Lance Mannion

Pickett’s charges

We’ve been watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War and last night we finished the episode that includes the battle of Gettysburg.  And when Burns begins to tell the story of Pickett’s Charge, the historian Shelby Foote, the shy-eyed, slow-talking baritone who is the star of the narrational portions of Burns’ documentary, refers to a quote from William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust about how for young Southern men it’s always early in the afternoon of July 3, 1863, the lines are still forming in the woods, the battle flags are about to unfurl, and that wide open field still looks like the clear road to Washington and the end of the war and victory for the South.

I looked up the exact quote afterwards:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is stll time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago....

This time.  Maybe.

When you’re young you think nothing can whup you, not even time.  For every Southern boy the war is still winnable.

Which would mean that for every Southern boy the war is still being fought.

White Southern boys. Faulkner was talking only about white kids.

I’ve always thought how weird that must be, growing up with one of the things defining your sense of self being hand-me-down memories of your grandfather’s, great-grandfather’s, great-great-grandfather’s war.

Lost war.

Was that ever true?  Was it just Faulkner’s fancy?  Is it still true?

For my friends and I growing up in the North, the Civil War fascinated our imaginations and provided all kinds of stories to act out in our backyard and cow pasture battlefields, but it wasn’t the war.  It was one of a long string of wars that we won.  And by we we didn’t mean the North.  We meant the United States.

Our Southern counterparts could pretend to fight almost as many wars as we did and count themselves among the we who won them.  But when they put on their imaginary gray their we divided against itself.  Their we lost.  Our they won.  In their imaginations they seceded from the Union and they got whupped for it, no matter how victorious they were in the Peach Orchards and Devil’s Dens, Cemetery Ridges and Angles of their neighborhoods.

For a Southern kid there would always be moments in his games when he was not one of us.  When he was a Reb.  When he was at war with the United States. 

Which could not have made sense to him if like us up in the North he was also part of the we driving the redcoats out of Boston and the Nazis back to Berlin.  We was we, wasn’t we?   There might have been some natural rebels among them for whom it was congenial to play at being a they, at being if not one of the bad guys then a renegade or some sort of outlaw.  Kids have no problem being pirates.  But for the more conventionally-minded kids, which is most kids, it couldn’t have been easy to accept that by taking their own side they were making themselves the bad guys, volunteering to not only be the losers but to be the ones in the wrong.  How could they say we started the war for ignoble reasons and then lost it, deservedly?

The answer to that would be they wouldn’t have to.  Their parents would have taught them that it was the North that started the war and the South was on the side of the angels.  They’d have inherited a culture of denial and down is up-ism.  Slavery wasn’t that bad, in fighting to protect the peculiar institution the South was actually fighting to help its slaves whom it would free, eventually, in a saner, smarter fashion than the North intended or cared to manage.  It was a war of Northern Aggression for the purpose of robbing Southerners, slave-holders as well as non, blacks as well as whites, of their land, their rights, their sovereignty.

But the South lost!

The bad guys won.  The good guys lost despite possessing superior virtues and fighting spirit, despite being on the side of the angels.  How did that happen?

How do you work that into your sense of who you are?  How do you believe simultaneously in your own inherited superiority and in your place in history as the vanquished?

Wouldn’t this create a self at odds with itself?  A self that felt entitled and undeserving at the same time?  A self that was full of bravado and just as full of self-doubt?  A self that felt it could lick all comers and a self that was insecure, afraid of a fair fight, brave only when among large numbers of the like-minded and tribally loyal, which is to say essentially a coward?  Wouldn’t you get a self spoiling for a fight in which it could prove itself?  A fight that would resolve the internal contradictions by showing the undeserving, self-doubting, insecure, dependent coward inside that he is not me?

Wouldn’t you get when these boys grow up the men who more and more fill the ranks the Radical Right as the Right and the Republican Party more and more become creatures of the South?

What self-respecting boy with a good and brave heart would want to grow up into that?  What self-respecting kid feeling himself pulled towards such a future self wouldn’t rebel and retreat into an idealized past?  And where better to go than to that moment at the foot of the hill leading up to Cemetery Ridge, before the order to go forward---given by a general too heartbroken at what he knows is about to happen to give it with more than a wordless nod---when none of it matters, when victory is still within grasp, when the fighting men of the South are at their best, when the cause is still glorious and history can be denied because it has yet to unfold?

Am I just going Faulkner one better?

Or are we still fighting that damn war?

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Still fighting that damn war:  Well, some of us are.

From CathiefromCanada, the Klan comes to Ole Miss.

From Oliver Willis…for Missouri Republicans it’s not the hour before Pickett’s Charge, it’s the day before the attack on Fort Sumter.

