Late Independence Day Announcement

Albeit four days late and 5.5 trillion Chinese yuan short, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish all 35 readers of the d.c. diaries an ironic Happy Independence Day. Our holiday here at the d.c. diaries was a smashing success...we didn't have any nervous breakdowns, no drunken arrests, and only a broken flip flop tubing in the Delaware River. When I say "we", of course, I mean the royal "we". I am the only staff member of this enterprise.

I'd also like to make an announcement...of sorts. Within the next few months, the d.c. diaries will give way to an as-of-yet-unnamed successor blog, and will be retired into the archives of the Internet. Sad as it may be to think of the d.c. diaries floating around an endless series of tubes with the rotting carcasses of the likes of the Go network and Prodigy, this is not so much the end as it is the beginning of something new. Something big. Something mega. Something copious, capacious, cajunga.

I am declaring my own independence. I am going viral. I will conquer the Internet.

I have many reasons for doing this. The first is that it doesn't make any sense for me to host a blog titled the d.c. diaries if I don't actually live in D.C. I'm not ruling out a move back to Washington in the near- or long-term, but why chain myself creatively to one city?

Which brings me to my next reason: as I have grown and broadened my horizons, my blog has also grown and broadened its horizons. the d.c. diaries began humbly five years ago as a mass e-mail to friends and family back home in Nevada as I spent my first summer as an obscure Washington intern. Back then, it was really about D.C. and my wide-eyed experiences in a new land filled with people who don't say "dude" nearly as much as I do, and tend to bristle when I do say it. Today, it's about more. It's about perspectives from one American life on the entirety of that thing we call "American life". It's part political, part social, part economic, part satire, and other parts I haven't discovered yet. And I believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This new blog, this mythic beast that looms on the horizon of the Atlantic seaboard, will hopefully serve as a springboard to other opportunities to cultivate my other vocational passion - writing. They say that the law is a jealous mistress. Well, so is the pen. I have two hands. I can hold a gavel in one and a stylus in the other.

I will continue to post content to this blog in the interim until I have established my new master plan to mesmerize the planet. Who knows? Maybe this newer, bigger, badder, bolder venture will result in a sparsely-attended book signing at Politics & Prose or one of those small-town boutique bookshops owned by a deranged aging hippie (the ones that have more boxes of tarot cards than anything else). Until then, keep your eyes peeled, and, for the long-term readers of the d.c. diaries (Mom, Dad, my old slow-pitch softball team, and the random loons who found me through Google), thank you for your support.

- The Management

The Boycott Problem

The needle is angled a little too far to the left for my liking. On the spectrum between "E" and "F", I need a little more "F" and a lot less "E". I can feel the "E" in the accelerator, shifting my way out of the parking lot of the SEPTA station.

Ca-thunk-a-thunk! Ca-thunk-a-thunk! Ca-thunk-a-thunk!

I really should have filled up the tank before the Focus turned into a Flintstones car. That would require forethought, which I often lack. Instead, I swear to God my car is actually borrowing from the physical force I exert on the gas pedal to make it the last 50 yards down Bellevue Avenue to the nearest gas station, the only set of pumps within striking distance of my God-forsaken lemon.

The sign at the station promises sunlight and hope, an oasis of green and gold. BP. British Petroleum. My salvation, an ever-present help in my time of need.

Go ahead. Shoot me.

The nozzle spews 87 unleaded into the tank. Anxiety eases; my streak of twenty consecutive months without a special gas can delivery from roadside assistance continues unabated. But as my anxiety fades, my conscience emerges as a substitute mental bother. Id has given way to superego. Images of bubbling black crude overwhelming the Gulf of Mexico, taking lives and livelihoods, stream into my field of vision. I have cast my dollar vote in favor of the destruction of a small swath of the planet. A conscientious American would have coasted on fumes until the car literally had a cardiac arrest on the I-95 onramp...

...or would they?

In the immediate aftermath of the only oil spill in history to spawn its own academic subject, hesitance to pull into a BP station is understandable and, at least in the abstract, commendable. Who wouldn't want to stick it to Tony Hayward, that evil yachting captain of industry whose company's negligence may single-handedly devastate an ecosystem into perpetuity?

Well, you're not sticking it to Tony. You're sticking it to Ed.

