West Coast Observer: Country-club new year

Musings on December 31

By William Silveira

Since the election, my brain has reeled in attempting to organize into one cohesive package a conclusion as to what happened to us as a country. Perhaps the readers of these words will find them too bleak or too far off the mark. If so, I hope those readers are right. What has transpired, and my view of what may transpire, have drained me of a great deal of optimism about this country’s future.

Third Monday Musing

The right to vote

By Ed Rogers

We have all placed our trust and hope on one candidate or the other at some time in our life—if you haven’t, why vote at all? The right to vote has forever been in the hands of the rich. White Americans never questioned the right to vote until the voting act of 1965. Outside of the South, people seemed to believe that everybody was voting who wanted to vote. But in the South, citizens with money pretty much controlled who got elected, and they controlled who was allowed to vote. A number of blocks were placed in the road to guarantee white control. From Wikipedia’s article on “Voting rights in the United States”:

Tuesday with Another Voice

Today's voice belongs to
Contributing Editor
Tom Lowe

I'm so bored with politics today

My father was a lifelong Republican. He learned his political values in the Progressive Era of the reformist Governor of California Hiram Johnson, and reflected that shade of Republicanism throughout his life. His letters to his college roommate, who was a member of the California Assembly, a New Deal Democrat, reflect the McCloud Lumber Company-owned, Northern California town’s establishment’s view of the New Deal programs—mildly critical but not hostile.

About those dead cats

It's cold and dreary in Mebane. There's even a possibility of snow (our always-reliable and hardly-ever-wrong weather forecasters tell us). What better sort of day for reading Gail Collins, who is even more reliable and right than our weather forecasters? I recommend her op-ed piece, "The Lost Weekend," in today's New York Times. Excerpts:

The Senate is going to be in session all weekend, debating the big health care bill and arguing about which direction the cost-curve is heading. This is a positive development on two counts. It keeps senators off the streets while providing much-needed employment in the chart-making sector of our economy.
    ...
    Is that perfectly clear? Good. Now we will return to our regularly scheduled conversation. Did you see that hot reality show “Hoarders” on A&E the other night? What about that lady who hoarded her dead cats? If “Hoarders” gets superpopular, do you think lots of people will start putting dead cats in their living room just so they can get on TV and be famous? Maybe somebody will try to bring dead cats to a state dinner at the White House! Does the Secret Service have a plan to avert this?
    Sorry. I’ll behave. Back to the health care bill.
    ...
    In fact, G.O.P. senators appear to have amendments aimed at wiping out virtually all the cost-cutting the Democrats have put in the bill, including productivity adjustments and incentives for innovation in health care delivery.
    If they can’t kill the bill completely, Republicans who are not from Maine seem intent on raising its price tag....
    There is no sane explanation for all this other than crass political calculation....
    Now, about those dead cats.

Enjoy today's weather.
    Or, as my friend Fred says:

McCain's not crazy. He's just performing stunts that he thinks will help him get re-elected. Unfortunately, there are no end of people (they're called politicians) who are quite willing to screw up the country as long as they can continue to enjoy the spotlight and perks of public office.

"McCain will have no trouble in Missouri"

A news article this morning on NPR ("Joplin May Be Reddest Corner in Missouri," by Linda Wertheimer) investigates how likely it is that the bellweather state of Missouri will again "pick the president." Only once in a century have Missouri's electoral votes not gone to the candidate who became president. (Missouri went for Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kevaufer in 1956.)

Polls currently show the Democratic and Republican tickets running neck and neck over Missouri as a whole, but apparently not in Jasper County. At about four minutes into Ms. Wertheimer's article, we're treated to this frank admission by a shop owner in Joplin, who says that "McCain will have no trouble in Missouri":

He's against abortion, anytime, and he's also, he's against same-sex marriages. Those are very important things to me. The country can go broke, and those things, those morals still stand. If you've got a moral country, God will be with you.

I don't need to parse this for people who can actually think, but if I needed to I might mention, for starters, that "belief in God" confers no moral advantage. In fact, it could weigh against God (if God existed), that the Bible allows itself to be interpreted the way this benighted Missourian interprets it. Also (if I were to mention one more thing), haven't we had enough of people who decide their vote on single issues? "The country can go broke, but..."

..."under God" MUST be mandated for our pledge of allegiance.
...homosexuals MUST not be permitted to marry.
...Roe v. Wade MUST be overturned.
...taxes MUST be lowered.
...the Ten Commandments MUST NOT be removed from our courthouses.

By the way, in my list of labels at the bottom of this post, I didn't choose the labels for how they would sort with respect to which labels would follow "Democrats" and "Republicans." Just turned out that way.

Jesse Helms curbed their enthusiasm

When we moved to North Carolina (twenty-five years ago last month), we saw a fair number of bumper stickers around liberal Chapel Hill that said, "I did not vote for Jesse Helms!" Today's huge headline on page one of our local newspaper announces Helms's death yesterday:

1921-2008
JESSE HELMS
HE REDEFINED POLITICS IN NORTH CAROLINA, REINVIGORATED U.S. CONSERVATISM

An accompanying article, by Bob Christensen, explains that

North Carolina was a one-party state when Helms was growing up, and he helped transform it by making it acceptable for conservative Democrats to vote Republican....
    More than that, Helms changed American history.
    He and his political organization rescued Ronald Reagan's political career during the 1976 North Carolina Republican primary. Although Reagan did not win the nomination that year, it set him up to win the White House in 1980....
    Had Reagan not been elected, would we have had the two George Bushes?....

