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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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NOTEBOOK: If results confuse Paul’s aides, how competent are they?

By David McElroy · March 8, 2012

It’s time for this week’s random musings that don’t fit anywhere else….

When other people are confused and frustrated about things that seem perfectly obvious to me, it makes me really frustrated, too. I felt that way Wednesday when I saw this article about Ron Paul’s strategists being confused about losing elections despite generating enthusiastic crowds at events.

If these guys are honestly confused, I wonder how experienced or competent they are. I knew months and months ago how this was going to play out for Paul. If anything, it’s gone even worse than I expected. I figured he’d slip up and win some small state or two, but that hasn’t even happened.

Here’s the truth. Ron Paul has the most enthusiastic core of supporters of any campaign today, bar none. If elections were won because of whose biggest supporters were most passionate, Paul would be elected. But that’s not how politics works. Most people aren’t going to go to anybody’s campaign event. They have busy lives and they honestly don’t care enough about the candidates. But when it’s time to vote, most of them are going to vote for a candidate whose ideas are mainstream and familiar to them.

Whether we like it or not, we are far outside the mainstream. The passion of a tiny group isn’t enough to change the fact that the masses recoil at our ideas. That’s just reality. Any political strategist should know this.

Remember the “corruption” trial that I told you about last week? I didn’t think there was any way these people should have been convicted, because what they were proven to be doing was just as legal as what anybody else in politics does. Well, the jury found all defendants not guilty on all charges Wednesday. I don’t necessarily support the people on trial — or vouch for their character — but the verdict was the right one. It’s a big blow to the out-of-control federal prosecutors who brought the case. They proved the old legal aphorism that a good prosecutor can successfully indict a ham sandwich.

I never find myself wanting to run campaigns to try to elect people anymore, but I frequently find myself wanting to run campaigns against certain people. As I was driving home Wednesday night, I saw signs for a few local candidates who I can’t stand for one reason or another. I won’t mention any names, but they’ll be the only reason I’ll be eagerly scanning local returns next week — hoping for them to all lose.

Is the battle for the GOP presidential nomination over? Technically, no. In reality, yes. People are accustomed to the modern era in which a front-runner emerges and takes obvious control quickly, forcing his opponents to drop out. Here’s an article that carefully outlines why that’s not true this year and explains the convention delegate math behind why Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee unless something completely unexpected happens. Basically, unless Romney gets hit by a bus or gets caught having gay sex in airport restrooms, he’s who the GOP is stuck with.

Are you ready for Romney vs. Obama in the fall? A lot of the people attacking Romney lately are suddenly going to find they like him better than they thought when they realize he’s their only chance to beat Barack Obama — who they hate worse then the devil himself.

Wednesday afternoon, I listened to four black women talk about Obama. It was like listening to cult members talk about their perfect and sainted leader. I can’t think of a similar example of a group identifying so strongly with a politician from the group lately, but I could be missing an obvious example. On the one hand, it’s disgusting to feel as though these people are supporting a president just because he’s black. On the other hand, there’s something almost touching — and very understandable — about people feeling that way.

It wasn’t that long ago that blacks in this country were treated miserably by the law in many places and in many ways. It’s understandable how their pride at having someone who looks something like them would swell. I disagree with everything that Obama stands for. But if I were part of a minority that had been as persecuted and discriminated against in the past, I might be tempted to support him, too, at least if I were an average person who didn’t know or care that much about politics or ideas. So I sort of condemn them, but I can understand why it happens.

A friend of mine who’s a very dedicated but frustrated teacher sent me this note earlier in the week: “If I want to work with kids who are not lazy and who are appreciative of someone teaching them, which country should I move to? Obviously, it is not here.”

She teaches at a highly rated government-run school in an affluent suburb. When I mentioned this on Facebook, one of the things that was pointed out was that kids who are home-schooled or unschooled don’t seem to develop this same laziness and lack of motivation. Does it really help children when we don’t force them to go someplace they don’t want to go every day? I don’t know. You tell me. (I’m leaning more and more in the direction of liking unschooling, even more than home-schooling, but the needs of children differ so much that it’s hard to name a “right way” for everyone.

Have you ever thought much about the biology of love? We talk about the “chemistry” between two people in love, but we act as though it’s just a figure of speech. Anthropologist Helen Fisher thinks it’s more than just an analogy. I’ve been following her work for years, and I’ve found her to be a very insightful scientist on the issue of why love happens and why we fall in love with the specific people we do.

Earlier this week, I ran across this TED talk she gave three and a half years ago about her research on the brain and love. It’s only 15 minutes, and it’s really worth your time if you have any interest in love and your own actions in relation to it. Have you ever felt that you were addicted to a person you loved? She says there’s a reason. Biologically speaking, that’s what love is: “Romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly.”

I’ll leave you with a quote from a book I’m reading right now called “The Scalpel and the Soul.” Dr. Allan J. Hamilton writes about his experiences as a surgeon over the years, much of it dealing with the things he saw that led him to believe in some form of soul or spirit. I don’t think he’s going to arrive at the same spiritual conclusions I have by the end of the book, but his observations are insightful. In one chapter, he talked about an experience that changed him, and he had this to say in introducing the subject. Especially in the last few years, I’ve found him to be right about this:

“In each of our lives occur transformational moments, fragile as spun glass. They drift though our lives for a fraction of a second and then shatter. … I want to be clear with you about those revelations. This feeling — I don’t want you to misunderstand when I say that a person just feels those delicate moments — you don’t just feel them. They hit you. Like a fist.”

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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