This week Maine voters threw out the state’s new and not yet enacted law legalizing gay marriage. after both sides poured lots of money into outreach and ads and voter mobilization. And, not surprisingly, people are upset, sad, and angry.

It makes me angry too; this endless series of referenda, in which our neighbors go out an vote on whether gay and lesbian people should be treated equally by our government, isn’t just a political battle; it’s humiliation. Most Americans would agree that the residents of a town shouldn’t get to vote on whether black people should be allowed to live there, or on whether Jews should be allowed to build temples in their states. If we left these questions up to popular votes, we’d have had slavery into the 20th century and the deed restrictions in my neighborhood would probably still prevent me from selling my home to a non-white person.

Add to that the major source of funding for anti-marriage groups in Maine: the National Organization for Marriage, a group that has been declining to obey campaign finance rules in several states, and which many of us suspect is basically a money laundering operation to allow churches – primarily the Catholic and Mormon churches – to spend money on political activities without endangering their tax-free status – and the whole thing looks less than an exercise in direct democracy and more like a sham. (NOM could put an end to those suspicions by simply obeying disclosure laws in the states where they have been active; they have declined to do so. Reasonable people may draw their own conclusions from that.)

And so after election day, I am left with two questions for gay people. First, how angry are we, really. And second, why do we participate in this sham?

We are, as far as I can tell, angry enough to tweet and comment on blogs and make Facebook groups. We’re even angry enough to go to Washington and book hotel rooms and march around and then go to parties at night.

What most of us are apparently not angry enough to do is what others have done in the past: actual civil disobedience. Mainers: your neighbors just announced that you are not equal. You are not really citizens of your state. You ran a well-executed campaign, and still lost; the unfortunate fact is that there’s always a sad, embarrassing aspect to these things. We drag out our most clean cut faces and basically beg the people around us: Please don’t declare our families nonexistent.

Are you really angry? Are you angry enough to do what hundreds did after the Supreme Court upheld laws that made your sex life illegal in 1987, and to try to walk into the Court and get arrested in the process? Are you angry enough to file joint tax returns next year and wait for the IRS and your state government to come after you? Are you angry enough to show up en masse to the town clerk’s office and refuse to leave until you are given a marriage license?

(Imagine if every same sex couple in America sent off a joint tax return next year with the “married” box checked. How long would it take the IRS to even get through the pile of rejected returns? I suspect it would be like the foreclosure situation now, where people live in houses for over a year without paying a mortgage because the bank just hasn’t gotten to their foreclosure yet.)

Back in the earlier days of the AIDS epidemic, when people were far more desperate (no good antivirals) and the government and medical establishment far less active in fighting the disease, ACT UP was the result. And we saw ACT UP members shutting down Wall Street and blocking bridges in San Francisco.

So forgive me if I see lots of gay people who are angry enough to tweet about it, but that’s all.

Which leads me to the second question: why participate in this nonsense? The next time someone tries to launch a “Gay people: OK?” referendum, the right response is to go to court and block it, because the right to equal treatment under the law is not subject to popular vote. If that fails, the right next step is to follow the signature collectors and form a circle around them and block them, and get arrested doing it. And to form a human wall around polling places on election day, because an election that includes a vote on basic rights is not an American election.

Now, I know, most of us do not want to get arrested. That includes me. But I’m a lot more inclined to write checks to a legal defense fund for people interfering with an immoral and un-American attempt to create a separate class of citizens in the guise of democracy than to write a check for someone to make “please don’t kick me” ads.

Gay people are a relatively small minority in this country. We are, however, a big enough minority to be a very big headache – disrupting daily life in peaceful but highly annoying ways, clogging up the courts, and so on.

If you are really angry, act like an angry person. If you really think, as I do, that the whole idea of these referenda is appalling and wrong, don’t participate with them – interfere with them. Get every gay person in the state to sign a petition for a referendum on whether Christians should be allowed to have pets, or to make divorce illegal, or some other kind of nonsense. It would not be hard, in many states, to fill ballots up with insane nonsense like that to make a point.

There’s a point where participating in these things is just playing your role in your own oppression. It’s sad and it will crush your soul. Stop it.

