Weather Writing Romney Religion
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008It was 60 degrees today in Boston and close to that or the same yesterday. And I LOVE IT. I am really hating cold weather more and more. In Charleston over Christmas it was somewhere between 55 and 75 the whole time and it was glorious. I had to go do errands outside the office and was wearing my winter coat and I was roasting. If it could be like this in New England from November through late April, I’d be so very happy.
I think this nice weather here is supposed to last a few more days at least. I do feel sorry for the bulbs though, because their little pea brains (heh heh) are going to be all confused by this and starting making their journeys to the air beyond the dirt. And then it will get cold again and they’ll turn downward again. This messes things up for the real blooming time.
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So now let’s talk about me. I was accepted into a class I really wanted to get in to, “Writing for The Daily Show,” which will start in a few weeks in New York. It’s pretty hard to get in–the teacher, J.R. Havlan (who is one of the show’s writers), only gives it once or twice a year and he requires a writing sample, which consists of a “headlines” section based on some current event in the news (that’s the first third of the show: what Jon does when he’s sitting by himself at the desk at the beginning), in the style of the show and, most importantly, which sounds like Jon. And then he decides among all the samples who he’s going to accept into the class. And I got in! I was fairly surprised because I’m sure they get many great applications, and the waiting list was over a year long. I requested yesterday with my boss and other relevant people the time off and it’s all set so I’m starting it on Feb. 5. Plus, a good friend of mine also got in and I’m looking forward to being in there with her: it’s really helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off of when doing this kind of writing. She gave me some good suggestions on ways to make my sample pop; things that were obvious after she pointed them out but which I hadn’t thought of beforehand. So you see how it’s good to have someone else’s eye to review things.I wrote my piece on Mike Huckabee’s recent ads, one of which rather prominently displayed a cross in the background (they were actually the edges of bookshelves) and the other a large “Jesus fish” (it was the logo for the group to which he was speaking). People sort of accused him of trying to send “subliminal messages” that he’s the best Christian or the most Christian or the most religious. I’m still not sure what the controversy was: everyone knows he’s a minister. Seemed kind of weird to accuse him of being subliminal about the subject. And it’s on his Web site plain as day. Anyway I tried to come up with something funny and “Jon-like” and it must have at least not been the worst one they got.
Point of interest: the first and possibly still only woman writer on The Daily Show was hired directly as a result of taking this class. Of course many more people than her have taken it before and since she did, so it’s not like you’re gonna get a job out of it. But it’s fun and interesting and there’s bound to be lots of talented people in there.
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Couple of comments on the Jan. 7 issue of The New Yorker: first, what does this cover mean? (Sorry, not the best picture. Maybe you have seen it full-sized though.) I get that he’s drawing the building whose beam he’s sitting on, but what’s that thing sticking out of his mouth? His tongue? An eraser? I’ve been staring at it for an hour and I can’t figure it out. Second, there was a great commentary piece by Hendrik Hertzberg in Talk of the Town, entititled “Round One”–which talked about the effects the respective religious beliefs of Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have had on their campaigns. Two paragraphs I found especially interesting were regarding Romney:
And the dogmas of Mitt Romney’s sect are breathtaking. They include these: that in 1827 a young man named Joseph Smith dug up a set of golden plates covered with indecipherable writing; that, with the help of a pair of magic spectacles, he “translated” the plates from an otherwise unknown language (Reformed Egyptian) into an Olde English that reads like an unfunny parody of the King James Bible; that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri; that American Indians descend from Hebrew immigrants; that Jesus reappeared in pre-Columbian America and converted so many people that the result was a series of archeologically unconfirmable wars in which millions died; that while polygamy had divine approval for most of the nineteenth century, God changed his mind in 1890, just in time for Utah to be allowed into the Union; and that God waited until 1978 to reveal that it was O.K. for blacks to be fully paid-up members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
And later on, with respect to disdainful comments Romney has made on “the religion of secularism”:
Secularism is not a religion. And it is not true that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” as Romney maintained. What freedom, including religious freedom, requires is, precisely, secularism—which is to say, state neutrality in matters of religion. (Nor does religion require freedom, as the European past and the Middle Eastern present demonstrate; religions, plural, do, however.) “Americans do not respect believers of convenience,” Romney thundered in his “faith” speech. “Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.” These were strange observations, coming as they did from a man whose campaign has consisted largely of jettisoning the beliefs he found convenient as a Massachusetts politician but finds highly inconvenient now that he stands to gain the Republican nomination for President. But then those were merely political beliefs.
Read the full article here.
My conclusions are: 1) Not wanting to really rag on someone’s personal beliefs but some Mormons really are worthy of being frightened of (and to be fair, so are some Catholics, Baptists, Jews, Hindus, Druids, etc.); and 2) Mitt Romney is a flip-flopper if there was ever a flip-flopper in the history of flip-floppery. I still can’t believe he got elected here in MA but we were in some kind of Bizarro Massachusetts for a number of years, when we kept getting Republicans in the governor’s chair here in the bluest state in the country. I still haven’t figured that one out. I think people were inhaling too many glue fumes from the Big Dig tunnel construction project. Notice how we swung back Democrat just about the time when they changed glues, after one of the ceiling panels using some kind of inferior adhesive dropped on that woman’s car and killed her? Coincidence? I think NOT.
Photo credit: New Yorker cover from this page.
