As I read Tumulty's silly ass scribbling, her fellow journalists were describing the event as "boring" before it even took place, not describing the event as "boring" as it transpired. In other words, the topic of health care itself is boring. That's utterly disgraceful. I wouldn't last a month in my job if I went around describing what I do as "boring" to my peers, but with these people it's somehow a sign of coolness. That these sloppy, lazy, arrogant, supercilious pricks are the ones who run our nation's discourse is far, far more than a tactical problem Democrats have to deal with.

Crooked cops, crooked lawyers, crooked judges, crooked politicians, crooked doctors, crooked scientists, crooked clergymen -- but no crooked journalists. An amazing record for an amazing class of people.

Hey, watch yourself!  Knowing bowling helped me finish today's Diagramless.

The empty noise "boring," in fact admits that the person emitting the noise has no intellectual endurance and does not plan on acquiring any. Parents and teachers who allow children (of all ages) to easily manipulate them through nothing more strenuous or demanding than the utterance of a two-syllable empty noise really have no business parenting or teaching.

As a successful father of two grown, college-graduated, productively working sons, I never had any problem dealing with the "boring" gambit when my boys tied it on me. I simply responded that I considered it my job as dad to bore the living daylights out of them and that I took every instance of the empty noise "boring" as proof positive of my success and encouragement to do even more of whatever activity had elicited the "boring" noise. My sons quickly dropped the useless gambit when it proved counter-productive.

Where did "parents" and "teachers" ever get the ridiculous notion that they had nothing better to do than see to it that children remaine passive, infantile, demanding recipients of effortless entertainment? (See America's current and pathetic excuse for a President and "commander-in-chief" for only one horrendous example of failed "parenting" practice.) Kids need to grow up. It takes awhile and a lot of effort to happen, but it never happens when parents and teachers find it too "boring" to "bore" those who most need to build concentrative power by concentrating on a task and not giving up until they master it. Kids instinctively know more about how to "bore" parents into abandoning parenting than apparently many parents know about how to "bore" kids into learning about the real world instead of imaginary ones.

While teaching high school English and Japanese, I once had an encounter with a university-educated mother (and wife of a university educated physician) whose daughter did poor work in class mostly due to her heavy schedule of socially entertaining "fun" activities outside her academic curriculum. The "parent" in question attacked and berated me as a bad teacher in such poor English that I had to correct her grammar during our "conference." Flustered, she offered this apology for why she sounded just like a teenage girl herself: "Well I have teenagers at home." I replied: "So did I once, but I never let them teach me to talk like they did."

To summarize: kids who have learned to manipulate their parents through uttering empty noises like "boring" know utterly that their "parents" care more about remaining children themselves than they do about doing the necessary work to see that their own children attain independent, responsible adulthood in the shortest and least wasteful amount of time. See the contemporary United States of America for a devastating example of how the Culture of Easy Entertainment has perpetuated political immaturity, reinvigorated religious fanaticism, and made intellectual endurance a commodity mostly now imported from East and South Asia where students learn to develop it at an early age.

Michael, Do you babysit? --Greg

Greg,

As far as the twins go.  Here;s a suggestion, whenever they describe an activity as boring, tell them it is a character building or mental growth  activity. Resist explaining why or even engaging their concept of boring. Instead force them to think about what is there by queries  about what is occurring to help develp their skill to discern the richness  of what  the activity engages and/or different level of senses involved 

For instance, ask qualitative and quantative questions about bowling and walks in the woods. How  could the game be scored, differntly is both a qual and quant question. Play a game using their new score method.  Help them to find the patterns in bowling with other questions, like How does the shape of pin set up impact how they fall? How do they fall when hit on the right or left vs.the middle. Why is that? Make bowling a show and tell. When it is the woods, focus in on the cycle of nature. And whether they like the sounds or the quiet. Which would the animals prefer. Do they think that squirrels can hear ants eating? How are trees like humans? Find the similarities and the differences. What kind of tree would they want to be?

That way you get to be the arbiter and help them entertain diverse thoughts while developing their ever fertile little minds. You will find yourself most likely impressed with  their 'unique' views and it will be a lot more entertaining for you as you probe  their  ideas and thought patterns.

In other words, don't succomb to their conservative thoughts. Be a liberal create a new dynamic that is enhances the quality of life for them and you. 

On March 26, 2007 - 7:39am whiterosebuddy said:

Excellent post, and it reminds me of something that happened many years ago. Let me try to explain it.

We had a 25 ft long plumbing trench in our lawn, the fill dirt lined the sides of the trench. One Sunday we had the whole family for a BBQ and the swimming pool. There were a number of young children there, ages 8 to 10 perhaps. I gathered all the shovels and spades I had and handed them out to the kids. I made a game out of backfilling the trench and the kids all happily joined in, shoveling dirt into the trench with abandon.

After a time I noticed something wrong with the way they were backfilling so I went to the them and explained the purpose of backfilling and how they should do it.

MISTAKE! I took what was fun to them and made it a job. It took less than a few minutes for them to get BORED, drop the shovels, and go elsewhere.

ol dopey John.

