Would you like some cheese with that whine?

A friend asked me the other day why I hadn't done much with this blog lately. No matter what weirdness emanates from Washington and the Human Yam I've been silent. She was surprised I hadn't expressed an opinion on the current movement to remove Confederate monuments.

Well, to be honest, I really don't have one. Granted, most were erected for deplorable reasons -- if they were truly about honoring the bravery of the CSA soldiers and officers, we'd see statues of General James Longstreet all over the South -- but I tend to view them as a local issue. If the majority of residents of Richmond or Durham or Birmingham or wherever want to shuffle Bobby Lee off into the dustbin of history, I figure they should be free to do that without interference. Are they contributing elements to a cultural landscape that shouldn't be messed with? Nope. Culture changes; landscapes evolve. I've never been real keen on preserving anything just for the sake of preservation.

Plus, of course, we don't need large tacky oversized lawn ornaments to remind of us history. There are these things called "books."

I've also actually been far more bemused by the spectacle of young, well educated white guys whining about how oppressed they are. I can understand where some of the bitter old men are coming from -- they've finally had to confront the fact they're never going to be rich, never be famous, and never have a chance to buy a trophy wife -- but when you're a 20-something dude who's still in college? Where's your reason for feeling oppressed, dude? Didn't get rushed by the frat you fantasized about joining? Feeling butt hurt because you went from being the smartest kid in your calculus class back in Podunk and are now the mediocre student learning for the first time that all the other smartest kids in their high schools are now packed into the same college lecture hall as yourself? Not enough Solo cups to go around at the kegger? Can't get laid? It must be the fault of the Illuminati or black or brown people or some vast Zionist conspiracy. It can't possibly be because the dudes need to learn some social skills or maybe take a bath once in awhile.

The tiki torch bros in their white polo shirts, in fact, reminded me of a clueless doofus I knew in grad school. He'd hit the point where he was ABD (all but dissertation) so had begun the job search. He'd done a bit of schmoozing (aka "networking") when our department had guest speakers in for a seminar series so he felt like he had an "in" at one of the schools where he submitted his c.v. He was sure he was a shoo in. After all, his research fit in with what the target department was known for. If memory serves, he did make it past the first cut (preliminary phone interview, maybe) despite the remarkably thin resume (no published papers, no book contract, maybe one presentation at a professional conference, minimal involvement in progessional associations, no Ph.D. in hand yet).

And then the dream department, his sure thing, hired someone else. Even worse, they hired a woman. The doofus went around ranting loudly about affirmative action and tokenism and how terribly, terribly political correctness was running amok. There was no way in hell a mere woman would be better qualified than he was. A few of his fellow students made sympathetic noises, or at least they did until word came through the grapevine as to just who the "underqualified" woman was. She was a person who had (1) a Ph.D. in hand; (2) several publications in peer-reviewed journals; (3) a book in press; and (4) currently held a post-doctoral research fellowship at a top tier institution. Only in the mind of a poor deluded loser unwilling to admit he'd been beat out by a much better qualified candidate would anyone blame tokenism and the evils of affirmative action.

It goes without saying (but I'm saying it anyway) if the winning candidate had been male the loser's response would have been a resigned "Oh crap. No way I could top that dude's record."

Cluelessness in action

Or perhaps I should say racism.

I spent a couple hours at the laundromat yesterday. The one I prefer to patronize locally happens to be a KBIC tribal enterprise; it's one of several local businesses owned and operated by the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community. I like using it because it's always clean and it's pretty rare to see an "out of order" sign on any of the equipment.

As it happened, yesterday was one of those rare times. One of the big front loaders was refusing to accept any coins, which is a sign the cash box needs to be emptied. There were customers who had hoped to use that machine so there was a fair amount of griping. And what form did that griping take?

Well, if I'd been over at the other laundromat, the one in L'Anse, I'd have been hearing complaints about a specific individual, whoever the current owner happens to be. But I wasn't. I was at a tribal-owned enterprise. So if the laundromat has a problem is it because whoever is supposed to collect the coins isn't doing it as often as he or she should? Is it the manager's problem? Nope. It's the "damn Indians can't do anything right." This gets said with complete seriousness despite the fact the facility is clean and every other machine in the building is working just fine.

