Aaaaaaagh my candidates lost again yesterday. After years of chuckling at the school board’s crazy hijinx, I finally live someplace where I can affect the outcome, and I did: I jinxed the motherloving daylights out of the election. (You’re welcome!) The people did not elect anyone who would publicly hex the mayor, but the new board members’ initiatives so far seem to consist of “undo the last two years of reforms” and “free on-demand backrubs for the teachers’ union.” Which, in terms of getting out the vote, turns out to be brilliant. This seems to have been one of those times when everyone stayed home, saying, “Surely nobody’s going to elect those yahoos. My vote is better saved for ‘American Idol.’”
On the plus side (I have decided to pay serious attention to all plus sides) it is sort of nice to know that you can still get elected in this country without a lot of money, connections, or any real idea what you’re talking about. You can get elected to the school board with no more qualification than running Everythingabouttheschoolssucks.com. It’s inspiring, in the sense that it inspires me to wait a few more years to have kids.
I had just shaken off the political news and started making sense of the world again when I obviously had a psychotic break and thought I read that Apple is now making Macs with Intel chips that you can run Windows on. I can’t be the only one who thinks this is like Coke offering six packs with cans of Pepsi inside. I thought Apple would go out of business before they’d let something like that happen. I’m not saying I thought they’d be very stubborn about it; I mean I literally thought Apple would go out of business.
Which I guess they still could. Atari seemed immortal in 1982, and now they’re just a name somebody bought. No Atari iPod, though.
I believe this Apple about-face could be great for them as well as the rest of us, not despite the fact that it flies in the face of Apple’s usual ethos but because of it. For so long, the Apple philosophy has been “appliance purchase as cult membership.” The fact that 90% of the population is using something else is a good thing. They don’t get it. You Think Different. You’re a Part of Something Bigger that the general population isn’t hip enough to understand, because they’re too busy using the shelves and shelves of software your iMac doesn’t run. Here. Have a bumper sticker. Let people know you advertise our merchandise for free love your Mac like a childhood pet/partner in sexual experimentation.
But I don’t want to love my computer operating system. I don’t want to think about my computer operating system. I don’t want to love the fact that I don’t think about my computer operating system. I don’t want to sit and listen to Mac users give me a protracted sales pitch for a corporation’s product like they’ve just come out of a Maoist re-education camp, knowing that if someone approached these same people talking the same way about a political issue or Jesus Christ they would beat the guy to death with their Powerbook and then rave about how durable it was. It is important to believe in something, just not Apple F-ing Computer Inc. I’m not looking for an identity; I can get that from my shoes.
The tragedy up until now is that I should be Apple’s ideal customer, because part of not wanting to love my computer is not wanting to mess with it. I don’t love my car; I just love getting across town. I have no particular loyalty to the Gatesian Empire; I just want a machine that can open my files and do what I want. Given how few truly hardcore things I use my PC for, a Mac would work just as well for me, probably better… except for the fact that, after years of having Mac users try to give me the Bhagavad Gita at the airport, I would rather slam the laptop shut on my penis than join their precious little club.
But imagine the cult opening the doors to their compound. Imagine a machine that the buyer can use however he wants. If they just started selling the Mac OS in a box for PC users, they actually could take over the world. “You want to use Windows? No problem. You want the MacOS? Fine. You want to use something other than iTunes on your iPod? F- you, buddy; you’re going down.”
One battle at a time, I guess.