Sad Lisa

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Maybe it's premature to borrow Cat Steven's song title.  It's spoiled sport to say "I told you so". The United States may be post-courtesy and post-propriety -- its own unique manner of being "post-Puritanical", as the erosion of the superficial reveals our asperity -- but it is not yet post-racial.

The Presidential election of 2008 should have been a runaway for the Democrats; the people were tired of the failed wars and the abysmal economy.  Because the party took a chance on candidate Obama, it was not a runaway, though it was a win.  Today, many seem to have all but forgotten what party delivered us into the chasm, and they are ready to swing back, for visceral reasons.  If Romney wins, it will not be the 1% who elect him.

Because it was President Obama who presided over a country in duress, it is he who will be blamed for not turning it around (a trick probably no president could have accomplished in one term.)  Because it was he, he will be judged doubly harshly.  Because he has actually ascended the American throne of power, he has stupefied and angered those with entrenched prejudice, those who think white men speak for them (even when they don't.)

Listening to Cat Stevens last night brought the thought to mind.  Despite his unquestioned excellence as a musician, when Stevens converted to Islam in 1977 (becoming "Yusuf Islam"), he endured no end of disdain.  No doubt part of that was spawned from fans who wanted Cat back, but there is also no doubt that disdain and intolerance of The Other played a part, the fear that such a great guy had been so readily "brainwashed".

Many of you voted President Obama into office, but you may not be able to keep him there, and that thought does not please me.  One of the deciding factors may be because his race has put a stick in the hornet's nest of latent American racism, and it is easy to lump our current failures upon his perceived inabilities.  For some people, their disappointment is independent of race, but not for a great many others who see Obama's background as a community organizer as a pander to special interests, which means, not them.

If he wins, it will be in the sort of squeaker John F. Kennedy pulled out over Nixon. (Per our own experience with voting here in Florida, if you're the distrusting sort, beware -- the Romney's own an interest in a voting machine company.)  Some will say Obama deserves to lose based upon his performance, but surely this is a case where there is no magic fairy in the wings to make things any better.  Things are already very tough for the average American, and further compassionate austerity measures as promised by the beaming, lying Romney will only further harshen the lives of the average citizen.

Unfortunately, per usual, our eyes are taken elsewhere, to topics that do not directly affect us, and the charlatans perform their legerdemain as if to a metronome.  And the people, those who listen, sit awash in a welter of lies and bad information.

Ultimately, as they always do, they will default to their primitive calculus that will produce for them no matter how uneasily, at least the ersatz image of a President to take them through the next term.  Each voter's ability to imagine depends upon how far evolved he is from his received self-image; most people cleave to those images that proved at least the semblance of security, and that usually means someone who looks and sounds like them, no mater how marginally.

What the people now know most is, it will be a rocky next four years; they will all be, as we have become acclimated to that expectation.  They hope the price of gas will not rise too much, but they know it will spike and fall in response to the vagueries of the trading markets.  Even many of those with conviction are willing to let their environmental sensitivities erode, a bit, if it means the oil will keep flowing, petroleum addicts that we are, and like addicts everywhere, the pushers do not care that we get better.

Our science is reduced to a shell game, global warming, a mere theory.  Of course, even if the harbingers like this year's massive crop failures turn out to be a one-off, why not prepare by putting on the petro brakes and really trying for a shift?  Instead, the 50% (more?) of Americans who do not wish to be weaned (who have had too much taken from them already) cry out that coal and oil can fuel us for, why, the next 100 years!  At least that.  And somehow, when they turn of the lights and nod off, they feel better with that thought.

Here are the betting margins from the South (and you should not dismiss this as being a representation of solely the "Ricky Bobby" South), where even (and especially) the power elite will muse on game day (that's football), "I wonder if our niggers will beat yours?"  It may be the older generation which says it aloud, but the tension remains in their scions.

Many have opened their hearts after a lifetime of seeing the inequities, but many, too have fallen victim to the equal opportunity policies they once championed.  Changing one's bedrock thought, the thing that allows one to maintain his identity in a tumultuous life, is a difficult thing.

Hollywood is doing its part, but some resent the patronization.  We now have Latina and black glamor with J-Lo and Halle Berry and all who have followed, and stories like Monster's Ball.  This is not Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Cansino) anglicizing her look by dying her hair and doing electrolysis on her hairline  -- this is a celebration of otherness.  However, it has all passed relatively quickly, and the anguish portended by Thomas Jefferson still perdures, namely, that slavery will be the burden of this nation.  So it is.