That pronouncement is then followed with a bunch of comments about the "damn Indians," their subsidized housing, the fact tribal members get a discount at the KBIC-owned gas stations, and a litany of other complaints.

And this, dear reader, is what bigotry looks like. When the white-owned laundromat is disgustingly dirty, the front loaders are all out of order, and the dryers rip you off, it's because the owner needs to find a better manager. When one machine isn't working at the KBIC-owned laundromat, it's the whole tribe that's to blame. And not only is the whole tribe to blame, one temporarily out of order machine can serve as justification for criticizing every other enterprise the local Ojibwe have ever undertaken.

Even more depressing, now that I think about it, is that if I were to tell this story to some of my local acquaintances, they wouldn't pick up on the internalized racism at all. They'd agree with the ranter -- one malfunctioning machine is indeed proof that an entire group of people can't do anything right.

Jesus wept.  

I guess there weren't any white actresses available

I've been watching with some bemusement the complaints about Joseph Fiennes being cast as Michael Jackson in an upcoming movie. The truly bizarre part, at least from a disinterested bystander's perspective, is seeing the side-by-side photos of Jackson and Fiennes and realizing that Jackson looks a heck of a lot paler than the white guy picked to play him. I can understand why black actors would be upset -- Jackson was, after all, African American -- but the reality is that between the make-up Jackson wore to cover up the blotchiness caused by vitiligo and the various plastic surgeries he'd had I'm not sure there's a black male actor on the planet who could play him. And I'm not sure any of the female black actors who might have the nose would be too thrilled with having to wear all that whiteface. One of the panelists on The Nightly Show suggested that Jackson's sister LaToya would have been a good choice, but I seem to recall that while LaToya may have paid for the same face as her brother, she's definitely a different body type. LaToya has curves.

Casting actors for roles in bio-pics is inherently tricky, especially if the bio-pic is about someone who's either still around or died so recently we all still have a mental image of what that person should look like. Whoever gets cast as someone famous should bear at least a superficial resemblance to the original person. Fiennes actually comes pretty close to looking like Michael Jackson: thin nose, strong chin, similar ears. He can also act, although his career must have been rather stagnant lately when all the references to him are citing "Shakespeare in Love," a movie that came out so long ago I actually saw it in a theater. In short, looked at from a purely rational perspective, Fiennes playing Jackson makes sense.

On the other hand, given the recent kerfuffle over the Oscar nominations, I find it hard to believe that somewhere in Great Britain (the movie in question is apparently a BBC production) there wasn't a young skinny unknown black actor who could have done a credible job. Who knows -- given the premise of the movie (a road trip that Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brando supposedly took) maybe the whole point of the casting is to make things even more bizarre than the reality was. A road trip? Brando, Taylor, and Jackson? Which one of them drove? And why? And just who is the target audience for the proposed film? It actually sounds so weird that maybe black actors everywhere should be feeling grateful they never got a call from their agents about auditioning for this particular role. 

You lost. Get over it.

It's been more than 150 years since Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia lost the Battle of Appomattox Court House and ended the Civil War, but it appears there are still Southerners who haven't figured that out. The state of South Carolina, for example, persists in flying the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia on the state capitol grounds. Why?

The whole obsession with the battle flag has always puzzled me. Even before I learned that Bedford Forrest and the Ku Klux Klan revived it as a symbol meant to strike fear in the hearts of former slaves during Reconstruction, I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to brag about being on the losing side of history when it came to an issue like chattel slavery. What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to convince yourself that your great great grandfather died fighting for some noble cause when that noble cause was to preserve human bondage?

Actually, I know the answer to that one: states' rights. Every time the subject of the war come up, someone waving a battle flag will start blathering on about states' rights while conveniently forgetting that the right the Confederates wanted to preserve was the right to keep slaves. The states that wrote declarations of secession all were explicit in naming the right to keep slaves as their motivation. So did the individual state constitutions. As I wrote in a post back in February, there was absolutely no doubt back in the 1860s as to what motivated the secessionists to secede.

