Since it’s clear that the covers have come off of political lying, let’s get a better crop of liars.
It’s hard to avoid chasing the news-cycle nowadays, since the lies change the news-cycle faster than most inattentive, cynical, people can keep up with. So, by the time you read this, Virginia governor Northam’s yearbook story may have morphed into another instance of the frenetic activities of the hyperactive Russian hacker corps.
At one point, Northam said he was in the picture but couldn’t remember which costume he was wearing. At another point, he said that maybe the pictures had gotten mixed up with some other asshole’s. I remember when American politicians’ lies used to rock the world, and now we’ve just got this pathetic “dog ate my homework” stuff. It does not meet the relaxed standards for a high school student’s lie, let alone what we expect from elected officials.
The beer jokes and the corvette go together for some excellent subliminal messaging. This was in the pre-failblog/youtube days, so the connection between “asshole loses control of corvette” and beer was not fully established. I find it incredible to imagine that the page was laid out using some pictures from someone else’s page. For one thing, I remember early in 1981 when my senior year high school yearbook was to be published – we provided “camera ready copy” of the page as we wanted it laid out and we got a facsimilie of the final, for our approval. That was the spring that my friend Willy M. went around with his old Pentax K1000 and did portraits of me, and Tom S., and shot his own yearbook page, which was vastly superior to every other kid’s yearbook page in the book. I remember he sat me out in from of the main hall, under a tree, and did pictures of me sharpening his Buck knife. Back at that time all the preppy kids carried big chunky Buck knives (to high school) the line was drawn when one kid started carrying a fairbairn-sykes commando dagger with a tigerwood handle and brass fittings. I later traded that knife for my first motorcycle; it was a beauty.
memories of 1981
I find it incredible that someone would forget the pictures they assembled and selected for their yearbook. Perhaps beer was involved. Perhaps, a great deal.* It’s weird that I remember all that so clearly. Perhaps I didn’t drink enough beer.
If the governor’s saying he doesn’t recognize himself in the picture, then it’s probably just that he’s the one in the hood.
This does raise an interesting question, which is whether it’ll be possible, eventually, to have a clean enough background to get past the retro-scope. What if it becomes attractive, or even necessary, to run complete non-entities for office, so as to avoid the slightest whiff of impropriety? My take on all of this is that people who want to run for office should own their impropriety and let the chips fall where they lay. Of course we’ve seen that “let racists be racists” just means we get a president who can’t stop blowing his dog-whistle.
Meanwhile, here’s a brief explanation of why racists are disqualified for public office: in a nominal representative democracy, the government is an emergent property of the will of the people, who elect representatives to do the politics on their behalf and to represent their interests. A racist politician, by definition, does not represent the people accurately, since they are in effect declaring that they are only going to represent their chosen people; that disqualifies them.
* “Boofed” was a popular term for drinking so much you threw up, when I was in high school.
I didn’t actually care for Black Sabbath that much, but I included the quote as an oblique christian-troll; a lot of the school were pretty religious. Perhaps someday when the US has completely flipped over to christian dominionism, that Black Sabbath quote will be used against me. My photo of myself wearing the American flag as a diaper might be problematic, too. There are other pictures of me out there that probably oughtn’t be out there but I think I have good excuses to cover all of them. I don’t expect anyone to ever care, anyway.
Perhaps you could do a series: “Photographs of me that could get me in trouble if I ever ran for public office”.
Considering that you just recently dressed up as a missionary-priest of Sithrak, such a set of photographs could be large indeed.
The irony is that if you look beyond the iconography they use and actually listen to or read the lyrics, Ozzy-era Black Sabbath were actually a very Christian band. Ozzy was always pretty devout, and a lot of the stuff from that era is very explicitly pro-Christian. (See, for example, the lyrics for After Forever…)
The big difference between Black Sabbath and the genre known as “Christian Rock” is that Black Sabbath were good.
Everyone has their own page in the yearbook?
chigau@#3:
Everyone has their own page in the yearbook
At my high school, we did. It was a small private school.
Owlmirror@#1:
Considering that you just recently dressed up as a missionary-priest of Sithrak, such a set of photographs could be large indeed.
