Join me Tuesday for some live radio — if you can stomach an hour of me

By David McElroy · March 13, 2012

Cleaning out the notebook once again…

I talked to a local elected official Monday night who told me that interest in the primary election today in Alabama is so low that they’re expecting only about 15 percent turnout among Democrats and 45 percent turnout among Republicans. I don’t sense any enthusiasm from voters about any race around here, from presidential on down to family court judge or constable or whatever. I mostly sense apathy.

Up until Monday, I hadn’t even seen a single sign for a presidential candidate around here other than the one Ron Paul sign at the other end of the street where I live. And you know how well Paul is going to do in a state with such a strong social conservative streak. (A poll released on primary day shows this for Alabama: Romney 28 percent, Gingrich 27 percent, Santorum 22 percent and Paul just 4 percent.)

I’ll be a guest Tuesday on a live radio show called “Independent Thinking with Steve Gelder.” Click the link and then click on “Listen live” to join us at noon central time — 10 a.m. on the west coast and 1 p.m. on the east coast. (If you’re in the rest of the world, you’re on your own with the time conversion.)

Steve is a bright and funny guy who’s a Los Angeles-based comedian, actor and filmmaker. We come from completely different places politically, but he’s smart, fair and genuinely interested in other points of view, so it ought to be a lot of fun. I’ve been fighting a cold for nearly a week, so the biggest fun for the audience might be counting the number of times I cough or snort before I can mute myself. If you miss the live show, you can hear it later when the episode is archived.

If a German government proposal is implemented, the Germans might come looking for me to pay someone each time I link to an article somewhere. The German government is trying to figure out ways to get online giants such as Google to pay money to help out with the European financial crisis, but the list of priorities also includes trying to get money from sites that aggregate news links. If this thing passes, I have news for them. The monkeys aren’t paying. All they have in life are their bananas — and the Germans are just going to have to find their own.

All my life, I’ve heard the expression, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” but I didn’t know where it came from and I had no idea of the context. (I also had no idea that the commonly used version isn’t quite correct.) When I was listening to this week’s EconTalk podcast Monday — which you should listen to each week if you don’t already — host Russ Roberts quoted the line from Alexander Pope in its context — and it took on new meaning for me:

A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain;
And drinking largely sobers us again.

How many times have you known someone who’s learned just a little bit about something, but just enough to make him assume he’s an expert? Pope is saying that learning just a little bit about something makes us feel as though we’re brilliant, but if we dig a little deeper, we’ll realize just how little we understand.

Most people today are painfully shallow in their intellectual pursuits. I have to confess that I’ve been guilty at times of learning just enough to talk about something, but not enough to really question the glib insights that I’ve casually picked up. Haven’t all of us done that? I just found myself thinking that when I study something new, if I immediately think I’ve mastered the subject, I probably haven’t gone deep enough to figure out how little I know.

There are times when men get unfairly characterized as being jerks who just want to use women, but there are some guys for whom the stereotype truly applies. A female friend of mine recently met a guy who acted very interested in her and pursued as though he was crazy about her. They had dinner for the first time and that went well. A week later, they had dinner at her house. Afterwards, he was all hands and lips. There was quite a bit of kissing and everything seemed to be going well.

All of a sudden, though, he realized that she didn’t have any intention of sleeping with him. He suddenly looked at the clock and said that it was late and he needed to go. That was days ago and she still hasn’t heard from him. Is there any question about what he was after?

Fella, it’s people like you who give all of us a bad name.

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Something small just made me happy. The specifics don’t matter, but I found myself smiling and I felt a kind of warm joy filling my heart and mind. In that brief moment of ecstasy, I felt the irrational desire to talk with a particular person. It wasn’t a calculated thought or a rational want. It wasn’t even that I wanted to tell the person about this particular thing. I simply felt ecstatic joy — and I somehow connected that feeling to this person. I can’t explain it. If we’re wise, we’ll pay attention to such moments, because the instincts of our hearts and minds often know more truth than our conscious and rational brains do. The same thing can be true in moments of great pain and suffering. If we pay attention to who our hearts are drawn to in such moments — of extreme joy or extreme hurt — we learn something about ourselves. I don’t know why. I only know that our gut instincts sometimes understand deep truths about ourselves that our rational brains haven’t yet figured out.

It started out as a satirical joke, but some friends liked the idea, so now it’s a real Facebook profile picture frame. If you’ve never heard of Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, let me explain. One of the dumber elements of social media is that it allows people to publicly signal their goodness and virtue to others — without actually doing anything of substance. So you see photo frames around profile photos saying things such as, “Moms Against Racism,” as though they’re standing up against those evil moms who are in favor of racism. It’s meaningless virtue-signaling and it deserves to be mocked, so I made a frame and published it on Facebook’s frame system today. If you go to your own Facebook profile picture and add a frame, then search for Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, you can select it. About a dozen of my friends are using it so far. It’s just fun satire — at least until Facebook decides it “goes against our community standards.” Or something. It’s just a fun way of mocking something that deserves to be mocked.

When I first told you about the project that would become DavidMcElroy.TV, I thought it would launch by mid-May. Since today is the last day of May — and I’m still not close to launching a finished product — here’s a brief update. The graphic above is the latest rough mockup of the format, but it’s still subject to change. Even the logo isn’t yet set in stone. Motion graphics are really difficult when you’re starting from scratch. Sunday night, my camera stopped recording, so it has to be sent off for repair. I have an older camera that I’ll keep using for testing, but I can’t launch without the better one. The audio system developed a low buzz this weekend that has me puzzled. I’ll be taking all the equipment over to the home of a local audio engineer who’s volunteered to help me figure out what I’ve done wrong. On top of all that, my on-camera performance seems to get worse with each test I do. There are days when I think I’m crazy to be attempting this. And in truth, I probably am insane to do it, but being crazy has never stopped me before. I’m at least a month away from launch and it could be a few months. Thanks for being patient — and thanks for all the support and enthusiasm for the project that you’ve sent my way.

I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

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