Last week I read a book review of the last known lynching in America which took place in 1934 Marianna, a little town to the West of Tallahassee.  Friends have shared with me stories of being invited to lynchings to the East (in Live Oak), and of the KKK parades down main street.  The people who share these stories have opened their hearts and grown to one degree or another, but by their own admission, their fellows have not.

My mother moved to Miami in the early 1960's and was amazed to see "WHITE" and "BLACK" signs over the washing machines in the laundromats.  She thought, "How neat -- they keep some washers for white clothes, some for darks." Then someone told her the truth: The signs were for the color of the people, not the wash.

Why do people hate?  I have no answer, but it perdures like the hardest things in nature.  Nations (people) have always warred over land to which they feel entitled, deciding the current inhabitants too stupid or venal to be allowed to continue.  That disdain is based in long-held prejudices based upon religion (ironically), race or creed.  Our story of the Hatfields and the McCoys provides a sad slogfest embodying the persistence of hatred, it's power to drive even mindless self-destruction.

Self-destruction.  There is something seductive and dark about the impulse: If I can't have it, you can't either.  Some people see Obama as Other, Romney as Self, even though it is not remotely true.

These people will not be able to see Obama as one of them, as an American, and they will vote against their interests in order to dislodge the Interloper, as they see it.

Kissin' Cousins

The only one who could ever reach me
was the son of a preacher man
Oh yes he was 
--The Son of a Preacher Man,
Dusty Springfield 

 They are not "job creators" as Mitt Romney tells us.

They've been waiting for economy to die

so they can make billions - billions - on scams,

flim-flams and political, military muscling

--fr. Vultures' Picnic interview 

Aw shucks, it ain't nothing but possum tails,

owl gizzards, and grits fried in bear grease.

And then that there gravy --

that's just goat's milk with vulture eggs

and mashed catfish eyes   

--Kissin' Cousins (1964)

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Some commentary spurred by the two bumper stickers in the Helen shop -- "WWRD: What Would Reagan Do?" and "Support Your Local Militia". 

Y'all folks on the more enlightened coast might not understand the obdurate nature of many Southeasterner's ignorance. (We understand that this stalwart conviction bleeds across the Midwest, too.)  While it is heartening that only 38% of respondents in a recent Gallup poll gave Romney's RNC speech positive marks, Americans are still impressible to manufactured emotions which define the unbridgeable chasms of modern politics.

Who cares what Reagan would do?  One thing is certain: Reagan would not be parading his issue across the stage like the good Republicans today preaching their family values.  Nope -- ballet dancer Ron Jr. and perennial malcontent Maureen would not have provided cozy bookends to that icon of the right.

We are such fools to devour the images which we believe define us and will make us safe.  We see Reagan on a screen, larger than life, and remember his presentation, forgetting the actuality of his term.  We see Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry or Josey Wales character and feel better. We see George W. Bush's or Reagan's ten gallon hat and feel secure; somehow, the bogeymen will not get us.

But what we refuse to see is that the bogeyman is already here, intertwined with every facet of our lives.  However you define the bad man, hovering in a convention hall among your fellows in silly hats will not save you.  Crying for less government will not extricate you.

Symbols and their real world referents have lost their connection.  Reagan and Eastwood represent Hollywood, which represents the distortion of truth and manufactured emotion.  Hollywood can only provide us real men before whom we suspend our disbelief.

Ann Romney's speech served the same function of delivering an image of ourselves of which we are not  actually a part.  She tried to feel our pain, but with her own personal Swiss bank account of $3 Million, we again see another disconnect between words and actuality, symbol and referent.

Surely the government has usurped powers and functions not intended by the Founding Fathers, but can or would we change that fact?  Does any man who aspires to be President actually intend to dilute the power to which he so desperately aspires?

While her husband Mitt has surely been a successful venture capitalist, how will his personal success translate to  into a benefit for the average American should he be elected?

This year, the choice is clear.  We can either elect a venture capitalist vulture, or award a second term to President Obama, a man who bailed out failed venture capitalists.  The center -- which defines America as we know it -- is gone.

It's a Hobson's Choice.

Sitting Ducks, Pt. II: Reagan Re-Ducks (Redux)

 Well we're living here in Allentown

And they're closing all the factories down

Out in Bethlehem they're killing time

Filling out forms

Standing in line 

--Allentown, Billy Joel

When the facts change, I change my opinion. 

What do you do sir?

