Alan Gutierrez

The Obama’s Katrina talking point doesn’t do much for us down here. Katrina is a word that has become so hopelessly overloaded with meaning, that our first response when someone utters the work “Katrina” is, “here, let me unpack that for you.” We try to explain the intricacies of the wholesale destruction of a major American city, but the intricacies never take. Calling the BP oil drilling disaster “Obama’s Katrina” merely heaps another layer of misunderstanding onto our plight, which is already so grossly over-simplified and so profoundly misunderstood.

It sounds like politics that does not concern us, that does not consider us, it merely packages us for use on the Sunday talk shows.

Problem with this talking point is that Obama has accepted the responsibility. After the sheer incompetence, the assignment of blame was the hallmark of the Bush response to Katrina.

Unlike Katrina, which was often waved away as an act of God, the BP oil drilling disaster is a undeniably a disaster of policy. A disaster of an energy policy driven by the childish rallying cry “Drill, Baby Drill!” A disaster of regulatory policy that choose to look at private corporations as our societal benefactors, who could be trusted to do the right thing. This faith in corporations is something that has been growing in the American psyche for a some time. The mistaken belief that corporations align their interests with their customers, not their shareholders. It is untenable. The oil disaster is another harsh dose of the reality of private profit, socialized risk.

The key difference between this oil drilling disaster and Katrina? Katrina didn’t have a CEO.

Rather than asking if this is Obama’s Katrina, we should be asking if this is Big Oil’s Chernobyl.

There was this advertisement for a pain reliever that tried to invent a new pain to treat, the pain of holding your children close, and it would be a laugh out loud failure, if it didn’t hit the brown note.

Do You Suffer from Babies?

When you watch the Motrin Moms ad, at first it is annoying, but there is this magic that happens as you replay it. For some reason, it is easy to watch again and again. It bounces along at nice clip, it is well animated, well narrated, and each time, it reaches out and insults your intelligence with a gentle plucking of a cord.

With the all the digital fervor of the online mob that mistakes their pursuit of customer service complaints for political action, a subset of the Twitter community has minted a bold new hashtag, and is pressing their message through Twitter search trends. On Monday, when whoever has the Motrin account arrives at their desk, there is a good chance that the advertisement will be pulled, a mea cupla issued, and the outraged Twitter users will squee triumphant. We’ll have to hear about the power of social media to effect social change for the remainder of the week.

The advertisement is indeed tone deaf. It is a reminder that you can’t always manufacture a problem for your product to solve, a la Don Draper and Mad Men. People won’t always cover their mouths, scrunch up their arms, put on extra baggy clothes and scurry off the pharmacy for the suggested chemical perfumes.

Sometimes they’ll just say, “who the hell are you to call me ugly?”
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Microsoft has released a new advertisement, after the Jerry Sienfeld and Bill Gates advertisements (Shoe Circus, A Family Affair), which had the look and feel of sitcom spun-off of the Seinfeld TV Show of yesteryear. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Jerry and Bill go from one ordinary domestic setting to the next, brining their own brand (Jerry’s brand) of humor with them. One episode even had an entire sitcom family.

These were generally referred to as the commercials about nothing.

Now the advertising has made a preposterous leap to an incredibly defensive ad campaign.

The ad is passive-aggressive with a chilly tone of righteous indignation. I recalls the haughty politically correct types that I’d encounter in Ann Arbor. You might be talking about the Atlanta Braves when someone at the table says, “Well, my great grandfather was half Chippewa Native-American,” and glowers at you. Everyone stops talking about baseball and starts talking about nothing.

They start with a John Hodgeman look alike saying, “I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype.” Then they run through a litany of people who say that they are a PC, but they are not hip, they wear glasses, they study genes, they are not human doings but human beings, and they are all PCs.

Immediately, I recalled Principal Blackman’s You’re A Racist educational film from Strangers With Candy, the comedy that parodied the after school specials that are so familiar to me as a television weened child of the 80′s. (The video is available. Please click play.)