Ed is a daytime cashier at the BP station on Lincoln Highway and Bellevue in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, one of over 13,000 independently-owned BP gas stations worldwide. Contrary to what you may have heard, BP doesn't actually own the vast majority of the establishments that bear its logo. Instead, like virtually every other major oil company, it enters into futures contracts with local franchises to deliver gasoline, contracts that are not exactly easy for the franchisees to get out of. So by the time you have opted to bypass BP in favor of more "righteous" companies like Shell or Citgo, Mr. Hayward and the the shareholders of BP have already lined the interiors of their wallets and the cabins of their flotillas.

When I pulled into Ed's station just after noon today, my car was one of four in the parking lot. The owners of a Chevy Tahoe, Infiniti G20, and Pontiac Grand Am were the only other patrons. I meandered into the store to grab a Gatorade to quench my perishing thirst. Ed, an Asian man in his 20s, didn't look too excited behind the double-plated glass that separated us as he rang up my purchase. After he dispensed my change, I decided to raise the issue.

"How's business been?"

Ed doesn't seem to understand my query. "Excuse me?"

I'm delicate, but direct. "Over the last two months, how has business been for you guys?"

Ed wavers. "Ehh...it's been....yeah, it's been fine...it's been alright."

The four cars in the lot during a non-peak hour indicate that he may be right, but I press anyway.

"The oil spill hasn't hurt you?"

In an instant, Ed's eyes indicated that he knew what I was getting at.

"Oh," he said. "Dude, it sucks. Totally sucks. I see way more cars drive by without pulling in."

I give him my sympathies, and inform him that I'm asking for the purposes of writing about the BP spill and the subsequent public backlash. He tells me "good luck", and I walk out the store and drive off. All the other cars have left, and none have taken their place.

But it bears repeating that BP isn't the one hurt by the burgeoning BP boycott. With a few notable exceptions, most modern boycotts generally don't work, primarily because they either target the wrong "evildoer" (i.e., Ed and the managers/employees of independent BP stations) or they aren't broad enough in scope to generate the economic leverage to get the bad guy to comply. Your individual boycott isn't going to amount to much if others are more than willing to suckle at the teet of your nemesis.

Example: as a senior in high school, I courageously participated in the 2000 American Gas Out in an effort to bring gas prices back down from the earth-shattering $1.50/gallon heights to which they climbed. From April 7th through 9th, I didn't buy gasoline. I sure felt proud of myself when I, like every other brave soldier who entered that conflict with me, celebrated my efforts by filling my near-empty tank to the brim on April 10th. We sure showed them!

As of this writing, the primary "Boycott BP" Facebook page has 704,930 fans and counting. If only those three-quarters of a million people had a chance to talk to Ed.

Plenty O' Fish in the City

A friend of mine from law school, now working as an attorney in Manhattan, has asked me to share her own blog about the trials and tribulations of dating in NYC. Think Sex and the City, minus the odious blonde.

the d.c. diaries heartily recommends Plenty O' Fish in the City.

The Partial Spectator

I couldn't help but note the irony as I took in the fresh-cut green grass of Lincoln Financial Field in South Philly. My first visit to one of the crown jewels of the National Football League, the home of the Philadelphia Eagles, in the birthplace of American liberty. And I was watching...soccer.

It was my first taste of live "football", as the unenlightened call it. For a sports nationalist like myself, this was a huge step, and it came with a hearty dose of quasi-historical guilt. Almost two hundred thirty-four years ago, the Founders risked their lives so we didn't have to play the games of our imperial cousins across the pond. Thanks to their bravery, we can play our own...baseball, basketball, real football, and the UFC. These are the pastimes of patriots. Our ADD-addled brains just can't handle the slow, plodding nature of the world's absurdly most popular game.

This tension opened a paradox in the sports-time continuum on Saturday afternoon as Team USA took on the Turkish national team. The patriot within was compelled to root for the Americans, but having a rooting interest in a soccer match is one of the most fundamentally un-American things one can do. It's kinda like when your son enters a drag queen beauty pageant. You find the contest offensive, yet deep down you'd be sorely disappointed if he didn't emerge victorious.

So there I was, screaming with 55,000 others at Landon Donovan as he dribbled through Turkish defenders in his sequin dress and pumps. I had support. Leave it to Philadelphia, of course, to supply obnoxious soccer fans. Turkey actually had a respectable contingent, as the second- and third-largest cities in Turkey (New York and Washington) are within driving distance. They were incredibly nice people, and their women are strikingly beautiful...with apparent staying power. As they chanted "Turk-i-ye! Turk-i-ye!", clad in red, I heard the following retorts that chilled the patriot within:

"Slaughter the Turks!" (unlike the Dallas Cowboys, the "Turks" are an ethnic group, and slaughtering them is genocide)

"Go back to Europe!" (the land now occupied by Turkey was once known as Asia Minor, thus, technically, Turkey is not really in Europe)

"Good luck in the World Cup! Wait! You're not in it!" (neither would we be if we were competing with Germany, England, and Italy as opposed to El Salvador and Haiti)

...and my favorite...