 --John Maynard Keynes

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We spent time in Athens, Ohio, home of Ohio University (OU).  Athens has a permanent population of 21,342, with about the same number of students attending the university; Athen County has a population of about 65,000. 51.9% of the population of Athens County, a former coal mining community, live below the poverty line; over 94% of Athens Co. is white.

$333 million in Federal Stimulus money has been spent in Athens since the inception of that program, or $111 per year (data from Athen's Visitor's Guide.)  Ranger thought to juxtapose the privations of a small Midwestern town with the $45 billion spent since 2007 on the MRAP vehicles alone.

Remember when a presidential race was won with the phrase, "It's the economy, stupid?"  This truism defeated a President (George H. W. Bush) who doted upon foreign policy versus the economy of his nation. While 2012 United States languishes in the same condition as then, President Obama leaves his foreign policy to Secretary Of State Clinton and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And foolish as this seems in terms of not addressing the dire needs of the nation which elected him, it may be savvy politicking: Whoever can out-Reagan Reagan will win.  Romney (and whomever the Republican machine would have tapped for candidate) must design himself as a Nuevo Reagan ... Reagan Redux.  The Democrats are also charged with meeting this bar, and Obama is coming fashionably close to out-gunning Mittens.

Considering what a sub-standard president Reagan was, his iconography is all the sadder.  But the Democrats have not found a viable contender to the Reagan brand and electioneering is acting, and no one out-acts an actor.

Of course, regardless of who out-draws whom, 50% of Athens County will still meander in the miasma that is poverty.  In this way alone, perhaps, they will share the situation of their elected leaders: Both will be signing checks on accounts with insufficient funds. 

(As an aside, the quick check cashing storefront in Athens features a colorful children's Playskool table and chair in the lobby; children should not have to be in fast cash establishments which charge their parents usurious 30+% interest.  It is not a good teaching point.)

No astrologer is needed to tell us too many of us are drawing on an NSF account.

Simple Folk

What do the simple folk do
To help them escape when they're blue?
The shepherd who is ailing,
the milkmaid who is glum?
--What Do Simple Folk Do?,
Camelot (19767)
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Predictably, everyone prone to hop on the sound byte did, but sound bytes fail to tell the actual story. The actual story is, most contenders for the job of U.S. president are totally out of touch with the common man. We seem to like having our collective heads whipped around by the spinmeisters and being outraged by gaffes, and since we don't demand better, we do not get it.

Romney is certainly not the first candidate to show his disconnection with the voters. Al Gore fumbled when asked for the price of a gallon of milk; George Bush did not know the price of a gallon of gas. Simple, real people know these things, and they know by pennies how much each increases by the week.

But now it's Romney's turn in the barrel.

He said, "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it." Insensitive statement, to be sure, but it was the follow on which should have merited the outrage. Continued Romney, "I'm concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I'll continue to take that message across the nation."

Now that is a load of baloney, but who has addressed it? This implies and marginalizes a small band of perpetually straggling groundlings -- the 5%? But the rest are worthwhile ... the "heart of America", the 90-95%?

The truth is, 15% of Americans live in poverty (Poverty Rate Rises in America). The rate is higher for children: 22% of all children, or over 1 in 5, live in poverty. But that's not the whole story, either.

Almost half of all Americans live at or near the poverty line (Close to Half of All Americans Live Near Poverty). These are people who are a couple of paychecks or one serious medical event away from destitution. With 49 million Americans lacking medical insurance, the potential for catastrophe is near. Their head is above water, but barely. These are the people who have fallen OUT of the middle class, and are hanging near its bottom margin by a tenuous thread.

Even if you go with a rosier Census Department study in December '11, close to 100 million people, or a third of the U.S. population, live at or near the poverty line. Math is not my forte, but 33 - 50% of us are very poor. Does that mean that Romney does not care about almost half of the country?

Romney's statement may turn out to be one of the more honest utterings of the campaign. He could not possibly feel our pain, or he would not have made such an absurd statement.

He was patently pandering the other ones he "doesn't care about" ("I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine"), because he is in the rich's pocket.

Newt is Us

A shilly shallier is a dilly dallier,
a dilly-dallier hems and haws
--Shilly Shallier children's song

Territory folks should stick together,
Territory folks should all be pals.
Cowboys dance with farmer's daughters,
Farmers dance with the ranchers' gals
--Oklahoma! (1955)

There is no deadline
There is no schedule
There is no plan we can fall back on
The road this far can't be retraced
--Tallahassee, The Mountain Goats

Well, it was kind of cold that night
She stood alone on her balcony
Yeah, she could hear the cars roll by
Out on 441 like waves crashin' on the beach
--American Girl, Tom Petty
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The snake oil salesmen are working their way through our state now, home of grifters and get rich quick schemes . . . the gentlemen are in their milieu.

