If The Truth Fits

Yes, I know that most people would have reported this story yesterday when it actually became a reality, but I thought that it would be a pretty good idea to wait a day to let it all sink in, and to make sure that Barack Obama was in fact the President elect, and that this wasn’t all some cruel hoax and that George Bush was going to have a live address to the nation in which he decides that his Presidency is going to turn the corner right around 2011 and that it’ll probably be for the best if he just stayed in his current job. To be fair to GWB, with the job market the way it is at the moment (especially as a man over 60), its probably going to be easier for him to change the constitution to allow him a third term than to try and get another job that isn’t being a greeter at Walmart.

Okay, Barack Obama is really going to be the President of America, as long as he spends the next few months surrounded by bullet proof glass (come on, not everyone in the US has made enough ’social progress’ quite yet). The official party line here at Pop Vulture was that we weren’t backing one candidate over the other, but I think it was pretty obvious whose side we were on, which is why I had goosebumps at around 11pm (EST) on Tuesday night. I mentioned in my last post that I was staying up here in France to watch the election, and I made it all the way to the end (or the beginning, if you’d prefer), and I think that the tiredness of staying up until 6:30am heightened my emotions to a level that Americans were feeling. When Obama came out an made that speech in Grant Park, and my God what a speech it was, I’m willing to admit that at moments I was welling up, and I’m well known for my heart of stone, so Barack Obama has done something pretty there, in terms of emotion for me, he’s reached the heights of the OC series finale (yes, I went there).

A lot of people on the news that are rather older than me have been saying for the past couple of days that they never thought they would see a black man as a President in their lifetime. Most of them have probably got 20-30 more years ‘experience’ than I do, but I didn’t think that I’d see it in my lifetime either. I just kept thinking that something was going to go wrong, millions of people going into voting booths and with a pen hovering over the Obama/Biden box, they thought “sure, there’s no actual evidence that Barack Obama is a muslim/terrorist/elitist/socialist/communist… but… I dunno” and lowering their pen to McCain/Palin, or deciding to just throw their vote away altogether and vote for Bob Barr.

I think that 10 years ago, no matter how well qualified or deserving of the office, a black person could not have been President, I realised that technically they could, but I don’t think America was ready for it. Even a couple of years ago I think it would have been a much tougher task, which is why I think that the Onion (yes, the website dedicated to news that isn’t true) hit the nail on the head with their article ‘Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress‘. Still, way to go, America.

Pop Vulture T-shirt

Okay, I know I’ve said more than once on this blog that us here at Pop Vulture don’t want to officially endorse one candidate or another, not that we’d expect it to sway you in any way, if the blog from a clothing company is going to decide which candidate you’re going to vote for, it might actually be a good idea if you stayed home on election day, and perhaps for a lot of other days too. That said, I’d be very proud if some of the things I’ve written over the past couple of months, and some of the stories I’ve linked to, actually did help to form your opinion and guided you through the extremely complex and important process of deciding who to pick. Or, failing that, just pick the person with the best hair, that almost always works.

That whole paragraph was basically a pretty long-winded way of saying Pop Vulture have released a t-shirt (the one in the picture accompanying this post, surprisingly enough) which features Barack Obama. So, yeah, we’re kind of endorsing Obama. The t-shirt could have just as easily been made with a John McCain image, but I’m afraid that Barack has already pretty much sewn up the graphic design vote. In my other job, writing about t-shirts and hoodies on Hide Your Arms, I’ve been sent e-mails about many, many Obama t-shirts, some well designed and some not so well designed, but I haven’t been sent a single e-mail pointing out a t-shirt supporting the Vietnam veteran, and since I place a massive amount of importance on t-shirts (hey, they’re my life), I think that is a pretty telling statistic.