"Let's go Flyers!"

The last line was delivered by a beer-soaked fat man as he staggered down the stairs. I reminded him that there was no ice on the field and no one was skating, and he promptly stopped talking, to everyone's laughter and delight. I do what I can.

All of which is to suggest that the sports patriotism to which I alluded earlier has its limits. It also suggests that American fans...or, Americans, generally...could use a lesson in cultural sensitivity. We are all partial spectators. We are partial to our towns, our teams, and our traditions. That doesn't provide an excuse, however, to provincially apply the sports manners we accrued during all those years at Veterans Stadium and apply them to an international friendly.

I may love America, and I may not have any passionate love for soccer, but I do know enough to know that you don't really need to "slaughter the Turks." A 2-1 victory for Team America is enough.

Socialist Anxiety Disorder

The other day, I plugged my earphones into my laptop at my co-working office in Center City Philadelphia and indulged myself in the rants of a madman. A priest and prophet in a time of fiscal meltdowns at home and the ominous threats of dictatorships abroad, the man heaped blame on a wide range of bogeymen for casting their curses on an America in decline. One bogeyman outshone the rest as the ultimate source of domestic evil.

It's that damned Socialism.

You'd probably be surprised to know that the madman to whom I refer is neither Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, nor the ultimate pariah of the airwaves, Michael Savage; neither did these rants arise in the aftermath of 11/4. The madman was the populist Father Charles Coughlin, and the year was 1937.

It's a banality, I know, to suggest that history does repeat itself. Then again, I've watched an awful lot of Lost over the course of the last year, and as a result I'm convinced that time really is more circle than line. Once upon a time, large swaths of Depression-afflicted Americans suspicious of FDR's New Deal imbibed Coughlin broadsides with titles like "Somebody Must Be Blamed", and the nation neither slipped into "socialism" nor civil war. I have to remind myself of this every time I stroll down the road and spot an otherwise well-intentioned patriot clutching a copy of Glenn Beck's irony-inspiring Arguing with Idiots.

Or, more appropriate to 2010, when I read some of the status updates of my conservative friends on Facebook, the agora of our time. They often raise legitimate concerns over the lack of fiscal discipline or accountability in Washington. Unfortunately, I find a good number of their arguments to be simplistic, reductionist, and alarmist. Forget a real discussion over how government can effectively be utilized to curb excessive risk taking on Wall Street or to contain the swelling costs of health care. Far too often, they speak in shorthand, with "socialist" or "socialism" the blunt weapon of choice.

"Obama is turning this country into a socialist dictatorship!"

"The health care reform bill is socialism, pure and simple!"

Aside from the decibel level, there are two real problems with the over-misuse of the word "socialism" in any debate over the policies of our 44th President. The first is that Obama is not a socialist. Ask any actual socialist. Fiscal policy is not a binary choice between unfettered market libertarianism on the one hand and centralized state ownership of your cats on the other. In between lies a vast middle area that recognizes property ownership and entrepreneurship as the foundation of a free and efficient economy, but also understands that free economies can only exist with a reasonable exercise of government oversight of and, dare I say it, participation in the economy.

Imagine an America with no free public education system, in which the intellectual development of the next generation of workers were left to the whims of the "free market". Public education is, at a theoretical level, antithetical to the abstract idea of the market; yet it is wholly irrational to call it "socialist", unless you believe that Thomas Jefferson was America's first socialist. Or imagine an America in which investment banks trade risky securities in the shadows, away from government oversi....sorry, I know. That one hits a little too close to home.

The second problem with the conservative overplay of the S-card is more basic, and it can be resolved by opening the dictionary. The primary definition, according to my Apple dashboard app:

"a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."

In other words, the primary producer, distributor, and seller of goods is the government. That is the dictionary definition of socialism. Over the past century, the cultural definition has become more fluid, but that only augments my point. To peg Barack Obama as a socialist is akin to crowning him the Queen of England - it is a title with no real meaning, save for creating the false impression that the Obama Administration wants to trade your guns for a sickle and hammer.

So I pose this challenge to my conservative friends - and I do indeed call you friends. If you agree to stop dropping the S-bomb, I'll agree to let you all in on the little known secret that Adam Smith decried the concentration of wealth and that the New Deal did not impose socialism, but actually saved capitalism from it.