My Pitch for Qatar 2022 World Cup Ad Space

black, fade in with tortured screams, cut into-

dungeon with 3 imprisoned workman in chains being tortured by 3 stereotypical Arabs/Muslims/Terrorists/etc, cut to-

small b/w tv on a table in the corner, announcer (in Arabic) "...blah blah blah World Cup 2022! Blah blah! Qatar! Blah blah," cut to-

everyone stops and looks at the tv. creaking of chains.

tv announcer "...blah blah Uzbekistan versus Iceland!" cut to-

raised eyebrows as all eyes meet. cut to-

the torture continues, but the everyone is distracted, paying attention to the tv, with only the occasional electrocution with a disinterested 'Ow' in response.

tv announcer's voice becomes more animated, motion/sound in the room stops completely. from the tv "and...and, and, AND AND AND....GOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL"

everyone goes crazy, Qataris jumping up and down and prisoners rattling in their hanging chains. Some torturer trips and falls on another, screams from all around, someone hits the camera person and cut to-

VODAFON.

To Sec. State, Matt Schultz

Dear Mr. Schultz-

I've just become acquainted with your proposal for a Voter ID law here in Iowa, and would like a chance to respond. In more than 140 characters. I like Twitter too, when I'm in haiku-mode, but some things require a little more substance so I'm hoping you took a moment to click on the link leading to this.

First, I'd like to say what a perfectly sensible, level-headed and pragmatic piece of legislation this is. If this could pass the way you described it in your Iowa Press-Citizen guest opinion column, it's hard to see why any logical, reasonable person could argue against it. Second, I'd like to say why it'll never fly.

"With their input, I created a bill that allows any federal, state or local government-issued photo ID as well as any student photo ID from a public or private university, college or high school to be used at the polls. For the elderly confined to health care facilities, we only require an affidavit to be signed if they do not have identification. It also requires the state of Iowa to provide a free photo ID to any eligible voter who requests an ID.
In the case where someone does not have an ID at the polls, we allow someone to attest for them as long as the person attesting has a valid photo ID. If someone is unable to show ID, we allow them to vote a provisional ballot, but the burden of proof is shifted from the voter to the public. This requires the precinct election board to count the provisional ballot unless a member of the public can prove that the voter is ineligible to vote.
The law also will be implemented over a two-year period to give voters time to be educated and to adjust to the new rules."
http://www.press-citizen.com/article/20131027/OPINION02/310270013/Iowa-s-voter-ID-bill-model-country?nclick_check=1

There's been a lot of back-and-forth on this matter in the last decade and I get it. I do. You can't do anything without an ID these days; you can't rent movies, return something to a store for cash or credit, can't buy a pack of cigarettes even though if you have more grey hairs than the kid selling them to you has pimples... I've been walking the dogs in my neighborhood and have had police officers stop me and ask for my ID. Voting is surely more important than these things, so why shouldn't an ID be required for something so vital to our democracy?

How will the Democrats react? Just a guess, but they'll probably say 'why fix a problem that doesn't exist?' Which is a really good question. I'm aware of your disputes lately with the Obama administration over access to databases and the claims of some, like Joel Miller, on numbers of potential fraudulent voters in Linn County (where I live), and there are serious, valid points being made. But at the end of the day, not one election has been swayed by these instances. They are rare and inconsequential. Mr. Miller's office has said his office had identified around 100 potential voter fraud cases in the past year. Even if he's right- hell, let's make him triple-right, let's say they are 300 verified cases in Linn County. Crimes and criminals, all. Find them and prosecute, they have violated a law. But they have not changed anything.

How will your fellow Republicans react? Again, just a guess, but from what I've read about the lukewarm reception it's received so far, I'm guessing you're not getting any votes from the right side of the aisle, at least if the final bill looks anything like the quote from you listed above.

This is the 'let's get real' part of my response.

Looking around the country, we can easily surmise what the point of all the current Voter ID legislation is all about. The country is changing, the GOP is not, and they're losing votes. They need these laws. They need to be able to disqualify thousands of blacks and latinos and women and elderly folk, otherwise they wouldn't be able to hold on to their offices. Not as much here in Iowa, but certainly in more diverse areas of the country. Your proposed bill is a mockery of that agenda. There is nothing contained in there that is going to win more Republican seats, it will only bolster our democracy, so what's the point in that?

The title that the Press-Citizen gave to your piece was "Iowa's voter ID bill is a model for the country." I agree. Too bad that no one on either side of the aisle will agree with you.

My 'King Of The World' Moment

Not going to publish this to the general public, but I thought it would be easier to do this from my blog spot instead of in the comment box on a certain Facebook page.

The conversation, as initiated by myself;

New thread: We've all had experiences that fell outside of the explainable, everyday life that we all share, whether you labelled it religious or mystical or maybe just hallucinatory (while still significantly meaningful)....would anyone like to describe theirs?