The t-shirt is based upon the very famous series of prints done by Andy Warhol of Marylin Monroe, a style which has been reused countless times since the white-haired artist popularized it. I think its a very good way of portraying Barack Obama, pointing out the way that he has come to have a foot in both the worlds of celebrity and politics. The McCain campaign tried to publicize that as being a bad thing, but to me that smacked of them saying “why the hell would you want to vote for him? Because he’s popular? Because people like him? Are you a moron?” Just because someone is famous does not mean that they’re the same as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, its a link that makes a few leaps of imagination for me to fathom, but I guess that the insinuation that Barack could become distracted by his status of being a ‘cool’ world leader is far more important than whether its actually true or not. Yes, Obama gets endorsed by celebrities all the time (don’t worry McCain, you’ve still got Chuck Norris and Heidi Montag!), but its not like you see him going out to brunch with George Clooney and then swinging by the Pitt-Jolie’s for dinner so that they can all talk about how awesome they are.

Let’s hope that when November comes around Obama doesn’t suffer a similar fate as the subject of Warhol’s orginal prints (I’m talking about a political death, by the way) and also that his fame lasts for rather more than the 15 minutes that is so often talked about when Andy Warhol is brought up.

Pop Vulture T-shirt

I know its an incredibly self-centered way of looking at things, but I decided that I was only going to start caring about this whole global financial crisis/meltdown/disaster/recession/crash/doom when it started effecting me, and up until now I’d been doing okay. Since oil prices had dropped I was actually paying less to fill-up my cute and fuel-efficient euro mobile (it has a 1.1litre engine, which I assume most Americans would feel would be underpowered even if it was just for a smoothie blender), food prices seemed to be dropping in the supermarket, and I even dropped a jeans size, I’m not sure if the last one is connected to the economy, but since everything on the news seems to be related to finance, I presume that it must be.

And now, when I thought I could just hide under a rock about the economy (ironic considering people have lost their houses and would look forward to living in a cave), it goes and starts to effect me. ME! The audacity!

The pound, which had enjoyed a towering position of the almost laughably weak dollar for many a year, which was part of the reason why I started buying t-shirts from the USA, then started writing about t-shirts, which in turn led to me spouting all kinds of opinions and commentary here at Pop Vulture. Basically, the dollar being weak has a lot to do with who I am and what I do. Today, the pound hit a five year low against the dollar, currently sitting at around $1.69:£1 at the time of writing. That means that when I move to Philadelphia in December, all of a sudden I’m actually going to have to think about the money I’m spending, when it was $2:£1 I thought I’d be dining on filet mignon every night, and laughing at my co-interns for not eating caviar at lunch!

When I arrive in the US, George Bush will still be the President of the USA (so at least I get that fun) but in January either Barack Obama or John McCain will be sworn in as President, and let’s be honest, it’s probably going to be Obama, will be sworn-in, and they’re going to have a lot of work cut out from them fixing this terrible mess, in addition to all the other messes that need to be fixed from George W.’s eight year reign of terror. During my quick bout of research, I can’t find a handy checklist which shows how each man will save the economy, but I have found an article that has a few ideas in from both men. McCain has suggested that the government buy bad home-mortgages and then re-negotiate them at lower prices, which should play well with everyone that bought a mortgage they couldn’t afford. He also “called for legislation suspending a requirement that investors age 70 1/2 begin to liquidate their retirement accounts.” That means that people wouldn’t be forced to sell their stocks when they’re worth so little just because of their age, which should play well with Florida.

Obama wants “a temporary extension in an expiring tax break to let small businesses write off the cost of many new investments immediately, rather than over several years.” That should play well with people that own small businesses and people that work for small businesses that are worried about their jobs. Following the business theme he wants to “extend the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program to help small businesses that cannot access other sources of capital” which seems reasonable. But if those small businesses do have to shutter their doors then he also wants expiring unemployment benefit to be extended.

For me, none of those suggestions can get use out of this economic funk, they seem far too focused on certain demographics, far too political, and if $700 billion of bailout money couldn’t fix this mess then I severely doubt that these voter-pleasing but not economy-soothing measures are going to have all that much effect.

Pop Vulture Tshirt

Guess what subject I still don’t understand? The economy, stupid! I thought I’d had it all figured out, the bailout bill would pass, the economy would stabilise somewhat, the banks would be more confident and have less fear of lending to each other, and the world wouldn’t be completely doomed and I wouldn’t have to start stockpiling turnips for the winter because my money is worth less/nothing/going to be replaced with Chinese Yuan (please delete as necessary relating to when you read this article). Clearly, that hasn’t happened, as the markets are continuing to tumble like people from Gloucester chasing a wheel of cheese down a hill, which sounds a lot more entertaining than the stock market, but I’m pretty sure that more people are getting hurt on Wall St.