The ad campaign fails for me because of this overlay. More after the jump.
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I am a Democrat. I am a supporter of Barack Obama. I want Barack Obama to win the election and become President of the United States.

Which is why I’m so happy to see Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. When I watched the clip above, I was able to laugh out loud at Sarah Palin for the first time. Much needed.

It was a fun and clever satire of the accusations of sexism that have been bandied about in the two weeks since Sarah Palin’s debut.

What I like most of all about the SNL skit is that it completely deflated Sarah Palin. For two weeks, Sarah Palin, marched forward with a message of wide-eyed denial about every aspect of her record, defended by a phalanx of operatives who labeled all inquiries into her abilities as sexist. As it seemed that she would get away with, there were the early stages of Bush Derangement Syndrome setting in among the Democratic faithful, a condition that is often fatal for Democratic political campaigns.
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Celebrating John Frum Day on Vanuatu.

Some folks have written to show concern. I appreciate the concern.

I’m still getting email about policy matters. I’m inclined to respond with, oh, wow, very interesting. Hey, seen what I’ve been up to lately?

I’m going to enjoy being rid of these people who engage me as a resource, people who have no resources to offer. That has been particularly tiring.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Many New Orleanians are engaged in a cargo cult dance to bring down some form of funding for the grassroots efforts that drive the recovery. They dress up, wave the sticks, march and dance, and but the DC-3s do not land. The cargo is not for us.

It’s uncommon that local efforts are overlooked, that nonprofit organizations parachute in and disappear as quickly.

Every time I create a new listserv, I need to remember how to do it. I’m going to write about it in Blogometer so I don’t have to think so hard next time.

Adding a new GNU Mailman listserv.

[alan@~]$ cd /usr/lib/mailman
[alan@ljubljana mailman]$ sudo ./bin/newlist barcampnola@thinknola.com
Enter the email of the person running the list: alan@thinknola.com
Initial barcampnola password:
To finish creating your mailing list, you must edit your /etc/aliases (or
equivalent) file by adding the following lines, and possibly running the
`newaliases' program:
## barcampnola mailing listbarcampnola:              "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post barcampnola"
barcampnola-admin:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman admin barcampnola"
barcampnola-bounces:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces barcampnola"
barcampnola-confirm:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman confirm barcampnola"
barcampnola-join:         "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join barcampnola"
barcampnola-leave:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman leave barcampnola"
barcampnola-owner:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman owner barcampnola"
barcampnola-request:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman request barcampnola"
barcampnola-subscribe:    "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe barcampnola"
barcampnola-unsubscribe:  "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe barcampnola"

Hit enter to notify barcampnola owner...

[alan@ljubljana mailman]$

Then you cut and paste the aliases into /etc/mailman/aliases

[alan@ljubljana mailman]$ sudo /usr/bin/newaliases
[alan@ljubljana mailman]$ sudo ./bin/withlist -l -r fix_url barcampnola

This had me laughing out loud. A great sense of humor bas Barack Obama. From Why Republicans Fear Obama by Byron York at the National Review Online.

“You notice that people who’ve been in Washington too long, they don’t talk like ordinary folks,” Obama began. “We had this debate in Las Vegas, and somebody asked me, ‘What are your weaknesses?” So I said, ‘Well, you know, I don’t keep track of paper that well, I’m always losing paper, my desk is a mess.’ And then they asked the next two candidates. And one candidate says, ‘Well, my biggest weakness is I’m just so passionate about helping poor people.’ And then the other one says, ‘I’m just so impatient to help the American people solve their problems.’ So then I realize well, I wish I’d gone last and then I would have known.”

I found a Susan B. in my change this morning. Did someone give it to me in lieu of a paper dollar or did they mistake it for a quarter? She was short lived. The date is 1979. The new Sacagawea dollar now competes with a series of presidential dollars. It strikes me that our misogynist society cannot stomach women on their currency, they must retaliate with the 43 big men. Lovely Lady Liberty is on the reverse of the presidential coins, of course. I adore her, but she’s awful quiet. Statuesque is our feminine ideal.