It’s Election Day here in the U.S., so if you live here, don’t forget to vote.

For the last twelve months we’ve been hearing from the lunatic fringe about how our new president is about to have a coup, put people into gulags (tastefully decorated with multicultural art and images of same-sex couples), turn us into an evil socialist state by making it possible for us to buy health insurance that actually insures us, etc., etc. I can be pretty cynical but I have been surprised that there are so many people with even less faith in the political system than me. Today is the day that citizens can boot out the people who they don’t like (if they choose to bother).

Here in Houston we’re electing a mayor and city council. (Well, more likely we will choose two candidates for a runoff for mayor.) Very low turnout is expected. Considering how much Houstonians like to complain about their property taxes, the police (we have an understaffed department and need more, which costs money, which comes back to that property tax issue, but… oh well), the lack of planning in the city, the results of that lack of planning in the city (think of the endless Ashby High Rise whinging), and so on. Today is the day we pick the leader of city government and the council that passes laws. And a majority of Houstonians will not participate.

(A message for those, although I doubt many are reading: shut up. Stay home today, you cede your right to complain without sounding like a buffoon until the next election.)

I am one of those people who vote ever time, even when there’s almost nothing to vote for. I’m also one of those people who makes sure to read up on the candidates before voting. If you haven’t been one of those people in the past, I’d like to suggest that you become one.

My guess for today in Houston is no surprises in the council races and Annise Parker and Peter Brown heading into the runoff. We’ll see if I am right!

So we’re seeing lots of the new Texas plates on vehicles now…

OK… what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, right: bleah.

It’s ugly, and much harder to read in real life than that image would suggest. It’s even worse than the old plate…

… with its insane “cowboy, oil well, space shuttle, what else can we cram in there?” image – but definitely worse. And the colors are brighter than they are in that image, so it can clash with almost every vehicle it’s attached too. (Our ad agency did an article about it in their newsletter; it was titled, “The new Texas license plate: a design tragedy.”)

Of course, you can opt for a specialty plate to avoid it. But… those are generally really ugly, too. And more than a little strange. You can, for example, celebrate our agricultural history.

Yay! The fabric of our lives, indeed! By choosing this one you will, at least, be giving money for scholarships for agriculture students.

There are tons of plates through which you can donate money to something or other, from arts education to marine mammal rescue and even one that reads “Insure Texas Kids” that gives money to the state to raise awareness of health and medical insurance programs (which the state grudgingly offers over Gov. Perry’s objections – perhaps a plate that actually pays for medical care for poor people would be a better option, as this one sounds like “flushing money down the toilet while making a statement that you care about poor kids, just not enough to do anything like vote for politicians who think we have a responsibility to keep them healthy.”)

The weirdest of these is our very own 9/11 plate, which manages to use appallingly bad design to trivialize a major tragedy:

That graphic looks like a scouting merit badge for mass killing.

Apart from making you want to claw your eyes out, this plate has a really weird feature: if for some reason you are able to slap one on the back of your car and not be too embarrassed to ever leave the house again, part of your fee will go toward fighting terrorism in this unique way:

From the $30 specialty plate fee, $22 goes to the state highway fund to acquire right-of-way, construct, maintain and police public roadways and to administer Texas traffic and safety laws on those roads.

Given that Texans are in far greater danger from the horrifying driving skills of their fellow Texans than from any terrorist, this is perhaps appropriate.

This one, though, is my favorite.

It wouldn’t be enough to put “Texas Association of Realtors” on it and have a picture of a house or something. No… “I AM a Texas Realtor!” I am, I am! This is the license plate equivalent of “Ask me about my grandchildren!” It tells you: run, run, run for your life!

It’s fitting for a profession that is a basically an honest way to make a living (there’s nothing wrong with brokering complex transactions for people) but which takes itself frighteningly, painfully seriously. You can see it in the way that their national association goes bananas over the use of the world “realtor” (demanding that it always be capitalized and include a registration mark, which is precisely why I have done neither). Or, as just happened, when I see a friend on Facebook is now friends with someone called “John Doe-Realtor.” Doe-Realtor, I thought, what an unusual name!