After the Chinese milk scandal, which has seen some 53,000 people people ill and caused the death of four infants (that we know of, who knows what the real number is), the Chinese government has seen fit to issue official limits on the amount of melamine (the chemical which caused all the problems) that can be used in baby formula. I guess this is the second time that I’m accusing the Chinese of closing the gate after the horse has bolted after that mining corruption scandal, but its pretty amazing that its taken them this long to sort out how much, if any, melamine can safely be put in the formula.

Apparently Barack Obama ‘pals around‘ with terrorists. That’s the latest monumentally important debate point raging amongst the media. Not how they’re going to fix the economy, pull out of Iraq, lower crime rates, stop the prison population from continuing to rise, or deal with the myriad of foreign policy situations that the US finds itself embroiled in on a near weekly basis. Oh, and John McCain might be corrupt. It’s getting really hard to see the issues on the road to the election with all this mud being thrown at the windscreen.

Oh, and the debates between Obama and McCain are really, really boring. All they do is go over the talking points, pretend to agree with each other, avoid the questions, act all folksy (okay, not as much as Sarah “Don’t ‘cha know” Palin), and then stand around shaking hands for a while afterwards. It’s boring, where’s the zazz? Where’s the interrogation? Where’s someone calling them out on all the ‘facts’ that keep getting cited that simply aren’t true. There’s a news presenter here in the UK called Jeremy Paxman who is respected by pretty much everyone because he really goes for the jugular. Not because he’s after the fame, just because he doesn’t let them get away with lying to him, I think that CNN, MSNBC or maybe even crazy-old Fox News should have borrowed him from the BBC to try and get some real answers out of politicians for the upcoming election. If you’re wondering who I’m wittering on about, try checking out Paxman on YouTube if you’re in the mood for seeing some politicians getting a well deserved nailing.

Pop Vulture Tshirt

Fridays seem like a good day to do a roundup of stories from the news, its the end of the working week, so it just feels right to try and tie off a few loose ends before we start fresh on Monday, and when I say fresh, I mean bleary eyed after spending far too much of my weekend fighting what will surely be a losing battle with a bar (the battle is trying to drink the whole bar by the way). Let’s kick off this news round up!

1. Apparently there was some kind of a debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin? I’d forgive you for not knowing about it since the media don’t really talk about the upcoming election all that much. Apparently, it was actually the most watched vice Presidential debate ever, drawing in 70 million viewers, which was actually more than the amount of people that watched the debate between the two men going for the top job, as Obama and McCain could only manage 52.4 million, although I guess that since they’ve been on debates before people know what to expect when they see those two, whereas Biden and Palin are a rather more unknown quantity, Palin especially. I get the feeling that most people tuned in just to see yet another locomotive crash into the train wreck that her media exposure has been so far, and whilst she was by no means an inspirational orator, she didn’t mess up, she read from her note cards and added in folksy sayings to prove that “she’s a real person,” which is probably the best that the Republicans could hope for. Side note: what’s the deal with this ‘real person’ schtick, why on Earth would anyone ever think that the best person for the job would be someone ‘normal’ that could easily be their neighbour? Don’t they want someone that’s well qualified, intelligent, and would actually be a good candidate for the position?

Oh, and once again, Pop Vulture does not officially endorse one candidate over the other, even if its really, really obvious what I think.

2. Russian President Dimitri Medvedev is of the opinion that the current “financial crisis should be taken as a sign that America’s global economic leadership is on the wane.” I’m not quite so sure how right he is there, the US certainly seems to be leading the world through extremely stormy economic seas at the moment, and earlier this week when the bailout was rejected it looked like they were steering their ship towards the Cape of Doom, and Russia is hardly one to wag the finger, they’ve had to shut down their stock markets three times in the last month (including today), and on September 16th their markets plunged more than 17% in a single day, aren’t you glad that the world doesn’t revolve around Russia?

3. The $700 billion bailout bill was passed at the second attempt. From what I understand, it will actually only end up costing $100 billion, but I still don’t know whether the bill itself is a good thing or a bad thing, so let’s just move on before you realise once again what little grasp I have upon economic concepts.

