Filed by Bil at 10:54 am under Politics, Pop Culture, Shameless Plugs

I have recently had my head forced out of the sand, where evidently it’s been for some time now. It’s what happens when you intentionally ignore both politics and pop music.

Just for the record, I don’t really consider myself a Democrat. I’m not registered as Democrat, I’m registered as an independent voter, and in the last gubernatorial elections here in Illinois, I voted Green Party for most posts (including Governor). However, I do get a lot – and I mean a lot – of e-mail from Democrats and the grass-roots people.

My tendency is to vote Democrat on a federal scale only, and vote all kinds of different things on a local scale, but I had to sign up for the e-mailer from Democrats.com if I wanted to get a free ticket to the party in Grant Park last November. (I did get in. And Obama won. It was a fun party.)

And I do tend to skim over the e-mails the Democrats send, because now and again something very interesting comes up that warrants my attention. But seriously, I think the last several months have been pretty much the same: Obama is trying to reform our health care system, and the Republican party is fighting Karl Rove-style to prevent that from happening. But just as I’m getting those e-mails painting one party as good and the other party as bad, I know that the other party must also be doing the same thing, so of course I take it all with a grain of salt. It’s all just bitter politics and it’s been the same exact thing for half a year now. Each party has a hat full of tricks they are pulling out, and it’s very much like watching a football game where no one can score because each team is committing so many fouls that they are hurting themselves as much as the other team.

In fact, it is so very much like that, that I’m going to start referring to them as teams, not parties. It doesn’t even seem to matter what the actual philosophy of the political party is any more, people choose one team and all they want is for the other team to lose. If Obama manages to get health care reform bills passed, we can all dump a cooler full of Gatorade on his head and high-five each other.

Anyway, my point is: I was ignoring it all because I couldn’t take the Democratic team seriously when they said “the organized agents of inaction are fighting change every step of the way.” That’s an actual quote from one of the aforementioned e-mails. The general consensus from the Democrats is that the Republicans are saying Obama has used the government to take over people’s lives. It’s a statement that I, of course, find preposterous, but I also had a hard time believing that the Republicans were actually saying something so stupid to their own constituents.

Then I came across an e-mail from Vern Buchanan.

Vern Buchanan is a Republican running for Congress, and his e-mail (which came to me, by the way, in the e-mail queue at my customer support day job) actually has the following quote:

President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid are working to gain control of huge segments of our economy. Their takeover of the bank and auto industries is just the tip of the iceberg that is coming towards taxpayers. If we don’t stand together and oppose them, health care is next.

So there was head-yank-from-the-sand number 1. I was laughing about this, about how Republicans actually are saying things like this (Karl Rove-style!), and I was going to post something about it on the ol’ Facebook, but somebody else had a post that caught my attention.

For those of you who didn’t watch, the general idea is this: Lily Allen – whom I always thought was totally laid back and cool, with a rapier wit and a sensible view of the world – is apparently pulling a Metallica-sized fit about music downloads and Dan Bull is cleverly (and rightfully) calling her out on it.

This was head-yank-from-the-sand numbers 2 and 2.5 for me. I didn’t know Lily Allen was on this whole legacy-destroying kick, and I also didn’t know who this Dan Bull guy is.

I can’t say it any better than Dan Bull did, so I’ll just sort of reiterate the main point: music downloads – much like politics – are not nearly so black-and-white as some people would have us believe.

Thus, my ostrich head has been pulled from its hole in the ground and I am seeing the happenings of the world (”Oh, crap!”). Of course, these are all things that will happen with or without me, and what I care more about right now are the projects I’ve swamped myself with.

I think my M.O. from now on will be to keep my head securely in the hole in the ground where I go to be an artist, but I will make a point of once a day coming up and letting some of the outside world into my brain. I can take what I want back into the hole in the sand.

This may, in fact, be the appropriate thing to do until I finish what I’ve started. I’ve got a play opening on October 15th and some writing projects that can ease up once I have a completed first draft of them. Then we’ll see about being more actively aware of current events and culture.