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The movie Gettysburg does a pretty fair job of giving a sense of how splendid it must have been to have been one of those thirteen thousand men stepping off from Seminary Ridge.  You can understand why one Union officer looking out across the field thought the view of the mustering Confederates was the one of the most beautiful sights he’d ever seen.

The movie doesn’t do quite as good a job of conveying the slaughter that was unleashed when the Yankees finally rose up and fired, how could it?  But it’s still heartbreaking to watch.

Two longish clips from Gettysburg.

Pickett’s Charge:

And the battle:

From the Department of Communications: Issues of Protocol

Lance Mannion has released the following statement (For immediate publication):

Unlike the President, I have never bowed to any emperors and I never will.

Appropriately or not.

In fact, show me an emperor and I'll be glad to spit in his eye.

Problem is, the only emperor I know of is very short.

I'd have to bow down to get eye level with him.

That would defeat the whole purpose, wouldn't it?

Nevermind.

From the Secret Diaries of Lance Mannion: In which I make a quantum leap in the direction of Sarah Jessica Parker and miss

For lunch today I chose the beef stew.

This decision caused three alternative universes to wink into existence.

In one of these alternative universes an alternative Lance Mannion had a chicken salad sandwich.

In the second alternative universe, the alternative Lance had the ribs leftover from take-out the other night.

I thought that in the third alternative universe, the alternative Lance met Sarah Jessica Parker at an outdoor cafe in Manhattan and the two shared a dessert while she complained about how Matthew Broderick was never home anymore.

I goofed.

It turned out that it was in this alternative reality I was supposed to have lunch with SJP.

By the time I realized this it was too late.

I had totally blown her off.

And then Matthew happened to wander by the cafe where she was waiting and they had a long heart to heart and worked things out.

So there goes that opportunity.

Oh well.

At least the stew was good.

Star Trek Geekitude: J.J. Abrams’ Get Out of the Official Canon Free Card

The new Star Trek movie is out on DVD today and naturally I’ve got to write about it.  Do I really need to warn you about spoilers?  Also, serious geekitude alert.

When Nero's ship breaks through from the future into the present of the movie's opening scene right in the path of the Federation starship USS Kelvin it's bad news for the Kelvin, her captain, and her executive officer, Lt George Kirk, but apparently not so much for the rest of the galaxy for at least the next 25 years.

The Kelvin is destroyed, but the biggest change in history as result is that one little kid in Iowa grows up without the steadying influence of his loving dad and instead of becoming the youngest and best starship captain in Federation history he becomes...the youngest and best starship captain in Federation history.

Aside from Kirk’s having a juvie record that for all we know he may have had anyway---Kirk the overgrown Boy Scout and academic grind of the first several episodes of the TV series might have been overcompensating for a bad boy past---apparently everybody who should have been born, got born and grew up to be exactly what they would have been anyway, and everybody who was scheduled to die died on schedule.  The members of the Kelvin’s crew who bought it in the short battle with Nero probably would have bought it in whatever encounter with whatever new lifeform or new civilization the Kelvin was on its way to seek out before it bumped into that uncharted black hole.

Those who should have survived left less a gap in history than George Kirk.

Meanwhile, the grade school age Leonard McCoy continues on a path that will take him into med school and a bad marriage.  The high school age Montgomery Scott begins building his reputation as an engineering prodigy and miracle worker. Sulu, Uhura, and Chekhov get themselves born when and where they’re supposed to and grow up with the same personalities, talents, ambitions, and resumes as they had in the other timeline, with only a few minor changes in character---Sulu is a tad mas macho, Chekhov, uninfluenced by the Beatles and Davy Jones of the Monkees, chooses a different ridiculous hairstyle, and Uhura is allowed a love life.   And all of them land on the bridge of the Enterprise together, five years ahead of schedule, but still at the right point in time, at the very beginning of the captaincy of James T. Kirk.

It takes Nero a couple of decades before he gets around to really messing around with "history" as we know it from the TV series.

Then he wipes out Vulcan.

Around six billion people who were alive during the events of the original show and the movies featuring the original cast, including Spock's mother, wink out of existence.  Presumably this will have a bigger effect than the premature death of Kirk's father, but all we can know for sure is that the mission depicted in the episode Journey to Babel, if it takes place, will not include this wonderful exchange between Spock and his parents, Sarek and Amanda.

Amanda: And you, Sarek, would you also say thank you to your son?

Sarek:  I don’t understand.

Amanda:  For saving your life.

Sarek:  Spock acted in the only logical manner open to him.  One does not thank logic, Amanda.

Amanda:  Logic!  Logic!  I’m sick to death of your logic!  Do you want to know how I feel about your logic?

Spock:  Emotional, isn’t she?

Sarek:  She has always been that way.

Spock:  Indeed?  Why did you marry her?

Sarek:  At the time it seemed the logical thing to do.

