1. We had graduation this past Friday. I found it a very melancholy day, and not just because I’ve spent the last two years working with these kids, whom I’ll probably never see again. Watching them setting out on adult life made me think back to my own youth and think about how little I’ve done with my life since then.

2. The more I read about Richard Nixon, the less I believe the standard narrative of him. I don’t mean just the Watergate Scandal; the idea of him as some kind of power-hungry monster doesn’t seem to fit his actions. For instance, he didn’t contest the 1960 election, when he very likely could have overturned it. You would think a man with the character ascribed to him would at least have challenged it.

Then there was the time he went out to talk to anti-war protesters. This is usually framed as showing how out-of-touch he was, that he tried to talk about football or patriotic platitudes, but to my mind the important point is that he did it at all; that he went to personally talk to people he knew hated him and tried to find common ground with them, which he did not have to do. This doesn’t seem to fit with the kind of sociopathic dictator he is presented as.

3. The Watergate story in general doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It feels very similar to the standard American Revolution narrative; in that the story itself doesn’t make a lot of sense, and even if we were to take it at face value, it doesn’t seem to justify the result. What it comes down to, it seems, is that Nixon tried to gain a minor advantage in an election he was all-but-certain to win anyway, then tried to stop the investigation afterwards. Which is bad, but scarcely comparable to some of the things other Presidents have done or been linked to (e.g. Kennedy having Ngo Dhen Diem assassinated). So, why would Nixon’s actions with Watergate prompt such atypical anger?

In any case, the Watergate scandal seems kind of artificial in general. I don’t have enough information to say for sure, but it sounds to me like a put up job: people in President’s administration did it without Nixon’s knowledge, then accused him as a way to escape prosecution themselves. More research is needed, but overall the whole thing seems very suspicious.

4. Overall, my guess is that certain elements in government saw the opportunity to remove the most popular President in history up to that time, who had been overall quite successful (even though some of his decisions can be very much questioned in hindsight), thereby damaging the reputation of the entire competing party. Then many people in the media saw this as the chance to paint the national elements they don’t like in a bad light (while boosting the reputation of the news media through the Woodward / Bernstein element). So, combination of conspiracy and crime of opportunity.

It gets hyped so much and so repeatedly as a psy-op: trust the media and the Republicans are bad.

5. My other political conclusion is that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was an incredibly stupid piece of legislation. The short version is that the act forbade any voting qualification process with the “intent or effect of limiting voting along racial lines.” Which is to say, if more of group A fail a literacy test than group B, then that test is illegal.

Once again, we have a matter of suicidal adherence to principle; we think voting is a fundamental right, so everyone needs to be able to vote. Therefore, we prioritize the raw number of voters over the competency of those voters.

How on earth does it benefit the community to have a electorate that cannot pass a basic literacy or intelligence test?

The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. Universal suffrage benefits politicians, not electorates. The more voters there are, the larger the percentage who either vote completely along party lines or who are easy to manipulate. Meanwhile the intelligent, informed voters (always a minority) count for less and less.

Think back to Animal Farm. Having the sheep in the meetings conveyed no benefit on either the farm or the sheep themselves; they were just tools for clever politicians to use to disrupt discussions that were going the wrong way. The farm would have benefited immensely if anyone could have told the sheep to shut up and stay out politics. But because ‘all animals are equal,’ no one was allowed to do this.

This is one of the political keystones that needs to be set up and defended to the death; quantity does not matter compared to quality. Voting should be something you qualify for, not something automatic.

6. On a similar note, I looked a little into the question of congressional districts. The current rule is that State Congressional districts must be roughly equal in population. This sounds reasonable until you think about it. First, how are these districts to be drawn? Well, in practice, you draw them to maximize your party’s votes in that district, because there’s really no reason not to.

Second, and more importantly, this ignores the factor of common interest.

Say you have ten districts: five are in the countryside, five are in the city. Now lets say you have to redraw them to be roughly equal in population. This requires you to double the ones in the city and combine two of the ones in the countryside, so that now you have ten city districts and four country districts. Equal in population, but the problem is that the city districts will all have roughly similar interests, because they’re all in the same city, part of roughly the same community, dependent on the same economic factors, distinct from those of the countryside.

You have made it more ‘equal’ in terms of population numbers, but you’ve failed to take into account that these people are not blank slates who may vote either way, but members of communities with distinct common interests, and so you have just made the interests of one region dominant over those of another. Whereas under the earlier, regional based system, even if the city-dweller’s vote counted for less individually, he could reasonably assume that the rest of the voting bloc roughly shared his interests and so those interests would be represented.

The whole purpose of voting is to ensure that the interests of the community are being served by those in power. Whether it actually does this effectively is a different story, but that’s the idea. It is not to ensure that every individual has an equal say in the way things are run just for the sake of it.

We desperately need to get this through our heads as a nation.

7. I have to say, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey does not look very good. The whole thing looks grey and dreary and weirdly cheap. Everything is grey and washed-out. The armor looks plastic and the environments are depressingly bland. For instance Calypso’s island, at least in the trailer, is represented by a completely flat beach on a slightly overcast day, while Calypso herself is dressed in a perfectly normal dress covered in what looks like a fishnet. She looks like a castaway. This is supposed to be paradise on earth ruled over by a supremely seductive goddess, but this looks like a clip from a Swedish art film.

The Cyclops looks okay though.

Overall there is nothing larger-than-life or mythic or epic about this; in fact, it looks as if it’s been very deliberately made as non-epic as possible. Even compared to something like Troy, which was de-mythologized, but at least tried to maintain an epic scale to its visuals and characters. Nolan’s film looks like it’s trying to be dull to look at.

Then of course there’s the casting. I’m not sold on Matt Damon as Odysseus, though in theory he could work. Anne Hathaway is an odd choice for Penelope, especially when Emily Blunt is so obviously ideal for the role. And apparently Zendaya is going to be Athena, which…who does she have dirt on that she keeps getting major roles like this? She’s not a good actress and she’s not particularly charismatic (she looks bored and grumpy most of the time), so I can only assume blackmail. Likewise, rumors have it that Ellen Page is going to be Achilles – which is just trolling the audience – and Lupita N’yongo is going to be Helen. Because of course she is.

Oh, and apparently the translation being used is by a hard-core feminist professor. So, that tells us quite a lot.

It will be a sad state of affairs if Epic: The Musical turns out to be the better adaptation, but it’s looking that way.