{"id":183,"date":"2003-06-02T23:25:27","date_gmt":"2003-06-03T03:25:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/toughening_up"},"modified":"2003-06-02T23:25:27","modified_gmt":"2003-06-03T03:25:27","slug":"toughening_up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2003\/06\/toughening_up.html","title":{"rendered":"Toughening Up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My home town is having a special election on Tuesday.  Tonight at <em>precisely 6:11pm<\/em>, my phone rang:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Me:  Hello?<\/p>\n<p>Telemarketer Lady:  Hi, I&#8217;m with the Republican party, and I&#8217;m calling about Measure E.<\/p>\n<p>Me:  (politely) Oh, I&#8217;m sorry, I&#8217;m not a Republican &#8212; <\/p>\n<p>Telemarketer Lady:  (click)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In retrospect, maybe I should have said, &#8220;Oh, how interesting,&#8221; and pretended to be a Republican for as long as I could, thus tying up valuable Republican party resources just before a critical school bond referendum.  Unfortunately my Mama and Papa didn&#8217;t school me in the brutal Darwinian tactics of street-level political combat.  Instead, they schooled me in answering the phone politely.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps this is the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonmonthly.com\/features\/2001\/0203.glastris.html\" title=\"Why Can't the Democrats Get Tough?\">essence of our problem<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>And on another front, <a href=\"http:\/\/marissalingen.com\/\">M&#8217;ris<\/a> is waging psychological warfare.  I make an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/2003\/May\/index.html#26\">innocent reference<\/a> to &#8220;Fiddler&#8221;, which has the unfortunate side effect of embedding a few of Fiddler&#8217;s songs and catchphrases in her head.  So M&#8217;ris retaliates by trying to make me <a href=\"http:\/\/marissalingen.com\/052703.html\">associate Trinity with Christopher Walken<\/a>.  Yuck!  Again, see?  Underhanded, vicious street-level combat, for which I am totally unprepared.  So the question is, does this deserve a response?  On the one hand&#8230; an eye-for-an-eye leaves the whole world blind.  On the other hand&#8230; it&#8217;s <em>just<\/em> this kind of namby-pamby thinking that lets Republican Telemarketer Ladies just, like, walk all over people.  But on the other hand&#8230; no.  No!  <em>There is no other hand!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unfortunately my Mama and Papa, being good Democrats, didn&#8217;t school me in the brutal Darwinian tactics of street-level political combat.  Instead, they schooled me in answering the phone politely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}