Now, obviously I have more invested in Star Trek than is healthy for a reasonable adult.  But geek that I am, I am not religious about it.  I don't need the new movies to be that faithful to the series.  I might even have applauded some changes or variations that I thought improved upon the mythos.  I like it that Smallville made Jonathan and Martha Kent younger and that it restored the old friendship between Clark and Lex.  I had just about accepted the advancement in Jimmy Olsen's age and I'm not sure I like it that it has turned out that the Jimmy Olsen I knew from the comics is the little brother of the Jimmy Olsen on the series.  And the changes the new Batman movies have actually been pretty minor, except for one and that one needs to be written into the comic book's bible---the Joker's make-up and scars are much, much, much scarier and intriguing than the vat of acid story.

But comic books rewrite their origin stories and revise their timelines frequently.  Apparently, while I wasn't looking, Star Trek's official history was chiseled in stone by Gene Roddenberry and no one would thinks to change it any more than Moses would have thought to take a blue pencil to the Ten Commandments.

I wouldn't have been bothered if the movie makers had just gone ahead as if they didn't have to worry about the "canon" at all, at least not as bothered as I now am by the implications of the creation of the alternative history.

They could have come up with a reboot that didn’t depend on time travel and alternative histories and I’d have been just as happy.  Happier, maybe.  Time travel plots give me headaches.

But it's thinking like I'm about to demonstrate that explains why the creators of the new Trek felt they had to come up with a time travel plot that leaves all the characters' characters intact while fudging the continuity between this movie and all the rest of the Star Trek franchise except Enterprise.

Start with this.

Ok.  Vulcan is gone.

Vulcan is gone?  Does that mean that the events in one of the best episodes of the original series, Amok Time, take place on the new Vulcan colony Sarek and Spock Prime help found?  Do they take place at all?  Did Spock's fiancee survive the death of Vulcan?

And now that Kirk has become captain of the Enterprise five or so years earlier than he did in the first universe, when does he have time to meet and bed Carol Marcus?  If they didn't meet at all, that means David Marcus wasn't born, and if David wasn't born, Carol couldn't complete the Genesis project, and without Genesis, Spock can't be reborn on the Genesis planet.  And if Spock isn't reborn than he can't be around to negotiate the truce with Romulus or to be on his way to save Romulus from the supernova, so Nero can't blame him for the death of his wife and civilization and won't chase him into the black hole and if he doesn't chase Spock into the black hole then he won't have changed history so Kirk would have met Carol Marcus so David would have been born so...et cetera et cetera et cetera.

Meanwhile, what about Khan?  The Botany Bay is still floating around out there, but Kirk is now on a different career path.  Is he going to find the Botany Bay five years earlier?  Will the historian who falls in love with Khan be a member of the Enterprise crew by that point?  If she's not, Khan's main motive for revenge is gone, so is he still angry enough at what happens to Ceti Alpha V that he will want to chase Kirk 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round Perdition's flames and hurt him and go on hurting him?  Will the space battle that kills Spock happen?  If it doesn’t, then Spock doesn't need to be reborn so he can be on his way to save Romulus so...et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But the time travel plots gives the new series of films a permanent Get Out of the Official Canon free card.

Whatever the filmmakers want to do, including killing off one of the main characters, they can do, because when fans of the series squawk, the answer is at the ready:

"That was the way it was, before Nero changed the history.  In fact, it's still the way it is, in the other universe or one of the other universes created every time a character makes a choice."

Ok.

As I said, minor changes in the canon are fine with me as long as the characters are consistent and the stories they’re put in are good.  After all, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is “canonical” but who needs laughing Vulcans?

The new movie tells a good Star Trek story.

It’s the what happens next part that’s giving me the headache.

There is now a universe, or many universes, in which Nero destroys Vulcan, and one, or many, in which he doesn't.  But the young Spock would have to be awfully zen to simply accept that and awfully cold-blooded, even for a Vulcan, to console himself for the death of his mother and six billion of his fellow Vulcans with the thought, Well, at least they're alive in other universes.

He has a powerful incentive to change history, and why wouldn't he act on it?   After all, he has a hundred and twenty nine year head start on solving the problem his old self apparently solved in a matter of weeks, how to save Romulus, and in saving Romulus he'll save Vulcan and his mother, because Nero won't have a reason to want to kill him, won't chase him into the black hole, won't show up in the "present" to drill that hole into Vulcan's core.

But then Spock won't know he needs to hurry it up on the plan to save Romulus, which means that he might not get there in time, again, and...et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Or try this one out.  We know Spock and Kirk are going to invent time travel.  Once they do, why won't Spock travel back in time to the point where Nero arrived in the "present" and help George Kirk destroy Nero's ship instead of merely incapacitating it?  Or if he doesn't feel like going that far back, why wouldn't he go back to the point where the Federation fleet takes off for Vulcan and warn them they're flying into a trap?   Given what one lone starship was able to do to Nero's ship twenty-five years earlier, it would figure that a squadron of starships with a generation's worth of technological upgrades, warned and armed with shields up, could make pretty short work of Nero's ship before he could drill through the topsoil on Vulcan.

