months until the actual election, I find myself both bored with the whole thing and eagerly anticipating the prospect of betting on these things.

Here's the bracket - commentary on the first-round matchups is below the bracket.



1 Bush vs. 16 Carson - I've never even heard of this Carson guy. Bush has too much money to worry about putting the first team in for this one. It will be over about 10 minutes after it starts.

8 Rubio vs. 9 Jindal - One is darker than the other. One of them is better at speaking. That's pretty much the difference that I can detect during all 30 seconds that I spent thinking / researching this matchup. It doesn't matter, because whoever wins will get destroyed in the second round by Bush.

4 Walker vs. 13 Pataki - I can't honestly say that I know anything about either of them, other than that Walker caused a whole lot of union types to decide to camp out in the Wisconsin capital, and a whole bunch of Democratic representatives to flee across the border. You have to like a candidate that can engender that kind of revulsion amongst the other side. Pataki's main claim is that I think I once saw him on an episode of Law & Order.

5 Perry vs. 12 Trump - As everyone knows, the 5-12 matchup is where you look for upsets. Perry is probably better organized, with actual adherents. Trump is the wild card, blinding everyone with his (admittedly) glorious hair while saying things that many GOP voters (don't argue with me, I know enough of them, and used to be one of them) think but do not say out loud.

2 Christie vs. 15 Fiorina - They had to let at least one female into the pool, despite the fact that a lot of GOP types are still silently resenting the fact that women are allowed to vote. Or to drive. Or to own property.

7 Cruz vs. 10 Kasich - Kasich ran the GOP side of the House Budget when the other Clinton was in the White House, and so was involved in helping to eliminate the deficit during the late 90's. This is a good thing. I have no idea what he's been doing since then. Cruz is a favorite of the Tea Party types. This one could go either way.

3 Paul vs 14 Graham - Rand Paul makes statements rooted in his libertarian leanings. Lindsey Graham, in response to the Hillary email server problem, has publicly stated that he has never used email. It's 2015. Choose wisely.

11 Santorum vs. 6 Huckabee - One has the product of a sexual act named after him. One has said things like "Jesus is crying today" after the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act for being discriminatory, and after the recent decision that marriage is legal for everyone, regardless of gender, said "I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch. We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat."

My only question is if Costco will place a limit on the amount of popcorn that I can buy at one time.

Hi. Call me whatever you want - I have lots of different nicknames.

I am occasionally (okay, regularly) guilty of the profligate use of words that fall well within George Carlin's "7 Dirty Words" routine. I don't use them for shock value - I only use them when I think they have value in the context of the larger topic. I'll try to hold off, but I have a weak character. Don't discount all the other words just because you object to a couple of them. At the very least, I care about typos and noun/verb agreement on a level that is probably not healthy, but will enhance the reading experience.

I have always had a problem, however, with the ban on double-negatives in a sentence, especially in a language that is as ambiguous as English is. Sometimes expediency means that you just go with the flow of a sentence, rather than conform to the rules of a language that seems to morph by the hour.

I've been thinking about doing something like this for a while. Things will be updated when the muse comes to pay me a visit. In some ways, it is intended to be an outlet for things that are a little too complex for an email, or require a lot of explanation, or for whatever reason don't fit into a Facebook post.

If you like what you see, come back. There will be very few pictures - I just don't do visual stuff well. I will, as my side of the bargain, attempt to limit my word vomit to reasonable lengths. As my part of the deal, I promise that I will link from my social media accounts to a maximum of one post every two weeks (this may kill me). I'm sure that I will probably post stuff more often than that.

Your side of the deal - if you find it interesting, or humorous, or otherwise worthy of conversation, please feel free to talk about it on YOUR social media, and share it with others. I'm rarely completely right, but I'm also rarely completely wrong. Somewhere in there is a conversation that is conspicuously absent in this country.

I know this is an extraordinarily high bar, but please try to keep it civil. We're all trying to make it through, and while we may not agree on everything, every person who is reading / commenting / linking to this is still a human being and worthy of some respect. Well, until the cats become self-aware. Because when that happens, we are screwed.