Category Archives: Americana

The Ironic Election

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

 

 

It comes down to numbers. And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney. Karl Rove in the WSJ.

This is what happens when people who don’t know the facts can vote. An after election tweet from a surprised – shocked, really –__fill in the  blank__ completely missing the irony of not knowing that Obama had been leading in the polls for weeks.

….BTW,  one of the more confusing election statistics is the reported 3M conservative voters who did not show up and vote for Romney. I have no idea how to approach understanding this situation. from a couple of emails from an Conservative acquaintance.

Looking at the fantasy map, above, seeing how many states Romney had to win to get the Presidency  I realize – even more – how difficult a time Romney was going to have to win the election. But every strong Conservative I talked to – by email, usually – was surprised by the result. Most were astounded. Stephen Colbert often remarks that Facts have a liberal bias. and that was a bias that the Conservatives refused to see. Romney and Ryan were promoted as numbers guys, promoted as the nation’s saviors  because they were realists. In the end, they were wrong.

They were wrong because they didn’t – or couldn’t – see the actual numbers. They had, along with their fellow Conservatives, lost track of reality.

I have seen this before; in 1966, a Republican actor, Ronald Reagan, ran against two-time governor Pat Brown for governor of California. As the election got close, all the polls showed Reagan leading but my dad, who was a close friend of Brown and one of his biggest fans, thought Brown was going to win in a landslide. In 1966, polls weren’t as accurate as now, but they were accurate enough so that it was obvious to me that Reagan was going to win, but my dad was only looking at the crowds from inside the bubble. This election, the Conservatives were looking at the data from  inside the bubble on a national scale.

That is better, I guess, than Peggy Noonan who thought Romney was going to win because he had more yard signs. Yard signs, it turns out were not the way to predict an election and I would have thought Noonan would know that. But I think that the right was predisposed to ignore all the signals.  Not just the polls but the advantage Obama had in thousands of Obama for America ground volunteers (a Community Organizer, after all, should be pretty good at organizing communities).  Not just the volunteers, but the increasingly large demographic advantage. Not just the volunteers and demographic advantage, but a campaign staff that really knew their stuff. That checked on reality five times a day.

Bleeding heart Liberals are supposed to be unrealistic but the Obama campaign was a hard-headed, tough, ass kicking machine and, very importantly, that is what the soft-hearted Liberals wanted. When Obama did poorly in the first debate, every Liberal I know, complained about it as if it were a personal affront, when Romney did poorly in the second debate, every Conservative I know thought he did great. The Liberals didn’t want to feel good, they wanted to win and, this time around, the Conservatives seemed to just wanted to feel good (they hated Obama so much, I think they thought it would be easy to beat him). Eventually, even Fox’s Megyn Kelly couldn’t take the right’s pundit bullshit anymore, asking Karl Rove if his blather about the number-crunching was just “math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better.”

 

 

Veterans Day

Americana, Politics, War

Korean War Memorial at the western end of the National Mall, Washington DC       

Washington is full of war memorials; it makes me sad that there are so many. On the east end of the Mall, is the The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial  facing toward the Lincoln Memorial at the west end. They unite the Mall like they united the country. In between are newer monuments: World War II, The Korean Conflict – named Conflict or Police Action so Congress didn’t have to vote for it – The Vietnam War. We are becoming an Empire, filling our capitol with memorials to our distant, empirical, wars.

It is nice we honor our Veterans – I am a Veteran and am proud of it, maybe too much at times, considering that I have never heard a shot fired in anger – but I fear that the Honoring is covering up national policies we shouldn’t have. I fear that the Honoring is covering up the debate and discussion on whether we should even be fighting these wars. I fear that the Honoring is covering up our neglect of the shattered bodies and psyches that are the waste products of these empirical wars.

In all the wars, in each war, young men and, now, women – or old boys and, now girls,  depending on your point of view – have been sent to distant places by old men to kill people whose names they don’t know and, in most cases, can pronounce. They are sent to places we don’t really know or understand. It is not making us great, it is not making us rich, it is not making us safe.

Obama, race, extremism, and stupidity

Americana, Politics

I was surprised at the racism in this election. I have been surprised and disturbed at the increasing reveal of racism over the last four years, mostly by people trying to appeal to Republicans, and – now,  in the end, when the ballots have been counted – I am surprised and delighted that it didn’t hurt the President. Ironically, the racism seemed to have hurt the Republicans.