But if Spock saves Vulcan at that point, how much of the original series' timeline will he restore?  He will have altered "his" timeline, but that won't bring things back to the way they should be, it will create yet another universe or universes and...et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Captain's Log, Supplemental:  I figure no one's reading this post except the most faithful of faithful readers, and only the geekiest of you have read to the end, and if you're that geeky then you want more.  You can find that more over at Jaquander's place.  He liked the movie, a lot, but the time travel bugged him too.  Other things bugged him as well.  But he answers my question about Carol Marcus.

Heores Live Blog ep.7 Dang you tech difficulties dang you all to heck!

Oliver Mannion here. I’m late because of dinner and I don’t regret it.

8:07 I’ve come to warn you your a dope!

8:11 Tracy: I’m becoming iceman I mean Icewoman!

8:13 Moehinder! Welcome back!

8:14 Yet we’ve never heard about this before.

8:15 Tracy: I’m just dandy! I’m just turning into an icewoman!

8:16 Claire: Just shatter me I’ll be fine.

8:17 Wow slow burn came on early.

8:22 No Matt is dieing in Texas.

8:23 Claire: Just give me my foot back.

8:24 Peter: This is Heroes its hard for people to die. Well at least main characters.’

8:26 Maya! No! DANG YOU! DANG YOU TO HECK!

8:28 Things may come to those who wait but only things left those who haste.

8:33 Don’t make a deal with the devil Nathan.

8:35 This is the carrnie’s brother.

8:36 Carrnie’s brother: Look to be frank my brother is evil.

8:37 Nathan: I’m just leaving you in the desert.

8:38 And the carnnie’s name is Samuel.

8:45 Yay! Hiro!

8:46 Claire: Yes I meat Sam, he’s a jerk.

8:48 Moehinder: Your crazy!

8:49 Hiro: That’s right I saved your life. Dang I’m good!

8:54 Thanks a lot Moehinder!

I’m going to end a little early today. I hope you enjoyed please comment and see you next week.

Programming note: Technical difficulties resolved, live-blogging resumes tonight

Undaunted by last week’s computer knockdown, Oliver Mannion comes back swinging tonight for some more Heroes live-blogging.  Join him at 8 PM Eastern as the fists and wisecracks fly.

Throwing popcorn at the screen when Sylar appears to do his worst encouraged.

November song

This photo was taken just before Halloween but the blonde thinks it’s more evocative of November than of October and asked me to post it.   She also asked me to post the poem below.

No sun--no moon!
No morn--no noon!
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
No sky--no earthly view--
No distance looking blue--
No road--no street--no "t'other side this way"--
No end to any Row--
No indications where the Crescents go--
No top to any steeple--
No recognitions of familiar people--
No courtesies for showing 'em--
No knowing 'em!
No traveling at all--no locomotion--
No inkling of the way--no notion--
"No go" by land or ocean--
No mail--no post--
No news from any foreign coast--
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility--
No company--no nobility--
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds--
November!

---“November” by Thomas Hood.

As you can tell, she has a thing about November.  Probably because she was born in November.  November 16, in fact.

November has provided all kinds of warmth, cheerfulness, and healthful ease for all us Mannion guys, thanks to one of its favorite daughters.

Happy Birthday, Mrs M!

Joe Lieberman as the Democrats’ Sarah Palin?

I’ve never understood why Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman as his running mate in 2000.  Lieberman did nothing to balance the ticket.  Virtually nobody thought of Gore as a Southerner, including the people of Tennessee.  Choosing the Connecticut Yankee who had a solid reputation in Washington but was pretty much unknown outside the Beltway was a case of one Washington insider putting another on his ticket, one perceived Northeastern elitist running with another.

He was a poor campaigner, a smug, unctuous, uninspiring, sanctimonious smirker so eager to please other establishment types that he let himself get steamrolled in his debate with Dick Cheney and then sat there looking grateful for it.  And when push came to shove in the fight over the Florida recount he was a cheerful defeatist advocating surrender and giving aid and comfort to the Republicans every step of the way.

Looking back on it, you have to wonder if this was not so much gutlessness on his part but self-interest.  I think as soon as it looked as though Gore had lost Lieberman saw his own path to the White House open up and he decided to do nothing to help close it up.

Now we know that Joe Lieberman isn’t a loyal Democrat or an actual Independent.  He probably wouldn’t be a good Republican if and when he switches parties.  He’s a die-hard Libermantonian, a staunch Joe-ist, and nothing else, and it’s hard to believe that people in the position to know this about him, like Gore himself, missed this about him.