(You know how I picked my real estate agent? One, he helped MWK find his house. Two, he’s a friend, and a good guy. Three, he never, ever, ever treated me like a prospective client, ever; I went to him because I like him and trust him. Sadly, many in the profession make you feel like a piece of bloody meat floating on the water over a bunch of sharks.)

I see these plates on cars now and then, and generally think, “I bet that person is really annoying when they trap you in a corner at a party.”

In a close second for favorite is this one. If I put this on my Rabbit I would have the absolute gayest car in the Lone Star State.

State fruit of Texas! And here I thought that was a pageant they hold at JR’s.

To me, it appears to be a nondescript sprawl of grass and mud with a few trees. It’s surrounded by a chain link fence and tucked between the a jogging path and a busy road. There are a few fountains just inside the airlock style gates that make it easy to enter with your dog and let him off leash. As dog parks go, it’s nothing special; no water features (unless it’s rained recently, as it had when we went Friday, and then there are big muddy puddles).

To Teddy, it is the most interesting place in the world. This was our third trip, and he was excited before we got into the parking lot. As we came closer, he strained on his leash, even though there were no other dogs there on a cool Friday morning. He stood by the gate, tail wagging, eager to get inside and… sniff.

It surprised me the first time we went. Chasing a ball? Not interesting. The other dog that showed up? Not interesting. (The other dog wasn’t a runner, so just wasn’t that much fun for Teddy.) But the ground? The fence? The trees? Captivating.

As I watched Teddy run around, I started thinking about his nose, and his brain. When we try to imagine what the world looks like to a dog, I think most of us imagine it looking more or less like what we perceive, but with stronger smells. We know that the canine sense of smell is amazing – I’ve read that a dog can smell a few spoonfuls of sugar in a swimming pool. But with our human minds and our tendency to anthropomorphize our pets, we imagine them seeing the world more of less the way we do.

Watching Teddy in the dog park, it occurred to me that this is probably all wrong. For us the world is primarily a visual place. No surprise, as our eyes are our most acute and important sensory organs. Hearing isn’t that far behind, and smells and tastes are evocative and incite powerful emotional reactions in us, but the eyes are the main event.

But given a dog’s amazing sense of smell, perhaps everything is reordered in their minds. They can see and hear and taste and feel, but they can smell in ways we can’t even imagine. That must have an effect on how their brains make sense of the world. And so I tried to imagine Teddy at the park, taking it in as a smell-oriented creature.

That drab patch of grass that dogs run over all day long must be amazing.

For us, smells are an accent, the spice that sets the tone of the scene. For Teddy, I think those scents are the scene. And so that dog park must be filled with a cacophony of dog "voices," telling him stories of what’s gone on: I was here. I ran here. I rolled on this grass. I was afraid. I was happy. I’m a big dog. I have long hair and left some behind. We chased things. We growled. I saw my friend. I wanted to go home.

What depth does it have? With a sense of smell so acute, can a dog tell the difference between the scent of a happy dog and a frightened dog? A healthy dog and a sick dog?

I know there are researchers who study these things, but that’s different than really knowing, and I wondered as I watched him what the world really feels like to Teddy and his sharp nose. Probably something a visually-wired human brain can never quite understand.

Teddy was eventually distracted from it all by the arrival of Carla, a big white poodle who loved to run. The two of them shot off making giant arcs around the park while Carla’s owner and I chatted about dog training. After a while Teddy was tired, Carla and owner had to go, and our morning at the park was done.

As we walked down the path to the parking lot, I imagined the park "sounding" like a receding din to Teddy, a movie still playing behind us, a thousand dog "smell-voices" that now included Teddy’s, playing endlessly on the grass until the next dog arrived to make his contribution. In the car on the way home, Teddy sniffed at his paws, listening to what they told him.

So, you know how President Obama declared a swine flu emergency? This is a move that makes it easier to deal with the spread of the disease by waiving some Medicare and Medicaid processing rules in order to speed up treatment.

What does it mean?

Oh, World Nuts, you are entertaining, except for the being real and having readers and thus being kind of frightening part.

The article beyond that headline confirms that yes, it’s the former, but goes on to point out that just because the president made did something totally ordinary that any president would probably have done does not mean he’s not planning the overthrow of American democracy!

