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Gah. I was having a quite productive day until lunch, and then WHAM! Yes, I was attacked by George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. No, I don't know what happened. I probably shouldn't have bought that coffee, especially after all those Zingos caffeinated peppermints. Those things are dastardly.

Can't wait for five o'clock. This has been a long week. Can you believe I actually came up here and WORKED for three hours last night? Scary, yo.

Huh huh huh, Wham!

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So what do y'all think about the Trent Lott thing? I can't be very objective about it because I despise the guy. I'm from Mississippi and have had to watch the fucker for years and years. I'd like to see his ass run out of Washington anyway, so naturally when this controversy started up I was really hoping that he would end up having to resign or something. But it's starting to feel a little wrong. I don't know. It probably has something to do with George Bush's emphatic denouncement of Lott's comments. I mean, yes, absolutely I think what Lott said is despicable--but somehow I don't get the idea that this really affects Dubya to the depths of his soul like he'd have you believe.

You might not know it from this journal, but I tend to err on the side of being overly politically correct--but at the same time I hate the very idea of political correctness. You should be guided by what you think is right, not the perceptions of others. So when something like this comes up, I always have to ask myself, "Is this as harmful as people are making it out to be?" Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

The other thing I'm thinking about is the common perception that people like Jesse Jackson are out to get certain people (namely Republicans) at all costs, and that they will use any excuse to paint someone as a racist. Now, I wouldn't go so far as to agree completely with them--but I will say that the perception has some basis in reality.

I heard Jim Brown, the political activist/actor/former football player, say on the radio last night that he accepted Lott's apology and that we should move on to real issues, such as why our inner cities are all fucked up. And I guess I'm leaning that way. Don't get me wrong--I still want to see Lott out of Washington, but I would rather see it happen as part of the regular political process (even though I don't have much faith that Mississippians would ever vote him out). Anyone who thinks that going after Trent Lott for this is addressing racism in any real way is kidding himself. But that's the way we work in this country: we don't deal with problems such as racism until somebody fucks up and says something bad on television. Then we get all rabid about wiping his ass out--not because we're really concerned about stopping racism, but because we don't want to address it at all. "Get his ass out of there so we can go back to pretending that we don't have a problem!"

Anyway. I don't know if that was comprehensible at all, but it helped me work through my thoughts a bit.

update: But then I keep coming back to what Lott said. And then I think about Strom Thurmond's decrepit ass down there in South Carolina. There's the guy who RAN for president on a segregationist platform, and he's still in office at fucking 100 years of age! So how well can the political process be working if that crusty-ass fossil is still in Washington?!

I think I might have asked this question here before, but here goes again: does anyone know a quotation that goes something like "I'm paralyzed by the ability to see all sides of an issue"? A guy I used to work with claimed it was "cursed" rather than "paralyzed," but I'm pretty sure he's wrong. "Cursed" isn't strong enough; it doesn't convey the fact that the ability can make one unable to act. Anyway, I feel like that all the time.