Later, as I was washing a few dishes and my wife was poring over the newspaper, I heard her cry out in disgust, "What did he do now? That's so stupid!"

"What did Bush do now?" I asked.

"No, not Bush. Me!" (She must have said, "What did I do....")

She was only doing a Soduko. Sometimes she screws up like that. But my reaction reminded me of another uproarious theme during Season Four of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Probably in the same opening episode in which Mel Brooks hears Larry David sing to Karaoke, Cheryl reminds Larry that their tenth wedding anniversary is approaching. For her wedding present, Larry agrees that they'll repeat the wedding ceremony, this time with more pomp apparently than Cheryl enjoyed the first time. "And what do you want?" she asks him. "Oh, don't you remember? You already told me what my present would be."

There's a ten-year flashback to the evening they agreed to get married. Larry was reluctant to take that step, their relationship was fine. Cheryl got him to go along with it by offering to let him have sex with another woman for their tenth anniversary....

Larry's attempts to find a woman to have sex with provide a series of entertaining situations throughout Season Four. There's the big, black hooker, who just doesn't quite appeal to Larry in that way. Besides if he's seen with her, it could put the kibosh on his attempts to join a new, very conservative country club....There's the randy wife of the local dry cleaner. They arrange an assignation (to which Larry brings a satin sheet with the hole already cut for his penis), but while she's telling him that the business about Hasids' only making love through a hole is bullshit, an earthquake begins to rumble....

Finally, it looks as though it's going to happen, only a few hours before the deadline imposed by Cheryl. Cady Huffman (playing herself playing the Swedish typist in "The Producers") invites Larry into her dressing room an hour before opening night. Everything's going fine until Larry spots a big framed photograph of Bush on the wall. "You're a Republican?" he asks, in disgust. Of course, it's all over.

"My Introductory Statement"

This morning I created a blog at democrats.org, with an introductory statement of my political background and interests. At the moment, I do not plan to post regularly to that blog, but continue here, and my first post there attempts to direct visitors to come here, to what I consider Moristotle's home.

I'm telling you about this only in case you might wish to read my short statement of introduction at democrats.org. (It'll be a quick link opened in a new window.) Again, the link is http://www.democrats.org/page/community/post/moristotle/CLLP.

My role in this year's election comes to an end

I've done all of the calling I'm going to do to get out the vote for this year's election. I feel relieved. And, I'm gratified to be able to report, I feel better than I did at the start of the day. It helped to speak with a number of voters who also seemed eager for change—eager enough to have already voted or to be going to vote for sure before the polls close tonight.

The late news tonight and the news tomorrow will tell us how some of it came out. May my visions of Bushevik dirty trickery have been more paranoid than realistic. I'll vote for that.

Enjoy the game?

George Will ends his column that I see reprinted in Raleigh's News & Observer this morning with a baseball metaphor for Election Day. We've just been handed a program and we're told to "enjoy the game."

Today's voting feels like anything to me but a baseball game. When my wife and I voted at 9 o'clock, the polling place felt grim to me. I just didn't feel as though I was exercising a "proud rite of democracy" or something. I think there's just too heavy a pall of uncertainty hanging over everything. Whether the Busheviks' fear-mongering and smearing can actually (in this country of "educated people") bring out voters for Republican candidates. Whether the Diebold voting machine company has the fix in again this year in key races, so that it won't actually matter how people vote in certain precincts.

Nevertheless, we voted, and I'm back home now and am continuing to call likely Democratic voters in tightly contested districts to urge them to go vote.

I do this despite my misgivings. Am I one of the people of faith? I am still a person with some little hope, at any rate.

Lots of folks still undecided?

One of my readers asks, "Do you think there are lots of folks still undecided?"

My sense, from the people I've spoken with on the phone as a MoveOn.org "Call for Change" volunteer, is that there aren't many left undecided—at least among voters previously identifed as likely to vote Democratic (which is perhaps only roughly half of the total pool). I would think that there might be more undecideds from those "likely to vote Republican," since they have to deal with various disappointments in the way their "president" and their representatives have done things.

But, since one way to deal with disappointment is to just believe all the harder (like those folks in the 50's whose leader's prediction of the end of the world didn't come to pass¹), there may not be so many undecideds among the Republicans as we might think, especially since Republicans tend, more than Democrats, to be "faith-based" folks².
____________________

1. The case was written up by the cognitive dissonance theorist, Leon Festinger, and I wrote about it on September 27.
2. Being no admirer of Bush Republicans, I like to think that Sam Harris's book, The End of Faith, is warning us against certain Muslims and Republicans more than it is against Democrats. That is, "faith based" folks believe things that have no evidence to support them, regardless of contrary evidence. Like "president" Bush himself. See the excerpt from Krugman, in my post of a few minutes ago (below).