"Obama just declared H1N1 a national emergency," wrote a WND reader in an e-mail, "Here we go with martial law."

An article by Kurt Nimmo of InfoWars took the worry a step further, wondering if the White House’s declaration engaged certain measures of the National Emergencies Act:

"In the weeks ahead," Nimmo writes, "we may witness a move toward martial law, forced vaccination and internment of those who refuse."

Also, the secret aliens who control Washington will fly out of Nancy Pelosi’s butt. And there will be a special episode of So You Think You Can Dance (And We Think You’ll Watch Anything, Suckers!) featuring paraplegics. (Wait… that actually sounds possible.)

However… as insane as WorldNet Daily is, they do make a valid point amidst all the nuttiness. (Yes, I really just said that.)

The news stories on the declaration were just awful; they said that the emergency declaration had been made, and it removed some roadblocks. What did it remove? What was the point? Not a peep.

In the face of shitty journalism, dutifully pasted off the AP wire by the “editors” at every around the country, one cannot blame readers for wondering, “What does this mean?” That was my first thought.

(Assuming it means that you’ll shortly be rounded up and placed in an internment camp where you’ll be subjected to H1N1 vaccines, gay porn, and adorable photos of the First Family is still insane, however.)

One might have thought that someone in that vast typing pool called “the US news media” someone might have, oh, looked up the details and included them before running the story. Sadly, no; there are other important journalistic duties at hand, like copying down tweets on breaking celebrity news stories so CNN can talk about them.

(Currently top non-sports story on the Houston Chronicle home page: “Why dogs hate Halloween,” a photo spread on dogs in costumes.)

(Holy Taco)

All that walking, squirrel watching, and sniffing can tire a pup out.

Observing the health care debate in all its mind-numbing silliness, it occurs to me that some of our basic assumptions are going unchallenged, and they need to be challenges. Specifically: giving people the power to make choices will make everything more efficient and lower costs.

Ha!

This might work in a very limited circumstance: if there were no insurance and we all had to pay for everything ourselves. There are downsides to this of course, like financial ruin and poor people dying in droves, although I suspect that’s what makes the idea so appealing to some conservatives. But if there is going to be some system to protect you from the financial consequences of health problems, the whole thing falls apart.

Because there’s a simple fact about how we all view this: we think that we (the grand “we”) should not be wasting money on unnecessary procedures. Our doctors should not be practicing defensive medicine, ordering up tests to avoid lawsuits. When there are cheaper, effective alternatives, they should be used.

Until, of course, we get sick ourselves; then we want everything.

I’m not criticizing anyone here; on the advice of my primary care physician, I visited a specialist to follow up on something that he was quite sure was absolutely nothing. But the specialist visit ruled out the incredibly remote possibility of something awful. It cost hundreds of dollars (which I didn’t pay) and at one point the specialist said, “Okay, so you have no symptoms and all your labs are normal…. hmm.” But when he said, “Let me give you a referral to a specialist just to be absolutely sure,” I didn’t say, “Gosh, doctor, that seems like wasteful use of limited healthcare resources!” I said, “OK!”

You would, too.

The other idea is that competition will lower costs. All of us as empowered healthcare consumers will run around to our providers, seeking out the most cost-effective ones, so that they have to keep their prices in line.

Right.

I can just see us all at our doctors saying, “Gosh, the physician up the street charges $10 less for an office visit! Bye!” Or, “That lab is a little pricey, we need to get my blood work done elsewhere!” Or telling the billing department at the hospital system that controls a huge portion of the hospitals in our city, “That’s really too much for that appendectomy!”

Here’s how costs really can be contained: a insurer who covers 40% of the local residents tells the hospital system that operates one-third of the hospitals, “No way.” And they negotiate and slug it out and come to some compromise and costs. Say what you will about insurers, they do have a motivation to keep costs down, and they if they’re large, they have enough clout to make some headway. Say what you will about large hospital operators, they have the clout to push back on insurers and say, “This is the right medical care to provide to patients, and these are the costs to deliver it.”

All of us on our own? We are easily railroaded. And when it comes to everybody else, we want sensible, cost-conscious decisions to be made. Just not for us, personally; we want everything. (Naturally – it’s our health at stake. I want that too.)