We all know the guy above is a ___fill in the blank again__. Even he knows it, as he stands there, staring into the close distance, looking at nothing, just being aware of the camera behind him. My question is Why did he do it? Why did he put that shirt on and go out in public? Why did he even buy that shirt? I guess that it is possible he is so tired of his life not working that he is finally wants to yell out his truth. His life is not his fault, it’s the black president’s fault giving all his black friends all the goodies . Maybe he thought most of us would secretly agree.

Before the election, I thought I hope he is wrong, but I am not as sure as I was four years ago. The election proved him – and me – wrong. Sure, there are racists out there, but not enough to overturn a black president whose pitch was What I am doing may not be working – yet – and hasn’t lived up to my promises, but it will and I need to be reëlected to finish the job. This was not the magic Negro promising Change, this was – in most American’s opinion – a steady, competent  guy trying to dig us out of a hole. A guy who just happened to be black and it didn’t really seem to matter.

Most of us reconized the passive- aggressiveism of Romney dickishly saying When the world needs to do really good stuff, you need an American. while pretending it was not about race, and it ended up hurting Romney more than it hurt Obama. Not with people who really did think he was born in Kenya, I guess, but with most voters (66,882,230 and counting). I can understand that the guy in the picture is too stupid to realize that he is hurting what I presume is his cause (getting Obama out of office). But I found it harder to believe that Romney is that stupid – I know, the proof is in the fact that he actually did make that statement – and I wonder why he made it. I wonder what he was thinking when he included you need an American in his speech.

When I read about Republicans cutting back on early voting, eliminating Take Your Souls to the Polls Sunday in Florida, making picture IDs mandatory to vote, and just generally harassing black voters, it scared me. I had forgotten that these were people who – just sixty years ago – were willing to die to get the vote (and, don’t forget, some did). The harassers must have forgotten that too, and they must have been shocked that all their harassment just increased the turnout against them.

I went to bed Tuesday night feeling great about America. An America, it turns out, that is becoming as inclusive and welcoming as I had dreamed it would be.

 

 

The debate

Americana, Politics

Michele and I watched the debate with two guys that love politics and we fell into rooting like we were at a football game. So my perception may be flawed, but it seemed to me that Obama was having a better time than Romney. A more fun time (we thought he crossed over into arrogant once when he kept talking way past the shut-off point and we all started yelling Shut-up, you’re winning). He seems to have found a more presidential zone and his lecture to Romney on Benghazi seemed especially powerful to me.

And, then of course, Romney said Women in Binders. Eerily enough I totally understand what Romney means just like I did when he said The trees are the right height. It is not where I don’t like Romney, but this time I recognized Women in Binders was going to be a big deal. What I didn’t expect was a Tumblr on it (mostly because I don’t really understand Tumblr).

The long way home

Americana, Travel

 

Coming back from Boise was the trip going in reverse except that the views and sightlines are all 180° off so that it is really never the same trip. I might not be the best authority on this, however, as Michele and I have driven across Nevada – probably – more than 20 times and, to me, it never seems the same. And all the trips are great, but maybe, it is an acquired taste. One trip, I remember, it was snowing – but right on the edge of the freezing line – for the whole trip which meant that every mountain pass had wet snow and every valley was misty rain (except for worrying about what the weather would be like in Utah – our destination – the trip, ensconced in our heated car, was magic).

The Owyhee Mountains seemed much more mountain like this time around and, what seemed like richer farms and ranches coming in, now seemed poor.

After the oasis of Boise with its soft green-ness, even the green floodlands of the Owyhee River seemed lost in the endless, late summer, Dry.

As we drive through the high desert, watching it float by us as if on TV, we chat and joke, we listen to Eileen’s iPhone music collection, we sense, more than hear the ever present car noise. But, when we stop, when we get out of the car, it is a deep quiet.   In Scenes in America Deserta, Reyner Banham talks about the silence of Drylands, Silence  heat and light. The silence flowed back around us, like a filling pool, as I switched off the engine of the car….In Basin and Range, John McPhee quotes Freeman Dyson It is a soul-shattering silence. You hold your breath and hear absolutely nothing….You are alone with God in that silence. We weren’t alone, and our chatter followed us out of the car when we stopped; but the background silence was always there. One one stop, Eileen and I took pictures of each other, and I think Eileen’s better captures the silence and immensity of the space.

At one point, as we drive along, I watch a truck – on a parallel road but in a life sharply divergent from ours – throw-up a dust trail. It starts me  thinking about how hard it would be to sneak up on somebody out here. We left Boise after lunch and now the sun is getting low as we get close to Winnemucca and the Interstate. The mountains are soft in the fading light and we start thinking about where we will have dinner in Reno (a Thai restaurant south of the airport won) .

To be continued….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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