Nonetheless, every time the subject of removing the flag comes up from public places where it's still proudly displayed, people persist in ignoring its actual history. Is it really that difficult to admit that past generations, people's parents or grandparents, were racist assholes but we're now living in more enlightened times? There's always a lot of blathering about a "glorious cause" and Southern pride. What the heck is there to be proud of in committing an act of treason because you want to keep people in chains? And then to insist on wrapping yourself in a flag that was the preferred symbol of the Ku Klux Klan? You might as well be walking around wearing a tee-shirt proclaiming "I'm racist as hell."

In short, it's long past time for South Carolina to jettison some of its more unsavory baggage. Whether they will, though, is doubtful. If anything, it's probable the nation-wide pressure on the state to remove the flag will just cause enough of the legislators to dig in their heels to prevent it from coming down. The war may have ended in April 1865, but some people still don't want to admit they lost.  

The thin-skinned and not-too-bright blue line

Over the past few weeks there's been a lot of bloviating in the media, lots of faux outrage, over the shooting of two New York Police Department officers. They were ambushed by a nutjob with a gun, a person with a long history of erratic and illegal behavior, a fellow who in the normal course of events would have been labeled a lone wolf, a mentally ill victim of the system who just didn't get the help he needed when he should have.

I say "in the normal course of events" because there is a remarkably long history of law enforcement officers being targeted by nutjobs whose obsessions have been stoked by ideologues who never bother to think about the consequences of their words. I can even name a bunch of the shooters without having to do a whole lot of Googling: Eric Frein (2014) and Richard Poplawski (2009) in Pennsylvania, Jared and Amanda Miller (2014) in Nevada, and Jerry and Joe Kane (2010) in Arkansas all pop up pretty fast in web searches. In every case there was a clear link with ideology being actively promoted by multiple people in the media. But you know what else is true of those cases? Every single shooter was white, so there was no hysteria about how every single white person was responsible for those guys' actions, no mass protests by aggrieved police officers, no ranting about the damage being done by activists. Nope. Why would there be? Apparently it's a given that when a white person does something bad, he or she is acting solely on his or her own with absolutely no outside influences affecting behavior.

Oh, every time there's an incident, a few brave souls dare to question the rhetoric used by right-wing bloviators like Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh, but they get drowned out pretty fast by the rhetoric about needing better mental health care and by the troubled lone wolf apologists. The stories also fell off the mainstream media news radar remarkably fast. After all, no one really wants to hear that white people engage in violent, sociopathic behavior, although you'd think the NRA would want to hype it -- if the guy next door might be an armed nut, then maybe I should own a few guns, too. In any case, it's odd, isn't it, that when it's white guy after white guy ambushing the police, there's no possible way they could have been influenced by anything other than the voices in their heads but when it's a black guy doing the shooting suddenly it's activists like Al Sharpton who are responsible? Who would have thought that the Rev had that much influence?

Bottom line: if you're really worried about the thin-skinned blue line, the guys who actually don't run that huge a risk of dying in the line of duty unless it's from choking on a doughnut (loggers have a higher occupational fatality rate than law enforcement, so do commercial fishermen), get pissed off about the media blow-hards that keep painting government as the enemy. Authority is authority, and when some lunatic decides he's going to stand up to the government, he's going to ambush the authority figures that are closest to home -- and that's going to be the local sheriff's deputies, a small town cop doing a routine traffic stop, or a Park Service ranger walking over to tell someone to keep his dogs on a leash. So go after the idiots with the Gadsden flags and tea bags tied to their hats. Or, better yet, go after the ideologues like Sarah Palin who babble mindlessly about "second amendment solutions." Because those are the people who really are encouraging the nutjobs to shoot cops.

And, as a side note, the real reason the cops in New York are so pissed at Mayor DeBlasio has very little to do with the shootings of Officers Ramos and Liu. It's just a convenient highly public way to mouth off about how much they hate the Mayor. The underlying problem is the department is in contract negotiations and, unlike previous administrations, DeBlasio doesn't believe the NYPD can do no wrong. He's had the nerve to question both the department and past policy, like the discredited broken windows theory and stop and frisk, that targeted minorities. The city and PD are currently operating under a Memorandum of Agreement, not an actual labor contract, and contract negotiations have not been going the way the Police Officers' Association would prefer. Naturally, journalism having pretty much disappeared into the toilet in the past couple of decades, you can count the number of media outlets that have reported on this aspect of the problem on one hand and still have several fingers left over.