4. The music industry and Apple, the makers of the most exciting thing in my pants (my iPhone), are at loggerheads over what royaltys musicians should be getting from digital downloads, most of which are done through Apple’s iTunes service. Each track costs 99 cents, and from that, 9.1 cents goes to the artist, the same amount as when an artist sells a track on a CD. The music industry believes that the artists should get 15 cents per track since its much cheaper to distribute things digitally since there are no packaging and shipping costs. Yeah, I can’t work out that logic either, surely the artist gets paid for the song, not the medium its packaged in, otherwise bands would have probably started selling vinyl records that had been dipped in gold so that they could claim the music was more valuable and therefore they deserved more royalties. Yes, that example makes no sense, but then again, neither does the record labels position.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Pop Vulture Tshirt

Last week a fifth-grader at a school in Aurora, Colorado was suspended after refusing to stop wearing a t-shirt that had the slogan “Obama: A terrorists best friend” emblazoned upon it. Kids at the school were told to turn up to school wearing something red, white and blue to show their patriotism…

Since I spend most of my days looking at t-shirts, reading about t-shirts, and writing about t-shirts, I see this kind of story fairly often. Previous tees in the news have included a man being stopped from going on a plane for wearing a t-shirt with a gun on it, even though the gun was attached to Optimus Prime, and was part of a series of tees by French Connection that were pretty popular here in the UK. This isn’t the first time that Obama has courted tee controversy either, back in May a bar owner in Georgia started selling t-shirts with the children’s character ‘Curious George’ on them with the unfortunate slogan of “Obama in ‘08″ written underneath George, who is a monkey in case you weren’t aware. Amazingly, the man didn’t see much wrong with his actions, certainly not seeing any racial element, commenting that the monkey and the Illinois Senator/probably next President of the United States of America (let’s be honest) “look so much alike.”

I’ll just let that sink in, he thought that the black man looked like a monkey. It’s four months since I first wrote about this story and it still shocks me that this kind of thing still goes on.

But back to the kid that got suspended for wearing that tee at the top of this post. I’ll let Daxx Dalton off for his crimes against graphic design since he is only 11 years old, and probably didn’t plan far enough ahead to steal his parents credit card to have something printed up at Cafepress or Spreadshirt. I’ll even let him off for being oh-so very wrong with his not particularly astute political analysis that Barack Obama has Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on speed-dial, because hey, he’s just an 11 year old kid. Also, considering the amount of mud that has been slung at Barack Obama over the course of this election campaign (anyone remember that secret Muslim thing?) by people that should know better and act more maturely that the young student, its hardly surprising that someone so young could end up getting sucked into believing all the rumours that are swirling around about Barack Obama.

Initially when I heard the headline of this story I thought there was going to be a ‘free speech’ angle to it, but I can’t even be angry about the school officials for suspending Daxx, apparently the shirt caused arguments on the school playground, and the kid was given plenty of opportunities to take the shirt off or turn it inside out, suspension was their last option. If other kids were supporting his first amendment rights (something that seems pretty advanced for 5th graders) then the suspension may seem a bit harsh, but if this tee was antagonising other kids and causing problems then I think its actually pretty fair to send him home just to make sure that nothing more serious happened.

So, I guess you’re wondering where the anger is in this story, well there isn’t really, I don’t think it should have really been a story in the first place, its a non-event, I’m sure people wear worse things in school all over America every day, it just so happens that election related political hysteria can turn almost anything into a national news scandal.

I know it feels as if you can’t turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper without seeing Barack Obama staring back at you, but I’m sure that you’d like hear the views a British guy who lives a few thousand miles away and won’t be voting in November’s election has to think about Obama the day after he delivered the most important speech in his career… so far.

I like the guy. Oh, I feel that right now is probably a pretty good time to point out that the official stance on political affiliation here at Pop Vulture is that we don’t do it, we want you to make your own decisions, because it’s your vote. So if you agree with what I say, that’s awesome, but if not, that’s cool too, like I said, it’s your your vote, and I would be scared of being the guy that swayed you one way or another, that’s just way too much pressure to put on a young man.