The same comes to malpractice; we think it’s horrible that doctors have to deal with all those frivolous lawsuits. It shouldn’t be allowed! Until, of course, we have a complaint about a provider; then we need to be able to sue them for ruining our lives. That’s different!

My point is not that we are all stupid. My point is simply that we are not rational, cost-oriented consumers of healthcare, and as individuals, we are powerless and irrational consumers.

This American Life did an interesting series on health care costs and insurance recently, and there was a discussion of HMOs. Remember when they were big? Oh, we hated them. Hated them. The funny thing is, they kept costs from rising. And while there were some horror stories – as there are with insurers now, as there are with nationalized plans like Britain’s, as there are with every system of providing care to millions of people – we got good care from them. Oh, we hated it, but people were just as healthy.

I will admit, I may be the one exception to that. The best medical experiences of my life were when I was covered by Harvard Community Health Plan in Massachusetts, the original not-for-profit HMO. I liked it because it was simple. You went to their facility and got what you needed. All your records were always there for everyone you saw to consult. In one big building a few blocks from my apartment, I got a checkup, blood work, had my eyes checked, and filled my prescriptions, with no paperwork.

(They’re now called Harvard Pilgrim and judging by their site, operate differently now.)

Now I go to my doctor, who no longer takes insurance of any kind because it’s such a clusterfuck, pay him out of my flexible spending account, and schlep around town when I need to see a specialist, fill out twelve forms with the same information, and then get statements from my insurer informing me that they have screwed everything up and are sending more money to the primary care doctor (who I paid already) because two years later they still think he’s on their plan. Whenever anyone insists that the private sector is always the efficient provider, I think of my insurer sending extra money to my doctor. Yep, sure is efficient. And yes, they are a major national health insurer and you know their name.

The popular answer to health care is that we should all get every possible form of care there is whenever we want or need it, regardless of demonstrable clinical benefits, and it should be cheap. That’s all. Is that so hard? Why can’t we have that? (And where’s my pony?)

When newspapers were first putting up web sites, they varied enormously in quality. I felt a certain hometown pride when the Washington Post early on had one of the best web sites around. Pull up the home page (around 1999 or 2000) and you’d get a nice view of the news. (I was going to include a screen shot, but they’ve blocked the Wayback Machine from showing you one.)

Since then, newspaper sites have converged on a more uniform quality: bad. The Post has continued to be one of the better ones, but they’ve recently changed things around, and the operating principle seems to be “news for people with the attention spans of gnats.”

Today at lunch I went over to washingtonpost.com to see what was going on in the world and as I scanned the headlines, something popped up in the corner of the site. Which naturally caught my attention.

An ad? No! Ads are annoying but a necessary evil. This was a pop-up box, sort of like an Outlook email notification, containing… a news headline for one of the stories on the site.

Why, I wondered, would I want a pop-up instead of a well-organized home page that would make it easy to browse headlines and click through to stories? I noticed one of the options in the box was to “opt out,” which I assume means “stop showing me these ridiculous, distracting pop-ups.” So I clicked that and got the following:

“Important alerts?” An important alert would be “Nuclear war has begun, please take shelter and try to avoid fiery death.” A story on pay limits for banking executives is not something worthy of an important alert. So yes, WaPo, I am sure I “wan’t” to opt out. (Apparently “staff who can write complex English words like ‘want’” are another victim of budget cuts.)

I went on to read an article about how everyone’s worried about getting the swine flu but does not want the vaccine because, like, it’s scary or something. That story contained this gem:

Two-thirds of those polled say they are confident that the vaccine is safe, but only 22 percent say they are "very" confident it is.

Now, unless they were polling a group of physicians or immunology specialists or vaccine researchers, what does this mean? How does the average person answering a poll determine whether they are “confident” or “very confident” a vaccine will work? And if somehow that average person has formulated an opinion on this, what is the value of that opinion? I’m “very confident” that it’s low.

Yes, I realize that it’s a story about a poll – a dumb poll – but might there have been room for a paragraph that actually contains real information about vaccines and whether these fears are reasonable or not? That seems like something worthwhile. No, instead we get this:

Just over six in 10 young adults (63 percent) express confidence in its safety, compared with nearly eight in 10 seniors (78 percent), and only 13 percent of those younger than 30 say they have "a great deal" of confidence. Further, only about three in 10 –

IMPORTANT ALERT IMPORTANT ALERT: Madonna shaves legs.