Bring on the tinfoil hats

As one might have predicted, the right-wing's reaction to President Obama's re-election has brought the crazies out in full force. You know, after every election you know there are going to be sore losers, folks who are absolutely convinced that the only reason their guy (or gal) lost is the other side stuffed the ballot box. They'll rant about voter fraud and other shenanigans, but, other than a lot of grumbling that most of us recognize as being a way to vent after a disappointing result, they're generally reasonably sane in their responses.

And then there's the stunning cognitive dissonance displayed by the tinfoil hat types on the far right. We've spent the past 4 years hearing about how President Obama was an extreme left-wing radical socialist who was going to force us all to live in some sort of European-style socialist hell hole. So now that the President has won re-election, how are those tinfoil hat types reacting? The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on various reactions around the country and quoted this gem: “If you can immigrate to Europe you start making plans. … " You got it. The radical right spent 4 years ranting about the evils of Europe with its high taxes and heavy-handed socialist agenda, but now that their dreams here have been crushed, where should they go? Europe. 

Of course, part of the reason for retreating to Europe is the angry white base of the Republican Party is not at all happy about the shifting demographics in the U.S. They see their bubble of white privilege steadily shrinking and it scares the bejesus out of them. They can't handle it -- they keep talking about the country going to hell in the proverbial handbasket because whites will be a minority in a few decades. Apparently they think it's going to turn into Haiti overnight if old rich white guys stop running it. More cognitive dissonance (or perhaps denial). I've been hearing for years that there's no such thing as "white privilege," but now that it seems to be poised to vanish, lots and lots of white people are freaking out. Maybe it's beginning to sink in with a few of the bigots that actions have consequences. When you treat some people like shit for decades, odds are they're not going to be particularly inclined to be nice to you when the balance of power shifts. 

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Specious arguments

I'm not particularly inclined to comment on the Trayvon Martin case -- it's been talked to death elsewhere -- but I have been noticing one particular piece of sophistry that keeps coming up over and over and over. It's a classic among the specious arguments that crawl out of the woodwork whenever racism is an issue: more blacks are killed by blacks than by whites.

So? And more whites are killed by whites than by blacks. Most homicides are committed by people who know the victim. You're a lot more likely to get shot by your brother-in-law or your next door neighbor than you are to get shot by a total stranger. If you're black, odds are most of your close acquaintances (friends and relatives) are also black so odds are anyone deciding to kill you will be black, too. If you're white, most of your close acquaintances are also going to be white so your murderer is likely to be white.

If, however, you have an incident such as the Trayvon Martin case -- someone shot by a total stranger -- it doesn't really matter that most murders involve acquaintances who share certain demographic characteristics. It's irrelevant. It's like looking at a case of arson and saying "But why aren't you talking about all the fires that get started by lightning strikes?" Tossing in black-on-black violence in an attempt to deflect attention from racism is specious, an attempt at sophistry to nullify concern about the real issues  raised in the Martin case: possible racial profiling by a wannabe vigilante and incompetent law enforcement by the local police department. It's not as despicable as trying to retrospectively make a murder justifiable by smearing the reputation of the victim, but it still isn't pretty. At the very least, it's intellectually lazy. It also signals an unwillingness to engage with the reality of racism by trying to conflate two different issues and pretending that the existence of one problem means we can ignore the seriousness of the other. 

Stunning display of cluenessness

I was watching The Ed Show on MSNBC last night, and got to witness one of the all-time most clueless displays of white ignorance and racism I've seen in a long time.  The panel discussion was about Dr. Laura's use of the infamous N word in talking with a caller.  The caller had a legitimate problem, and Dr. Laura responded the way she always does -- blame the victim -- and accused the caller of being too sensitive. 

Dr. Laura also did the usual psuedo-naive white person's lament of "I don't get it.  Why is it wrong for me to say nigger, but black people use it all the time?"  The simple answer, one that doesn't even get into the long and troubled history of race relations in this country, is "For the same reason that the Irish can call each other drunks and Poles can tell Polish jokes without being called bigots, but people outside their ethnicity cannot, you dumb bitch."  But that isn't what floored me about the discussion on The Ed Show. 