What Lierberman did do was signal Gore’s break with Bill Clinton, but breaking with Clinton made no sense since the main reason for voting for Gore was that he would continue the very popular President’s policies that had brought the country years of peace and prosperity. 

Sarah Palin is getting the celebrity treatment this weekend because, well, she is a celebrity.  And at this point it’s not that she’s an accidental celebrity, the way she was last fall. She is famous for being famous.  Trying to claim that she’s newsworthy because of her political importance is like trying to claim that we’re getting all those stories about Britney’s sex life because of she’s a great singer.

There’s no evidence that Palin is going to be anything other than a celebrity.  Polls show that lots of Republicans like her, but they also show that few actually take her seriously.  She is extremely popular with a relatively small cohort of hard-core Right Wing men of the type that have driven sensible men and women away from the Party.  So there’s no good reason to think she stands a chance of winning even the Republican nomination in 2012.  But that hasn’t stopped a whole slew of Beltway insiders from thinking it.

Which baffles Eric Boehlert.

In terms of larger context, I'm not aware of any polling data that indicates Palin has a prayer of being elected president. In fact, the latest CNN survey finds that a strong majority of Americans think she is singularly unqualified to run the country. (i.e. She's relegated to Dan Quayle territory.) And of course, she's coming off her stint as VP candidate on the GOP ticket that lost an electoral landslide last November.

So I guess my question is, besides the larger and authentic one (who, besides journalists and GOP partisans, cares about Sarah Palin?) is, has the press ever treated an election loser the way it now treats Sarah Palin? Has the Beltway press ever turned an election loser like Palin into a political rising star, even though there's no evidence to suggest her stature has changed since last November's embarrassing thumping? (i.e. What "magic" is Stephanopoulos  talking about?)

Atrios refines the question with an analogy:

There's never a proper left-right analogy, but imagine if John Kerry had put Dennis Kucinich on the Veep ticket and then lost. Kucinich would have increased stature in the Democratic party, and probably be quite popular with "the base," but the press would mostly ignore him other than to occasionally sneer. I'm not equating Palin and Kucinich, just trying to imagine who might occupy a similar space on the left.

As Atrios says, there’s never a perfect comparison between the left and the right.  His Kucinich what-if?  is pretty good mainly for illustrating the difference between the way the Insiders treat Republicans and the way they treat Democrats.  They’re eager to show how seriously they take even the craziest Republicans or Republican talking points.  Desperate to marginalize and trivialize Democrats and their concerns.

But I think there is an actual case that come close and this one is a case of the Insiders taking seriously and puffing a Democrat who should have been relegated to if not obscurity then at least to last few minutes of the lowest rated bobblehead shows and the op-ed pages of his state’s largest city’s newspaper.

Instead he is everywhere, whenever he likes.

Why is Joe Lieberman so important?

He was on the losing ticket.  He may not have dragged down Gore the way Palin did McCain but he didn’t help.  Palin at least bought McCain a bigger post-convention bounce than he would have gotten with Tim Pawlenty on his ticket and for a few weeks at least helped make it look as though McCain was on the rebound.  Lieberman may not have hurt Gore outright, but he didn’t help at all.

I really don’t remember what Lieberman was up to in the first few years of Bush’s presidency but when he decided to run for the Democratic nomination in 2004 a choir rose up among the congregation of Beltway pundits and analysts to sing his praises and to what effect?

He got trounced right out of the gate.

The question is why did those insiders think he had half a chance?

He lost and he lost big.  Big enough that he finally and surely deserved to have his name changed to Loserman.

And yet here he is, holding the fate of health care reform in his hands.

How did that happen?

Another reason Sarah Palin will never be President

She’s mean to Katie Couric in her autobiography, Going Rogue.

From AP:

While the book follows Palin's life from her birth in Sandpoint, Idaho, to wondering about the next stop in her future, Palin, who received an advance of at least $1.25 million, saves her strongest words for run-ins with McCain staffers and her widely panned interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric.

She describes Couric as condescending, biased and "badgering." She contends the anchor chose "gotcha" moments while leaving the candidate's more substantive remarks on the cutting room floor…

Palin takes another dig at Couric while asserting her expertise on energy matters. She writes that she was shocked Couric had asked her which newspapers and magazines she read; given what she called Couric's lack of knowledge about energy issues, Palin wondered whether she should have asked the news anchor what she read.

Couric can take care of herself and her interview with Palin is all the defense she needs to make, if she cares to make one.

But I’m not sure the people of Iowa will shrug it off as easily.

A Time Magazine poll asking who’s the most trusted newscaster in America found that in Iowa 65 per cent of the people put their trust in Katie Couric.

Let’s see Palin get through the Iowa caucuses now.

