After some time suffering from an unknown form of vile pestilence--and a great deal of time spent Twittering frantically about #dontgo--I have something to say that isn't energy policy-related. Mainly because thinking about energy policy would require me to not feel as though I've been hit by a truck. (A big truck symbolic of the excess in America's materialistic consumer culture as it sucks down gasoline. Also known as my dream car.) But I digress.

I've spent a great deal of time learning about subtle "-isms." You know what I mean. The racism, sexism, classism, anthropocentrism, and other nasty prejudices that undergird our (non-)great society. But they do their work subtlely. So only people skilled in the fine art of detecting such problems can bring them to our attention (see: Group of 88 in the Duke lacrosse case).

Well what name should this earn as an -ism? 

There's a subtle art in selecting photos and videos of George Bush and Dick Cheney to reinforce the pop culture storyline of Bush as the dumb monkey/frat boy/puppet/redneck and Cheney as evil overlord/Darth Vader/puppetmaster/exasperated handler. The photo above from Jonathan Martin's blog at Politico is just one more example. For a post about Bush and Cheney speaking the first night of the Republican convention, was this photo really the best--or most relevant--Martin could use?

It's not that I think the media should portray sitting presidents in glowing light and in beautiful portraits. But it's quite another when nearly every photo I see (and Martin's just popped at me this morning) plays into the hands of this storyline.

Republicans have lost pop culture and "cool," and to a large extent, I think that's why they've (really, we've) lost the youth vote. It's tiring day after day to engage with opposite-minded friends as well as the media. And popular humor. And popular culture at large.

We can't control it. We can just call it how it is. Oh, and be slyly amused that being privy to The Great War-Mongering Republican/Big Business/Big Oil/Big Everything Machine is the most counterculture move of all.