Maybe There’s a Moron’s Parade You Can Get Into by KTK

I’m not on board with the conservative meme about American becoming a “nation of whiners”. They’re usually talking about people who whine over things like having their children killed by a defective product, or their entire city wiped out by a well-anticipated storm after nobody did anything about it. The “tort reform” movement is quite literally nothing more than stealing the right to justice away from victims of corporate malfeasance*. In a nation in which Jake DeSantis is not a whiner, I’m not interested in hearing conservatives’ opinions about who is.

But at the same time I have a sense that we are inundated, not so much with “whining” as just stupid distractions and idiotic disputes over things that don’t matter, or shouldn’t be controversial. In part this is politically strategic. The right wing is constantly and calculatedly ginning up “wedge issues” deliberately designed to prevent critical attention to their own failures and extremism: consciously empty scandals like Al Gore’s suits or John Edwards’ hair, and fraudulent or just insane controversies manipulated to divide the electorate, like gay marriage or the Terri Schiavo travesty. But to a large degree it’s just sheer stupidity run amok. The general public, liberals and conservatives, are just so thoughtless, so myopic, and so easily agitated, that the smallest, dumbest things can turn into social controversies.

Today it’s . . . the fact that the White House let everybody have a chance to get tickets for the Easter Egg Roll on the White House Lawn, instead of a privileged few. The ones who didn’t used to have a chance are now complaining that they do.

Apparently, previously you had to be lined up at dawn a certain day a week before the festival was planned, and tickets would be given to whoever was in line when they opened the gate. People would stay overnight in line to get tickets to the Easter Egg Roll. Which meant that the only people who could get them were those who had the liberty (and desire) to spend all night standing in line outside the White House a week before the actual day of the event.

This year, the Obama administration decided to make it easier and more democratic by posting blocks of tickets on an online sign-up system, and letting them go at various times of the day so everybody would have a chance to log on and try to get some. It was still first-come/first-served, and since they couldn’t offer more than a certain number of tickets, it was obvious that only a certain number of people could be successful in getting them. But now everybody in the country could at least try to get some, whereas before you had to be in Washington both a week before and the day of the ceremony and stand in line all night – meaning almost nobody but Washington residents with a lot of time on their hands could qualify.

Naturally, the complaints began immediately.

Complaints began surfacing early yesterday, shortly after the tickets became available.

Several people said that they were unable to log on to the White House ticket site or that when they logged on, tickets weren’t available. . . .

Kristin Vergis of Garden City, N.Y., said she was up until midnight to see whether the ticket site was active. She went to the site again at 6 a.m. and tried to reserve tickets throughout the day, to no avail. “At one point, I got through the verification process and then was timed out,” she said in an e-mail to The Post. “I wish the ticket process had been left the way it was.”

OK, Kristin Vergis of Garden City: under the old system, you had no chance at all of getting tickets, unless you were willing to travel to DC on successive weekends plus go through all the other rigmarole. For those who didn’t have that luxury, it was simply no chance ever. Now you had a chance, though it didn’t work out. How is this worse?

A moment’s thought should have told you that your odds of getting tickets were very low. If everybody in the entire country can sign up, you’re not very likely to be the one who gets it. Under the old plan, you could at least see what your chances were; once the line got too long, you knew there was no point waiting in it. But the whole point to this system is to increase the pool of eligibles, which it does, dramatically. And since those who don’t get tickets are no worse off under this system than they would be under the old one (they still didn’t get tickets), and since it takes only a few minutes to try, again, how is this worse?

Not everything works out to your personal benefit. That’s not a reason to keep from making it better for everyone else!

Partly, I realize, I’m reacting defensively to criticism of Obama – it seems to me that a lot of it is nitpicking over stupid or made-up stuff (the current meme: he uses a teleprompter), which is not only detrimental to someone I support, but also very counterproductive and dangerous at this critical time. (There are substantive issues of huge moment in train right now, with all our interests hanging in the balance. Whatever your opinion on the various plans put forward, you’re the worst of the worst Republicans if you would deliberately drag down the ones in charge over stupid shit, while they’re trying to juggle the important things we all depend on.)

But in addition to that, I’m just tired of stupidity. I’m tired of hearing morons carping about inconveniences that they insist outweigh the real issues that have to get managed. I’m tired of the shortsighted selfishness that derails every important plan or goal. (The right wing found yet another reason to oppose relief for the homeless this month: some of them own prepaid cellphones. And they’ve always had a reason to keep destroying the environment: not every country can reduce its carbon emissions, so the greatest offending countries shouldn’t try.) I’m tired of continually hearing that, because of some person’s or group’s parochial obsession, we can’t get on with policies and programs that benefit everyone.

I keep waiting for the country to grow up. Seems like it’s not happening.

*NB: Some extremely stupid and ignorant person is just about to say “McDonald’s coffee”. That extremely stupid and ignorant person is extremely stupid and ignorant. There’s nothing I can do about that. They’re going to do it anyway. But know this, whoever you are: you’re extemely stupid and ignorant.

UPDATE: OK – I have to acknowledge that Michelle Cottle at TNR got there before me. But she slow-rolls the larger public policy angle, treating this as a “mainstream media suck” issue when it’s so much more. And she gets paid to do this fulltime, while I have to steal time from my employer to do it. Why am I not on JournoList?

UPDATE: Added link to good article on the teleprompter issue by Bob Cescas.