No, that honor goes to Heidi Harris, Las Vegas conservative radio talk show host.  In debating whether or not Dr. Laura did something wrong, Harris told Joe Madison (a black progressive with an XM satellite radio show) Dr. Laura doesn't dislike black people.  Madison thought the same thing that I did -- that Harris was going to pull out that tired line about "some of her best friends. . ."  We were wrong.  Harris dropped so far into cluelessness that even my jaw dropped.  Her defense of Dr. Laura?  The woman can't be a bigot -- she has a black employee (a bodyguard). 

Holy fuck.  That's in the same class as "I really like Hispanic people. Our gardener Jose is a gem."  No wonder the right wing comes across as a bunch of tinfoil hat types.  They really are dumb as rocks.

Looking for a land that never was: Whitopia

I just finished reading a brief article on white flight, the growth of the homogeneous exurbs flourishing in Utah and Idaho, in the October 2009 issue of American Prospect.  The author of the piece, Rich Benjamin, has written a book on the topic -- Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America -- that, to be honest, I'll probably never read.  Normally I eschew judging books by their covers, but I have a hunch Mr. Benjamin is simply retelling a story that's an American classic:  the grass is always greener (or the neighbors more like you) someplace else.

As for Whitopia, I've lived there.  I grew up there, spent most of my formative years in the upper Midwest where the only people of color a person ever saw were the Pullman and dining car attendants working on the trains that rolled through town and the Native Americans who back then spent a great deal of time busily denying they were Native American (easy to do when your last name was Heikinen or LaFernier).  No doubt to folks burnt out on urban life and looking for a nostalgic, safe, family friendly place to live it looked great.  It probably still looks great to anyone fleeing diversity -- last time I was home there was a fair amount of discussion revolving around the shocking fact there were now at least three (count 'em -- three!!) black prison guards working at Baraga Super Max. 

I can see where for some stressed out white dude looking at the White House and wondering where his country went, Baraga County, Michigan would seem like a utopia.  All those white people, small churches, sense of community, . . .  all very bucolic and reminiscent of kinder, gentler, whiter times.  Everyone thinking just like him, looking just like him, sharing the same values. . . 

It would be pure fantasy, of course.  The small towns I lived in until I went wandering off to college and the military way back when may have looked like Mayberry, RFD, but they were no more safe havens, trouble-free rural paradises, than today's small towns are.  Most murders are committed by acquaintances, so moving to Whitopia isn't going to stop your spouse from killing you.  Besides, serial killers live in small towns, too -- just ask the Wisconsites who remember Ed Gein.  Most burglaries are committed by teenagers, the kids down the street, so your garage is still going to get broken into.  Amazing amounts of domestic meth are manufactured in small towns -- ask the law enforcement folks in Iowa and Wisconsin who are dealing with that headache now -- so you're not going to be able to leave that particular fear behind by loading the U-Haul and getting out of L.A. or Phoenix.  You can't escape reality by running from it.

Continued amazement at stupidity on parade

Update: It is now Friday morning, almost 24 hours after I started writing this post, and the MSM is still obsessing, but now it's "should Obama have said what he thought about his friend being arrested?" Then they did a sound bite of the cop being totally unapologetic, saying he did absolutely nothing wrong, and that Professor Gates "had total control of the situation. Oh, and he shouldn't have said bad stuff about my mother." Or words to that effect. WTF?! The person in control should have been the guy in the uniform, the one with the gun and the civil authority. Letting some relatively small, physically disabled (Professor Gates needs a cane to walk) middle-aged academic goad you into arresting him does not speak well for the officer's cognitive abilities. Behaving stupidly doesn't begin to cover it.