By the way, Couric’s rivals for most trusted newscaster include Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams, and Williams comes out ahead of Couric and Gibson in more states.  But Williams doesn’t top the poll.

You know who’s America’s most trusted newscaster?

This guy.

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Actually, in the opinion of Douglas Burns writing in Des Moines Cityview, Palin could do very well in Iowa because the Republican Party there seems to be doing what it seems to be doing nationally, deliberately shrinking itself down to a fraternal organization of raging, reactionary loons, although he doesn’t say it in those exact words:

Many in the national media have this mistaken sense that Iowa Republicans are seeking a new identity, that they'll reach out to moderates and carve out more widely palatable positions. Having been to two major GOP events in just the last weeks in Iowa, I get the distinct sense that the party is growing smaller, more insular, more angry — and that it is likely to double-down on a candidate like Palin — damn the torpedoes and the media and conventional wisdom…

In other Sarah-related news, AP fact checks Going Rogue.  What’s that?  You’re surprised that there’s anything in the book bearing a close enough resemblance to a fact to be worth checking?

Greg Sargent reports on Palin’s claim that she agreed to be interviewed by Couric because she felt sorry for Katie. 

Meanwhile, at Lawyers, Guns and Money Dave Noon disabuses another Palin Cheerleader, this one writing in the Wall Street Journal, of the notion that Palin is at work improving her political skills and brushing up on policy and economics.  Scott Lemieux sums up.

And Roy Edroso got his hands on an advanced copy of Going Rogue and has posted these excerpts while Carl Hiaasen has obtained a copy of a letter from Palin’s editor suggesting a few minor revisions.   Mark Twain would be so proud.

Stupak and the bishops, the bishops and me

Taking orders from the priests is exactly what JFK had to promise he wouldn’t do when he ran for President.

Several Democrats, including Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pennsylvania, said they are in touch with their Catholic bishops back home. Altmire said he must have the approval of his bishop in Pittsburgh before he can vote yes.

That’s from CNN by way of Ed Brayton by way of Mike the Mad Biologist.  And Altmire was talking about a health care reform bill that hadn’t been amended by Stupak-Pitts yet.  He was planning to ask his bishop for permission to vote to expand health care to the poor and protect the sick from losing it.

Any one from Altmire’s district, PA-4, want to call his office and find out which other of his votes he’s asked his bishop to give him permission for?

You would think such a grovelingly good Catholic like Altmire would already know the Church’s views on leaving the poor and the unfortunate to go suff.

But it turns out Altmire simply knows what truly matters to the bishops.

Long time readers know I have a longstanding grudge against the church.  I don’t think I’ve ever written a post explaining why in detail.  I’m not going to do that now.  Don’t have the time or the heart this morning.  But here’s the gist.

I was raised Catholic but my parents didn’t have to work that hard to do it.  I was devout all on my own initiative.  I used to use my allowance money to buy statues of saints.  I had a shrine to Mary on my dresser that I decorated with flowers every May.  I was an altar boy and proud of it.  I was prouder still when I earned my Parvuli Dei medal in Cub Scouts.  I still have it.  I’m still proud of it.  Over time I drifted away from the Church.  But when I married a good Catholic girl I came back, not with any of the old enthusiasm or even faith, but with the best intentions.  I promised that we would raise our kids Catholic and to that end we sent them off to start school at our parish’s elementary school.

Then our oldest began to have his troubles.

We needed help and didn’t know where to turn.

Our pastor came to our aid.

He threw our kid out of the school.

We called the bishop’s office to complain and ask for the bishop’s help.

The priest we talked to lied to us.

Repeatedly.

When I finally called him on his lies, he told me my wife and I were bad parents.

I told him to go to hell.

And those are the last sincere words I’ve said to a priest since.

Actually, those are practically the last words I’ve said to a priest at all.  I avoid they’re company as much as I can.

Shortly after this, though, the news began to come out about the abuse.

And the cover-up of the abuse.

And the justifications and excuses for it!

It wasn’t the fault of the pederasts themselves.  It was the fault of seductive pubescent boys who lured the priests into sin with their charms.  And if any priests were at fault, well, that’s because they were homosexuals.  It was all the gays’ doing, so let’s bounce them from the church, because if we ban open homosexuals from the priesthood then no lying closet cases are going to sneak in in their place, are they?

Now, just about every priest I served mass when I was an altar boy had turned in his collar and chalice by the time I graduated from high school, and they all got married very shortly after they left the priesthood.  I always thought that they’d left because they’d decided they wanted families and the changing times allowed them to make that decision without the old stigmas, guilts, and fears.

But, knowing how far back the scandal goes and how widespread it was, I wonder how many of them were fleeing in disgust.

I wish a few of them had stayed around for a while to call the cops, although I expect that if Father C had stayed he’d have been arrested himself, for “inexplicably” beating some other priests bloody.