Newt is positively brilliant in terms of capitalizing on his pasty-faced doofusness -- it is image-maximization, 2012-style. He has co-opted Sarah Palin's extreme mediocrity, parlaying it into a battle cry for dis-informed Republicans everywhere: I am YOU; we are reactive and ill-informed, but emotional, and Romney thinks we are stupid!

It is the I know you are, but what am I children's game. Gingrich knows we are stupid, too, but he has enough savvy to ally himself with the numbers. In other words, Romney is a cad for being grossly elitist, and therefore not patriotic (Newt to Voters: Romney Thinks You're "Stupid".)

We are Americans, and therefore, covetously mediocre in an aggressive sort of way. Don't you say it though, but we'll walk out in our pyjamas, thanks, because WE are NOT French! (But, this non-royal WE also fancies they are not welfare hootchie mamas, either, and so assiduously takes pains to rein in their brand of mediocrity; they will not share their bloc.)

Newt is their poster boy. It is Newt who petitions for our rights to clap and laugh at rallies, and generally act like the cowman and farmers at a house-raising in Oklahoma! We are just that sort (or like to think we are). We do not like France and we do not wear lycra padded racing shorts. Do not! Look at the man ... could you even imagine Newt in John Kerry's shorts (figuratively, of course, though he is a Republican)? Could it have been such a vision which has caused Callista's eyes to remain perpetually agog?

Slate asks, since both Gingrich and Romney are both consummate insiders. So why is only Gingrich able to portray himself as an outsider? It's image, stupid. It's pretty clear Romney follows a diet and works out, and that is not the American Way (see "Twinkies to Fuel"), unless you're some East or West-coaster. While they correctly note, "The economic diversity at the top of the Republican field runs the gamut from A to B", it is not the reality but the patter that matters. He is a simulacrum populist, and that's good enough for us.

Now Florida is somewhat more diverse than South Carolina, and though Newt may be able to carry the day on the back of his bumpkin-ism, Romney will give him a run for his money because he resonates with the strivers in the middle-class -- those who fancy they can one day afford membership at the country club but meanwhile manage greens fees at the municipal course for the day. They get to play golf, when they are not slaving away at their tenuous jobs. That makes them look like arrivistes, and that makes them feel good.

Romney is what the middlin' folks hope to be but probably never will, so in Florida that means he'll take much of the Latino vote in South Florida, too. He dresses well, and Newt is a schlump. Not for them is a candidate who looks like he could go to Walmart in his p.j.'s; alas, Callista's Tiffany jewels cannot make up for the failing of his shape.

Despite the fact that Florida has the highest rate of chronically unemployed (and the fifth lowest rate of unemployment benefits), the thing that fires us up are the quaint and reviling notions that reek of an empire in decay, Gothic issues, like suppressing the Copernicus's of the world:

"Speaking at a Baptist church in Winter Park on Saturday, the former speaker received a standing ovation when he declared that embryonic stem-cell research amounts to “the use of science to desensitize society over the killing of babies" (Gingrich vows to ban embryonic stem-cell research, questions in vitro practices).

Facts are quite immaterial here -- facts like no babies (or fetuses) are getting killed; facts like stem cells may be extracted from the umbilical cord after birth (in other words, from medical waste). Facts get in the way of passion, a good rumpus, and that's what Newt gives.

We are not talking rationale -- we are talking hootenanny, here. And if there is one thing most Floridians love, that's a swamp fete ... a tailgating party or a hog roast. Yee-haw. Newt is all that and more; he's the whole kit and kaboodle.

In our neck o' the woods, people hop on motorized carts at Walmart whether they need to or not. It is both sport and sloth, for some. These are not fit people and would in fact do well to walk, but have bought into a society which has effectively rendered them hostage to Big Pharma and Big Agra. They feel impotent -- often are -- and out of frustration will vote on seeming kinship alone, so disenfranchised are they from the system. Maybe someone who looks like he has to take the same statin drugs or eats the same fast food will feel their pain. (It was in this way that Bill Clinton was exceptionally successful.)

As Joel Achenbach noted in the WaPo yesterday, a lot of us don't even know there is an impending election. If we muddle off to the polls, for the majority of us, it will be to check the box for someone who looks like us, and that is not necessarily good.