(of course, as planned, the plumber came back and did the backfilling)

America has the highest infant mortality rate of any wealthy democracy and Americans have a shorter life span than Costa Ricans. Boring. Unless the dead child (or parent) is yours.

You are just bang on with this diary. Avoid the issues and base all politics on personal slander within a media system where Republicans' personal lives and past history are continuously glossed over. Russ Feingold opted not to run in part I'll bet because he has had a personal life about half as problematic as McCain or Giuliani. And he'd be twice the President and then some. And Kerry is the one whose war record became an issue!!!

It is really hard to run on the destruction of Social Security, growing poverty, accelerated job exports, tax cuts for the rich, and environmental destruction.

global citizen

This is all well and good Greg (and to commenter Mike Murray) but while talking about how calling something "boring" is unproductive and descriptive of the person over the activity can be highly accurate (I personally have no problem saying "I am bored doing X") the point remains that:

1. Many of these thing that are labeled boring are in fact boring in that they offer a small amount of "surprises" or "thrills." As with the law, surprises mean something went wrong somewhere.

2. Berating people for being bored by things like health care is not very conducive to getting their support for that program.

To Murry: I'd hazard a guess if that parent whose grammar you corrected had a chance to get some kind of revenge (say by denying you a raise) they would take it. Not because you are wrong about her, but because you are right. Whether you care about that or not, in term of the healthcare debate can we really afford that kind of response to a healthcare initiative?

A/N: When I say healthcare I generally mean "health insurance."

I agree with much of what you said. This attitude is what drove our political discourse in 2000 and again in 2004. The press is "bored", they find certain candidates "boring" and what the candidates say is "boring" to them. This is why we had hours devoted to Gore's wardrobe, Kerry's "Frenchness", which candidate would make the best "beer buddy", who is the "alpha male", who is the "regular guy", my own personal favorite, which candidate had the better food on the press plane,and all the gossip that entertained the press corp.

That's why Bush could lie with impunity - he knew full well that to keep the press entertained was his real campaign and that not one of them was going to call him on anything he said. He lied about foreign policy, he lied about social security, he lied about medicare, he lied about the war, in fact, it would be difficult to find anything he didn't lie about from 1999 to the present. But all those things "bore" the the self-important press and it is easier to joke and yak with fellow press corp members, scramble for a deadline story and think that the silly crap they gossip about is actually newsworthy because it is what they think is newsworthy and is what interests them.

It isn't journalism, it is farce.

One additional reason some people might become bored by discussions of certain things: the most interesting parts are in the minutiae.  An argument about national health insurance cannot really be made in broad strokes.  And if one doesn't have a full grasp of the details, it's really easy to tune out or to find the discussion meaningless.  For example, I don't really understand the details of trade policy.  I lack background and have to work much harder to pay attention.  Besides, I find I have to worry about abbreviations and definitions and acronyms and all of that, which makes it much harder to devote any bandwith to the interesting stuff.  

MNPundit,

Point 1 is definitely well taken. On point 2, just to be clear, no one is suggesting that Dems should berate average people who say they're bored by wonkery. I'm just trying to get across to political opinion-leaders that they are falling into a trap set by the right every time they start off any discussion of complicated issues with a concession that the subject is boring. How may times have you heard Jonah Goldberg make fun of "earnest" liberals who drone on and on about studies or whatever? What Gore showed, much like Perot in '92, is that if you acknowledge that issue x can be somewhat complicated but that it's important to the country that citizens try to understand it better, people actually appreciate having their intelligence respected. But the second you concede the "b" word, you've lost people. And part of the right's modus operandi is to raise the "b" word early and often to get reporters and even liberals to join them. --Greg

Why things are boring:

Things are boring not because they're complicated but because they lack conflict.

The Odyssey is complicated, but it isn't boring to most people because there's tons of conflict in the story.

An 800 page healthcare bill is boring. But the fight about who shouyld be covered and who shouldn't be and who shold pay for it isn't boring at all.

Obviously, we don't want to lecture people about why they should listen to a boring lecture about healthcare.

Let's make things more exciting by demagoguing our opponents.

Because you know what's really boring? Civility. David Broder. That's boring.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

The Odyssey is complicated, but it isn't boring to most people because there's tons of conflict in the story.

Ahhh, you never sat in a fifth-grade class that read The Odyssey aloud, alternating readers every few stanzas, during the course of a really, really long month. :)  I liked The Odyssey much better when I returned to it in college -- and was able to read it silently to myself.  

Somerby says it the way it needs to be said today. Read it.

Re: Conservatives believe in free markets and small governments.

Well, maybe somewhere there are still some pure-at-heart conservatives who really do believe in those things. But for sure the gang in power, and their legion of kortowing sycophants, believe in no such thing. Thye believe in markets rigged to benefit their patrons and big government to better further their patrons.

Thye believe in markets rigged to benefit their patrons and big government to better further their patrons.

The fascist subset of conservatives?

War does not determine who is right - only who is left. Bertrand Russell

Neo-feudalist is closer. Fascists don't have patrons.

Repeating the same basic "joke" three times in one thread certainly qualifies.