In my Donald Trump picture, I am wearing the American flag as a diaper. Because I hate America!
Dunc@#2:
Ozzy-era Black Sabbath were actually a very Christian band
Well, kinda. They didn’t come out and make a big enough deal of it that it crapped up their music, at least.
I can’t imagine how Northam can keep clinging to power with no support from his own party. I actually went out door-to-door campaigning for the guy (because his opponent was a far more open racist), but he’s let down the environmentalists like me in a big way by caving in to the pro-pipeline power companies. The lieutenant governor is an up-and-comer with a big future ahead of him, and I’m sure he’ll do well.
Like chigau I’m kind of astonished at the create-your-own-yearbook-adventure thing. I went to a small public high school and was on the yearbook committee. We just took a bunch of pictures during the year and our group of about a dozen or fewer threw the whole thing together.
I also remember a couple of fiascos between us and the printers. When we got our first proofs back, we found a bunch of the pictures had been swapped out into the wrong places and one of them had been duplicated with a mirror image below it. For some bullshit reason the only thing we could fix at that point was changing photo captions to things that either made sense or made a joke of it. Then they somehow lost a bunch of pages in the mail or something – I forget exactly what happened there it’s been so long ago.
As to the governor, I could believe a claim that the pictures got swapped or something, but it would help if the story didn’t keep changing too. Also, if someone ever told me they had a picture of me in blackface, my immediate and continuing response would be an unwaveringly certain, “No, you don’t.” Since we’re not getting that here, I’m less inclined to offer the benefit of the doubt.
Personally, I didn’t have access to the Internet until I was 15 years old. Back then computers and Internet connection were more expensive than nowadays. On top of that, my family was also a lot poorer. Thus I have been able to leave my own traces in the Internet only for the last 11 years. If somebody was to search for it, they could find all the things I said online back when I was 15 (I mostly used my real name for everything I did online). The problem is that I no longer hold many of those opinions I had 11 years ago. And I still remember how I publicly said some stupid things that would be embarrassing for me now if someone did a google search and found those quotes.
For example, my mother is very homophobic. Same goes for the society in which I grew up. When I was 15 years old, I believed that there’s something wrong with LGBTQI people. Luckily, I managed to change this opinion before I realized that I myself belong to this particular group of people.
I suspect that many other people are in the same situation. Our opinions and values change as we get older and (hopefully) wiser. Thus, if you search carefully enough, you should be able to find past dirt about almost everybody. For this reason, if some person wants to become a politician, they should be prepared to say, “I was young and stupid back when I did that thing, I no longer hold these views.” This would sound a lot better than pretending not to recognize one’s own photo.
I certainly don’t want there to be any racists (or homophobes, misogynists, etc.) in public offices. That being said, I have a problem with your justification. In order to be consistent, the same rule ought to apply to every political opinion not just racist attitudes. Thus we would get this problem: some party, let’s say Social Democrats, get 16% of all the votes in a parliament election, which gives them some seats in the parliament. An elected politician from this party gets to make a coalition government. In my opinion, this politician’s duty is to represent those 16% of population who voted for their party, their duty is to advance socialist policies that their party promised to their voters. Thus this politician isn’t representing all the citizens out there (most of whom didn’t vote for them and doesn’t support any socialistic policies), instead they are representing only those people who voted for their party and wanted the socialistic policies this party advocates.
The conclusion is that a racist politician can accurately represent some part of citizens who are also racists and who voted for this politician. I live in a country with coalition governments, and the way I see it is that a bunch of politicians with various different opinions come together to make a government, and there each one of them is only representing only those voters who voted for them. No single politician is representing the entirety of all citizens.
Back at that time all the preppy kids carried big chunky Buck knives (to high school)
That is truly bizarre. Students were required to hunt down and butcher big game for lunch at school?
But then, I went to small rural schools where one would have been thought to be nuts to lug around one of those things when there was no need. They were/are tools.
Did the geeky kids carry Crescent wrenches?
I see you have the Necronomicon’s Gate of Yog-Sothoth on the ol’ yearbook page.
Cthulhu fthagn to you too!