I made the mistake of turning on the television this morning. The main stream media have finally decided to stop telling me that Michael Jackson is still dead, and have moved on to a couple of new (sort of)obsessions, both tied to racism, and both of which I really hadn't intended to say anything about because other people have already said it better, but I feel the need to vent:

Item 1. Noted scholar Henry Louis Gates being treated like a criminal in his own home. Lots and lots of blathering on and on by (what a surprise) white people about how Gates should have behaved. You know, done a little shuck and jive and maybe a Bojangles soft shoe shuffle, just let the man in the uniform know that Gates recognized both their places in society, and all would have been well. Shades of "Yassuh, Massa, just let me fetch you a mint julep, maybe shine your boots, and we'll pretend none of that uppity stuff ever happened." Hey, I know there are a lot of good law enforcement officers out there, but I also know there are some power-tripping jerks in uniforms -- and it sounds like Professor Gates had a run-in with the latter. Would Gates have been treated the same way if he was a middle-aged white guy? I doubt it. Even moronic cops tend to recognize white guys living in a good neighborhood might have some influence with local politicians. And would the typical middle-aged white guy have meekly allowed himself to be treated like a criminal even after producing proof he was in his own house? I doubt that, too.

Still, I think I'd be disturbed in any case by the immediate assumption of so many people that if the police say or do something, it's automatically right. This isn't some third world banana republic. The last time I checked we still had the right in this country to question authority, and even to be obnoxious in the way we do so (especially when standing in our own kitchens). Any cop who hasn't mastered the art of placating angry citizens (i.e., defusing a situation) instead of bullying them into getting even more ticked off probably needs to look for a different line of work. But that's a subject for a separate post.

2. The birth certificate. When are the tinfoil hat types going to give it a rest? We get it. You're all annoyed that someone who, in your warped world, is the wrong color is now in the White House. You can't come right out (unless you're so far over the edge you're openly a Klan member) and admit that's why you're ticked off. Even hard-core bigots have learned that it doesn't pay to openly admit to being a bigot. You can't bitch about his qualifications -- the man is educated, erudite, and obviously a heck of a lot smarter than most of us. So you obsess about the birth certificate. Which, incidentally, has been produced multiple times, starting back during the campaign, which is yet another reason why every time this subject comes up the people obsessing about it look more and more like morons. The birthers have actually progressed to suggesting the birth announcements in the Hawaiian newspapers were faked, too (hard to do when back then birth announcements in newspapers came from either the hospital or the county clerk's office, not the parents or grandparents). As a commenter elsewhere noted, "What's next? Demanding the US Geological Survey produce official certificates that the earth is round?"

Oh well, there is a bright side to the lunacy: Lou Dobbs has climbed on to the bus to crazyville. Maybe that's going to get him a fast ticket over to Faux News, and I'll never have to hear his voice again. (I watch CNN because the S.O. is a Jack Cafferty fan, which means that every so often we're treated to Dobbs doing a promo for his show.)

You can't make this stuff up

I have no substantive comments. I'm just incredibly happy I don't live in this guy's district.

Georgia GOP Congressman Calls Obama 'Uppity'

Lynn Westmoreland, a conservative Republican from Georgia, let slip today what critics have been saying is the subtext of many of the attacks on Barack Obama: He's "uppity." According to The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, Westmoreland was discussing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's acceptance speech outside the House chamber today when he veered into his thoughts on Michelle and Barack Obama.

"Just from what little I've seen of her and Mister Obama, Senator Obama, they're a member of an elitist class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

When a reporter sought clarification on the racially loaded word, Westmoreland replied, "Uppity, yeah."

Reality check for anyone who thinks racism is dead

Depressing article in this morning's Washington Post:

Racist Incidents Give Some Volunteers Pause

An excerpt:

For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

Doesn't surprise me much as I've been the recipient of some pretty twisted and hateful e-mails forwarded by acquaintances whose politics are a tad more to the right than my own. I do have a fairly good idea of how the wackaloons back in the hollers, so to speak, are thinking, but I can see how it could all come as a shock to college kids who are obviously far more cosmopolitan and open minded than the small-town Bubbas they're running into.

Saying it's been unreported is kind of an understatement, too. If anything the MSM media has been falling over backwards repeating a "racism is dead/racism doesn't exist/Jeremiah Wright is delusional" mantra.

Oh well, I'll just keep my fingers crossed that the most ignorant members of the general population are also the same folks who are too lazy (or stupid) to bother to register to vote.