But they gave up their vocations, and so who was left?  Old men, saints, and those who found a life of celibacy and secrecy congenial.  The old men died off.  There are never enough saints on hand when you need them.  Which means it was from the third group that the current crop of bishops has been recruited.

In other words, Congressman Altmire and his good Catholic like are taking their orders from men who either covered up for the molesters---actively or by turning a blind eye---or who were part of the gang themselves.

This is why I can’t sit in a Catholic church without having to fight the urge to hurl a missal at the first grown man in a dress who dares put a foot on the altar.  And I don’t understand how anyone else is able to sit there without  wanting to rush the pulpit with a horsewhip, let alone stay put quietly in their pews, paying attention and saying their prayers as if that’s still Bing Crosby or Pat O’Brien up there.

No still practicing Catholic I’ve talked to about it has been able to make me understand.  They tell me they don’t go to mass for the priest.  They’re there for Jesus and God.   I have trouble with this because one of the things I discovered when the Church and I parted ways was that I didn’t believe in God anymore.  I only thought I did.  Turned out my faith was a part of the habit of being a Catholic and once I broke the habit I was through with all of went with it.  I figured I was like an ex-smoker who’d only thought he liked the taste of tobacco and realizes now that he’s quit that he doesn’t miss it in the least.

But besides that, there’s this.  Even if you go to mass for Jesus’ sake, to hear His words and to talk to Him, you’re expected to do it by going through the priest.  He’s Jesus’ representative on the altar.  It’s why he can work the transubstantiation magic.  It’s why he can forgive you your sins…or not forgive them, if he sees fit not to.  It also happens to be part of the justification for not allowing women into the priesthood.  Jesus was a man so no woman can stand in for him.  We can accept that a piece of stale bread is God’s flesh, but we can’t be expected to believe a woman can be Jesus’ stand-in.  This is an idea it took the Church over 400 years to come up with, by the way.  The early Church let women be priests and allowed all its priests to marry.

Everybody knows the Church’s stands on abortion and gay marriage and women in the priesthood.  What’s easy to forget is that on a slew of other issues, the Church is supposedly on the side of the Progressive angels---the death penalty, immigration, the environment, health care!

The reason it’s easy to forget is that the bishops seem to forget it themselves.  How many Catholic Congressmen who voted for Stupak but against the final bill are going to hear more than a mild tsk tsk between holes on the golf course?

If they hear that much?

In 2004, a number of bishops and priests announced they would deny Communion to the good church-going Catholic, John Kerry, because of his pro-choice positions.  This is in an election in which he was running against a man who lied us into an unnecessary war, a war Pope John Paul II spoke out against, and whose administration turned the US into a torture state, and whose economic policies were not just a disaster for the poor but an active assault upon the poor and the middle class.  And although President Bush himself was somewhat actually compassionately conservative on immigration reform, his party was rabidly xenophobic and racist on the matter.  Top this off with the fact that as governor of Texas Bush presided over a record number of executions and made fun of a woman on death row who was asking for clemency.

Of course, the bishops couldn’t deny Bush Communion because he wasn’t Catholic and he didn’t go to church anyway.  But they could have spoken out, and they could have left Kerry alone instead of setting out to show him up as a candidate for excommunication in the minds of Catholic voters.

They could have, if those other issues mattered to them as much as abortion.

The bishops might defend themselves on the grounds that when it comes to articles of faith the catechism is not a Chinese menu.  There’s no choosing from Column A and Column B.  There’s one column and you have to eat everything the Church puts on your plate.

By the way, as far as I know, Kerry was able to take communion whenever he wanted, so it wasn’t all the bishops and all the priests.  But when have you ever heard that a prominent pro-death penalty, pro-torture, anti-immigrant, screw the poor to enrich the already rich Catholic Republican or conservative Democrat was threatened with being denied communion?

For that matter, have you heard of a prominent Pro-Choice Republican getting threatened like that?

Liberal-minded bishops and priests are probably more inclined to keep criticisms of specific politicians and partisan positions to themselves, partly because, I suspect, they have good philosophical and practical objections to blurring the lines between church and state, but partly because they know that if they don’t watch it Rome will come down on them, hard.

Here in New York State, back in the late 1980s and early 90s, our archbishop, Cardinal John J. O’Connor, hated our governor, Mario Cuomo.  It was probably more personal than political, but if you went by what O’Connor said the issue between them was abortion.  Cuomo was decidedly pro-choice.  But worse from Churchman’s point of view, Cuomo had articulated a pro-choice position that was both Catholic and American, which was that Catholics themselves should not choose to have abortions, they had no business trying to impose on non-Catholics what was purely an article of current Church teaching.  Want to make an anti-abortion Catholic’s head spin?  Remind them that the Church used to permit abortions until “quickening,” which is to say the Church’s position used to be the same as current US law. 