My story, though deep and meaningful to me, is naturally ridiculous to anyone else, maybe just goofy. That's the point of these kind of events, essentially, that they are experienced individually and can only be evaluated and understood in the same way. Unless you're an artist and can visually convey your 'vision' (for lack of a better term that everyone can kind of agree on) to others with the same weight of importance and significance with which you yourself experienced, these kind of recounts are hard to take seriously. It's great if you're a Samuel Coleridge or Thomas Aquinas or John Coltrane or Wolfgang Pauli or Salvador Dali and can translate the right information regarding theses 'events', these experiences that seem to not come from 'within' the self but from somewhere else, from some 'Other', providing actual contextual meaning...  For the rest of us, our stories are just gonna be goofy.

I will try to be brief and not generate an intolerable amount of boredom.

I was twenty years old in 1990, living in my mother's house (again), and employed at a warehouse where my job was tedious, repetitive and finally physically exhausting, which might be one in an oleo of factors contributing to the state of mind I found myself in one afternoon. I was hungover, tired and bored, normally a potentially disastrous mixture for me. That's when I usually get in the most trouble. I don't think I was stoned, didn't pick up that as a regular habit until a year later while living in Phoenix, so I can't put this down to psychotropia. 

At any rate, I was in a particular mood. A friend had lent me a cassette, Steely Dan's Gold, and I popped it into my Walkman. I'd never really gave the band a serious listen before, so I positioned a chair in the puddle of afternoon sunlight coming in through the living room window, kicked my heels up on the coffee table and slipped into it. 

It was okay. I liked it, I guess. A lot of jazzy riffs, good keyboards that didn't overshadow the other instruments, some good booze and drug references that made me chuckle (remember 'For Cuervo Gold/ For fine Columbian/ Make a tonight a wonderful thing'?), some good lyrical word-play. Like I said, pretty good.

By the time I got around to 'King of the World', I was somewhat hypnagogic. It's a dreamy-sounding kind of song in itself with rambling yet insistent apocalyptic lines set into an odd time signature, and it worked on my poor little ears and brain with what I can only describe as a peculiar effect. Listen to it for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJz0c981F7U


When I got to the part, "When you come around/ No more pain and no regrets/ Watch the sun go brown/ Smoking cobalt cigarettes", something happened to me. Something somewhere clicked or shifted or aligned or sped up or slowed down, maybe some series of neurons and synapses snapped and popped in a certain pattern... Whatever it was, I was suddenly in the middle of something, something that was either a dream that felt like a memory or a memory that seemed like a dream, or some combination thereof. Whatever. It was something that was powerful enough to consume my entire attention and awareness, to the point that, for all purposes, I felt to be actually re-living the event.

I was a child. I was ill, had a high temperature and a feverish brain. I wasn't awake and I wasn't asleep. I was in my bed but I was also in a boat, sitting on a deeply black body of water, still and motionless, not a ripple disturbing the surface or rocking the boat. All around were mountains, also completely black and devoid of color so that no features were visible, only a stark silhouette that stood against a bright red sky, hellishly red maybe but I didn't feel like I was in any kind of Hell, didn't feel anything negative at all, just a peaceful calm. Though I was alone in the boat, there was a voice talking to me. It wasn't me talking to myself. I cannot overemphasize this. It was not a voice that came, in any way, from me.
It was some Other talking, telling me in a voice that wasn't unkind, This is a dream but you are awake, you must listen and remember, remember this place, these are cobalt mountains, these are the Cobalt Mountains, you will forget them but you will remember, you will know what this means... On and on or all at once, you know how dreams are, the disembodied words kept coming and coming...

That's it. Sorry if it disappointed, but do you see what I mean? A bunch of nonsense to you, reading this. Goofy, even. But for me, the whole thing was as earth-shattering as Saul's day on the road to Damascus or Pythagoras hearing the music of the spheres for the first time or Kepler tearing down centuries of misinformation and seeing in his head the true orbit of Mars or Terrence McKenna in the South American jungles drinking some vision-vine tea, and the process of sitting here remembering and writing all this has gotten me so upset that I've had to go and take a shower halfway through. 

There are no Cobalt Mountains anywhere in the world, outside of certain ranges being described as so. There's a ski resort, in Connecticut I think. There's a shitload of cobalt piled up in Africa somewhere that was a by-product of a mining operation that was once worthless but thanks to cellphones is now worth a gajillion bucks. There's a role-playing game that I've never played. I've been a'googling a hundred times or more now, and there is nothing else that I can find to provide any more meaning to any of this, outside the fact that I had a fucked-up fever-dream as kid and somehow recalled it exactly some twelve or thirteen years later. It didn't come over me as a religious experience, I didn't attribute it to God or Jesus or Satan or any saints or anything like that. I don't write it off just as some hallucination. I can't. It was too real, too vivid. I can just say again that it was contact with something outside of myself, some other thing, there is something outside of ourselves and that it had a message just for me. It wanted something from me, for me to do something.

I don't know what. I didn't know then, and I don't know now. I'm forty-three now and resigned to the idea that I may live the rest of my life without knowing what it was. Or that it meant anything at all. Probably didn't. I'll keep trying, every once in a while when I'm kicking back and letting my mind wander I'll think about it, try to superimpose something from the life I've lived since then on top of it and hopefully find something in it that I haven't before found. Maybe I won't even have to try, maybe I just have to wait and it'll just happen, and I'll just have to recognize it when it does. 

Who knows? 

Thanks for reading, and I'm looking forward to anyone else joining in this discussion.