Some Stories

So, I didn't really intend for this to be a political blog. I made it when I was single as a place to just pour out thoughts about different things. It's been getting too political lately, so now I'm just going to put up a couple of stories about my life (and....PICTURES!).

Story 1

I met my wife thanks to my turkey-cooking skillz. I cooked my first turkey on my mission, then cooked several more while I was at BYU. Anyway, soon after I got to Cambridge, I got a call from this girl I'd seen before in the ward, Annie Siddoway. I found it quite flattering that she'd call me, since I thought she was quite pretty. Well, she was actually calling because she needed to cook a turkey for a dinner she was putting on for the guys that had helped her move, but her oven was broken. Since she knew my roommates (in fact, she had dated one of them) and we lived only a couple of blocks from her new apartment, she called my roommates to ask if she could use our oven. But only I was home.

So, soon enough there was a knock at the door, and when I opened it there stood Annie, holding a raw turkey. I showed her to the oven. Soon, however, it became apparent that she (and her roommate that was with her. Of course she never would have come alone) had never cooked a turkey before. Well. I showed her how to cook a turkey. I think she was especially impressed when I momentarily disappeared into my room, reappearing moments later with a baster. Her version of what she was thinking at the time: "Ok, this guy is either incredibly weird or incredibly cute." She has since determined that the former is always true, while the latter is only occasionally true.

To make a long story short, it takes a few hours to cook a turkey, so I had a captive audience. And the rest is history.



Story 2

I have a very odd sense of humor. I'm the kind of man who loves the Muppets, Ask a Ninja, and videos about blenders powered by v8 engines. I also love unintentional comedy--when actors are very much trying to be serious but only succeed in being ridiculous.

This is what makes it so wonderful that Annie and I have so much fun together. There are not that many people that understand or enjoy my sense of humor--most people can enjoy certain parts of it, but Annie enjoys almost all of it. As demonstrated by the gifts she has gotten me so far.

Our first holiday as a couple (not yet a married couple) was Christmas of last year. As she thought of what to get me for Christmas, Annie remembered that one of the most memorable of our early dates was the time we went to see High School Musical 3. As far as unintentional comedy goes, it doesn't get much better than Zac Efron sings and dances out his teenage angst in a high school gym as hundreds of computer-animated basketballs fall around him and lightning flashes in the background. So, for Christmas, Annie got me a Zac Efron t-shirt. There was a lot of laughter at the time...we're still not quite sure what to do with it. I won't wear it in public and she won't let me hang it above her side of the bed.

Valentine's Day brought another fun gift from Annie. Earlier we had discussed one of the kinds of gifts that I loved seeing on Valentine's Day in high school--stuffed animals inside of balloons. To me, there just aren't many more ridiculous looking things. Well. Annie got me socks (Smart Wool socks. Awesome), but had the nerve to go to a gift place and ask them to put the socks into a balloon with confetti and the whole bit. While she definitely got some weird looks from everyone at the store, I absolutely loved it.

Conclusion

That's probably enough stories for one post. I do want to leave everyone with a couple more pictures, just in case you're one day called upon to recognize me or Annie in a crowd and it's been years since you've seen either of us.

An Account of Democratic Self-Government

The following is from Ronald Dworkin:

To achieve that sense of a national partnership in self-government, it is not enough for a community to treat citizens only as if they were shareholders in a company, giving them votes only in periodic elections of officials. It must design institutions, practices, and conventions that allow them to be more engaged in public life, and to make a contribution to it, even when their views do not prevail. Two conditions are necessary for this:

a) First, each citizen must have a fair and reasonably equal opportunity not only to hear the views of others as these are published or broadcast, but to command attention for his own views, either as a candidate for office or as a member of a politically active group committed to some program or conviction.

b) Second, the tone of public discourse must be appropriate to the deliberations of a partnership or joint venture rather than the selfish negotiations of commercial rivals or military enemies.

If we embraced that attractive account of the conditions of self-government, we would have to accept that democracy—self-government by the people as a whole—is always a matter of degree. It will never be perfectly fulfilled, because it seems incredible that the politics of a pluralistic contemporary society could ever become as egalitarian in access and as deliberative in tone as the standards I just described demand. We would then understand democracy not as a pedigree a nation earns just by adopting some constitutional structure of free elections, but as an ideal toward which any would-be democratic society must continually strive.

We would also have to accept not only that America falls short of important democratic ideals, but that in the age of television politics the shortfall has steadily become worse. The influence of wealth unequally distributed is greater, and its consequences more profound, than at any time in the past, and our politics seem daily more rancorous, ill-spirited, and divisive.

So this analysis of democracy as self-government confirms—and helps to explain—the growing sense of despair about American politics that I began this essay by trying to describe. How should we respond to that despair? We must understand the First Amendment as a challenge, not a barrier to improvement. We must reject the blanket principle the Supreme Court relied on in Buckley, that government should never attempt to regulate the public political discourse in any way, in favor of a more discriminating principle that condemns the constraints that do violate genuine principles of democracy—that deny citizens information they need for political judgment or that deny equality of citizenship for people with unpopular beliefs or tastes, for example—but that nevertheless permits us to try to reverse our democracy's decline.