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Thursday, November 4, 2004
Merry Ricksmas 
| | reading political blogs. Time to stop watching tv news so much. Time to stop listening to people argue on radio and tv just because the radio and tv people want them to. |
| | Time to start shifting into the positive. |
| | Speak truth to stupidity. Speak truth to thuggery. Speak truth to douchebaggery. Better we each become Michael Moore than we all become Winston Smith. |
Can't get my mind out of it
ITMS
| | The homegrown national paper is produced by the Cullen Family (who, except for the legal counsel, comprise the entire masthead), out of Storm Lake, Iowa, which lies at deep within the red donut surrounding the blue hole marking the state's one urban center. The paper is packed with pieces by Ted Rall, Arianna Huffington, Jesse Jackson, Alexander Cockburn, Ralph Nader, Donald Kaul and Molly Ivins, among other volcanoes comprising the left ridge of the national op-ed archipelago. While I enjoy reading many of those folks, there hardly seemed any point. |
| | Still, I paged through the paper, because paging through papers is a habit so deep I'll be doing it after I'm dead; much as, I suppose, devout trout fishermen will wade and cast for an eternity, certain that rewards will come. |
| | Mine came when I spotted the sharp eyes and bushy brows of my all-time favorite colunmist: Hal Crowther, who kept my mind pried open during all the years I read him in local North Carolina weeklies. (He's still carried by the Independent.) What a treat to find him there. |
| | Hal's latest piece in the Progressive Populist makes for depressing reading. But oh, the writing... |
| | Much as the knowledge torments us -- those of us who remember -- it's no longer possible to deny that Iraq is Vietnam revisited. When Bush, Cheney and the neocon warlords deny that they see the resemblance, remember that their only memories of the conflict in Vietnam come from motion pictures... |
| | Early one Saturday evening, after my aunt's funeral, I drove south from Rochester, N.Y., into the Allegheny foothills. In late September twilight I drove 90 miles, almost to Pennsylvania, before I found a motel or any substantial sign of life. The dozen towns I drove through were ghost towns, with empty streets, empty storefronts and scarcely 20 functioning businesses that I could count -- and 15 of those sold pizza. It was like a medieval countryside emptied by the plague. Do ghosts eat pizza? |
| | Every 40 miles or so a Wal-Mart sits like a fortress in the same medieval landscape, the Wal-Mart that murdered these once-charming villages, that created five mega-billionaires on the latest list of the super-rich, that controls all the retail business and most of the jobs that remain in wasted rust-belt regions like Western New York. And I know from the experience of living there, as well as the flags and ribbons, that most of these people support the war and support this president. Out here even the ghosts vote Republican. |
| | It's here in the empty country that the great Republican gullibility holds sway. People surrender their soldier-children, their votes, their meager taxes without a murmur, then call in to rightwing radio hosts to rage about abortionists and same-sex marriage. Where hope is hard to find, people turn to more accessible emotions, like anger and fear. They need enemies to give them purpose in the world, and if Osama bin Laden is out of range they're happy to substitute you and me -- the too-tolerant, too-skeptical "secular humanists" for whom, ironically, the post-Enlightenment American democracy was expressly designed. |
| | The Republicans are wondrous manipulators of these lost souls, these disenfranchised Middle Americans. But Kansas isn't our enemy. It's our responsibility, as a few serious politicians understand. Sander Levin, Democratic congressman from Michigan, is an intelligent, compassionate, somewhat sorrowful-looking old man who looks like the Hollywood stereotype of the wise old liberal legislator. On his wedding anniversary, he drove out to a Kerry fundraiser in upscale Chevy Chase, Md., to rally the troops, who had been reading discouraging polls. |
| | "Don't start hanging your heads, that's what they count on," he told them. "We have a great opportunity. I'm obsessed by the importance of this election. Believe me -- there are 175 Republican congressmen just like Tom DeLay, and they plan to dismantle this nation as we know it, as it has evolved to this point. Four more years of these people and we're bankrupt, we have no tax base, we have a military draft, we have hopeless wars. Worst of all, all the machinery for helping people will have withered away. Think of a Supreme Court packed with fundamentalist reactionaries ..." |
| | Levin shook his head and his voice trailed away. Then he looked up and smiled, a tired smile: "Please, please don't give up." |
| | I love Hal. And because of Hal, and the brave hearts and pens of the Cullens and their friends, I'll subscibe to The Progressive Populist, which also features this online bonus: Their content is served in simple, fast-loading HTML. Bless them. |
| | But I have to disagree with Hal's conclusions, if not his sentiments. |
| | It's now clear that the country (in at least two meanings of that word) favored Bush mostly for moral reasons that trumped all the Larger Issues (such as the war). For example, the craftiest move Bush (or Karl Rove) made was calling for a constitutional amendment "protecting" marriage (and hammering "stronger family" rhetoric for the duration). While the dumbest move by progressives was making same-sex marriage an issue during a presidential election year. The meta-message: Bush was protecting the family at home and the country abroad. The term "homeland security" is not accidental. Never mind that progressives believe he was doing nothing of the sort. The message was moral, and it resonated with a majority of voters. Especially the activist ones in evangelical Christian churches, which Hal barely saw, if at all, in his travels through Wal-Mart country. (Aside: Do you know that Wal-Mart is loved by many of its customers? Deal with that.) |
| | The LA Times has an amazing map in its print edition today. Maybe one of you can find it from that last link. (Here it is. Thanks, Dave.) It shows how the Red/Blue vote broke down, by county, nationwide. Holy shit, folks, lemme tell ya: It's hard to drive a hundred miles from any blue county without entering a vast sea of red. Even here in Santa Barbara county, only the city itself is blue. Go to the county seat in Santa Maria and you're in Red Country. "Blue states" like Pennsylvania, New York, and even California, Oregon and Washington, are blue mostly in urban centers and counties whose main industry is a state university. Most of the rest are red. |
| | Here's the slogan Bush didn't use: It's The Morality, Stupid. |
| | Andrew Sullivan: The war was not the issue. Gays were. (Read his whole post today. Also this. Wrenches the heart.) |
| | If progressives want to win the hearts of the heartland, they'd better learn how to find common ground. |
| | Fortunately, that's why George Lakoff wrote the book. |
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