Anyway, to get back on point, I like Barack Obama. The thing is, I don’t really care what his policies are, I don’t really care what his voting track record is, I don’t really care about his lack of foreign policy experience, all that really draws me to him is a vague feeling of, well, hope (I was really hoping to avoid using that word) when he’s making speeches. When he speaks I actually believe that he might actually change things (change, another word I’d hoped to avoid in this article). I’ve already accepted that logically its a bad way to decide who I think should be the next President of the United States, even I know that decision should be based upon logic and reasoning based upon evidence, not the way a man talks when he’s stood on a stage in front of seventy-five thousand people, but here we are, I can’t change now, can I?

I guess it all comes down to how much of a sucker I am when it comes to ‘the big speech’ in movies. One of my favourite movies of all time is ‘Any Given Sunday’, and I know that the film itself isn’t particularly good, but Al Pacino makes grand, inspiring speeches every pretty regularly for its duration, so it found itself being rapidly propelled up the list of ‘films that I think awesome’ simply because of the speeches. Similarly, when I was talking about Aaron Sorkin being interested in writing a film about Facebook yesterday, I mentioned how I thought that Martin Sheen’s character in the West Wing was a great President, he also made great speeches. Of course, it was pretty easy for Martin Sheen to be a great President, its always easy to make someone seem great when all the events are dealt with are fictional. The Barack Obama story, how he grew up and became who he is today, almost sounds like a fictional tale to me, as if someone invented him so that in 50 or 100 years time someone could write a inspirational film telling the people of the future how the world worked before the robots were in charge.

As if I hadn’t given you fair enough warning about not deciding who to vote for based upon my opinions, here’s something that should make sure you get the message. I quite like George Bush. Not as a President, the past seven and a bit years have clearly been a disaster, I wouldn’t even trust him to run a bake-sale, but I think he would be absolutely great at a barbecue, I bet he’d turn up with steaks as thick as the Bible.

Pop Vulture T-Shirt

If there’s one thing that I don’t like, and you’ll find that there are quite a lot of things that I don’t like, its uninformed, self-righteous celebrities forcing their religious, political and environmental views upon us ‘normal’ people when no one asked them to. They all seem to do it after they get bored of merely entertaining us, perhaps their lifestyles eventually catch up with them, they start feeling a bit guilty about driving a hummer to Starbucks two or three times a day and decide that its time to “give something back,” as the famous phrase goes.

Or in other words… I don’t like Madonna.

At a performance on Sunday night in Cardiff, Wales, the so-called Queen of Pop (who actually has the audacity to enter the stage sitting on a throne) ran a video montage during a song called “Get Stupid” that showed images of social and environmental destruction interspersed with pictures of Adolf Hitler , Robert Mugabe, and John McCain. Wow. That’s about as subtle as throwing a brick through someone’s window then screaming nonsensical ramblings through the hole you just made. As if that weren’t enough, when the song ended images flashed up of John Lennon, Mahatma Ghandi, Al Gore and Barack Obama, presumably whilst a white-robed choir sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

Okay, maybe I’m embellishing slightly with the choir, but the part about the video montage is all true. I’m a reasonable guy, I don’t expect her to stop half way through a song and bring up a power point presentation detailing why she thinks John McCain should be compared Adolf Hitler and Robert Mugabe, but this kind of heavy handed and ill-conceived stunt doesn’t add anything to the political discourse in America, it just takes the focus and attention away from the issues and onto a few seconds of footage from a concert that was taking place in the Welsh capital of Cardiff, a city that is three and a half thousand miles away from Washington D.C., although I’m sure that events this week in Denver will ensure that McCain doesn’t get all that much attention over the next few days anyway.

I feel that I should point out that we here at Pop Vulture aren’t necessarily backing one Presidential candidate or another, we want you to make your own choices, and those choices should be based upon sound and reasoning logical decisions, not based upon rumours, slander and baseless attacks. I know Madonna has managed to reinvent herself numerous times throughout her career, but can’t imagine that if she were to transform herself into a political pundit that historians would regard it as a particularly golden era for Madge. I’m certain that she’d get a lot of air time on TV to let the world know her views, she is a global megastar after all, but perhaps she should leave politics to the experts… and bloggers that have half a politics degree.

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