Oh, sorry, there was a pop-up “important alert” and I really “wan’ted” to read it.

I understand what’s behind thing like these pop-ups; it’s the same idea that’s behind the endless crawl of idiocy on the bottom of cable TV news: a literate adult cannot be expected to think about one thing for more than 37 seconds.

So you couldn’t be expected, as an adult American who can read, to actually go to a news site, click on a headline, and read a whole article. You might get bored and leave. So while you’re reading, it’s necessary to interrupt you with something else. Besides, you read three paragraphs of that article. Bored now!

So why am I on a tear about this? Because I think it’s a symptom of our in-progress undoing: the presumption, I suspect self-fulfilling, that we cannot concentrate on anything longer than a tweet, and the weird notion that immediacy is the most important criterion for everything. (Because after hearing about pay limits for banking executives, I imagine thousands of Washington Post readers had to rush from their desks and change all their afternoon plans. That one couldn’t have waited!)

A society of people who cannot pay attention to anything, and are never expected to, is a society headed for disaster. That’s us.

Now, I’m not a Luddite. I like technology. I think it’s amazing and wonderful that any time I want it, I am connected to this vast worldwide network of information and people. I really like things like Facebook, which let you keep up with people and share interesting things.

But here’s what is most striking about Facebook: the number of people on it updating furiously with things I would consider barely interesting to the person posting them, never mind the rest of us. In extreme cases, I’ve found people on their whose updates consist almost entirely of the results of quizzes like “If you were toilet paper, would you be single-ply or two-ply?” and “How many letters are in your name?” Interspersed, of course, with your latest update from the rousing game of “Online toenail clippings collecting.”

I quietly tune them out. But I do find it really odd that I have friends – smart, wonderful people – who post maps of their exact locations all day, or play 147 different Facebook games, and so on. (The map thing is particularly strange to me: I think of it as “Stalker’s Helper.” I do understand updates like, “I’m going to be in Los Angeles this weekend, who wants to have lunch?” Or “I’m at the big Twitter Meetup, if you are here, look up from your iPhone!” But daily around-town map updates? Does anyone want to know that I just crossed I-10 on my home, or which stop sign I’m at?)

And the Washington Post, once an excellent online source of news, seems to be turning into another CNN-style “Factoids for Morons” trivia machine. This depresses me.

(It could be worse, of course; currently featured at the top of the Houston Chronicle’s web site is a link to a blog post about fertilizing your garden with your urine. Earlier today it was a photo gallery of vegan celebrities. I feel informed now.)

I can’t prove it, but my gut says there is a direct link between this and a country in which large numbers of people think that scientific ideas and the scribblings of ancient desert wanderers should be taught side by side as different but valid options in a science class, in which a significant number of people think that the president is a Muslim because he’s brown and has a funny name, and in which everyone’s afraid of a flu vaccine made the same way as every other year’s flu vaccine because, you know, OMG, swine flu.

All of this makes it hard to be very optimistic about the future. Endlessly distracted people unable to process complex thoughts (complex, in this case, being defined as “requiring more than twelve seconds to grasp”) don’t tend to create much, build much, or solve problems well. Large groups of such people, once they lose some existing advantages of wealth and safety, are likely to be dead ends.

And as time goes on, that sounds more and more like us.

Well, I can’t fix it; I can only resist it. Tomorrow I’m off work, and intend to spend the day doing unconnected, offline, old world things: weeding the garden, taking Teddy to the dog park, and riding my motorcycle. There will be no maps of my current location. I will not be answering any polls to provide my expert opinion on the biology of the powdery mold in my garden. (“It’s yucky!”) There may be some dog park photos, of course.

With any leftover time, I plan to sit on the front porch and read. A book. A whole book. Page and pages of it, with no pictures, pop-ups, or videos – just thousands of glorious words arranged by a writer with the ability to construct something longer than 140 characters.

Today while parking my bike I discovered that it is the same length as a Smart Car.

But a lot more fun.