At any rate, O’Connor openly despised Cuomo and wanted to see him gone from the governor’s mansion and not to move onto the White House, as it was expected Cuomo would do.  O’Connor got his wish finally in 1994 when Cuomo was defeated for re-election by George Pataki.

But Mario Cuomo had been all that stood in the way of New York’s reinstitution of the death penalty.  The state legislature would pass it just about every session and Cuomo would veto it.  Which should have earned him lots of points with the Church.

George Pataki was pro-death penalty and he’d hardly settled into the governor’s chair when the legislature passed the death penalty again and he happily signed it into law.

George Pataki’s Catholic.

He was also pro-choice.

Which means that here in New York women still had access to abortions while we started putting people on Death Row.

I never got the sense O’Connor was bothered by the irony.  But then I never got the sense he was bothered by the death penalty.

At the time I thought this was just O’Connor being O’Connor.  There were still some relatively liberal bishops who took the Church’s whole catechism seriously.  But John Paul II went to work taking care of that with the aid and advice of the cardinal who is now Pope Benedict XVI.

The catechism isn’t a Chinese menu, but under John Paul and Benedict it’s become a two-item menu with a salad bar.  You take the anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage without complaint, but you’re free to help yourself to the other stuff, have as much as you like and if that’s none, then that’s fine with Rome.

But apparently this only applies to the United States.  In Central and South America, in Asia and Africa, eradicating poverty and taking care of the poor and the sick are still among the, ahem, cardinal virtues.  But I’d guess this is because in those places the priests and the politicians toe the line on abortion and gay rights and the proper role and place for women in the Church hierarchy. 

Andrew Sullivan thinks Stupak-Pitts proves that for the Church it’s all about abortion.  Other people might point to what’s going in on Washington DC and say that proves that it’s abortion and gay rights.

I would add that the Pope’s recent invitation to Anglican and Episcopalian clerics who can’t tolerate the idea of women and gay colleagues to trade in their Book of Common Prayer for rosaries, shake the dust of Canterbury from their sandals and join up with Rome shows that it’s gays and uppity women.

It’s probably all three, but all three have this in common, and it’s not just fear of sex.  It’s obedience.

This is what it’s intended behind the talk of a smaller, purer church.  A church full of the unquestioningly obedient.  An American church full of the unquestioningly obedient.  Rome doesn’t need there to be a US Congress full of Jason Altmires.  It just wants the pews full of them. 

It wants no more parishoners who’ll tell a priest go to hell, literally or figuratively by rejecting the Church’s teachings, the ones the church really cares about, that is.

It wants none who are inclined to distrust the priests and the bishops and ask what’s going on behind the closed doors of the rectories.

It wants Catholics who will go down on their knees, not only to pray but to kiss the bishops’ rings.

Then maybe we can talk about doing for the least of our brethren.

________________

From the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the text of JFK’s Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.  You can also listen to the speech here.

And here’s the text of a great speech Mario Cuomo delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 1984, Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective.

About the “base”: Another futile note to some of my fellow progressive bloggers

Stupak-Pitts stinks and we need to work to make sure it’s stripped from whatever sort of health care bill manages to make it out of the Senate.

But while we’re at it can we please find other ways of talking about it that don’t assume that “Women” are a monolithic voting bloc and that the thoughts, needs, interests, concerns, and voting records of all women happen to be exactly the same as those of left-leaning, mostly white, mostly urban and coastal dwelling intellectuals, academics, and bloggers.

While we’re at it, can we find a way of talking about the Democrats’ “base” as if it isn’t made up exclusively of the same cohort of left-leaning, mostly white, mostly urban and coastal dwelling intellectuals, academics, and bloggers.

Just for instance, the base includes an awful of of African-Americans, men and women, who are on the whole much more socially conservative than the rest of the base, and it includes an increasing number of Hispanics, men and women, quite a few of whom are Catholic.

I don’t think we have to pull a Lord Saletan or go all over Amy Sullivanish to do this, nor do we have to give up or hedge on principles.  I just think that we can find a way to advocate for things without talking as if of course every good Democrat and liberal thinks like us.

Jonathan Ames on making people think they enjoy sex

Jonathan Ames, the writer who is the creator of HBO’s Bored to Death and the real person Jason Schwartzman’s character is the projection of, wrote a novel about an alcoholic writer who hires PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves as his valet.  Odd thing is no one but the writer ever sees Jeeves.  The novel’s called Wake Up, Sir!   There’s not much of a plot.  The writer lurches from mix-up to mix-up, counting on Jeeves’ help and advice to straighten things out only to find that Jeeves never shimmers in in the nick of time to save the day the way he does for Bertie Wooster.

The writer becomes involved with a woman with whom he is, as Jeeves often advised Bertie about the likes of Lady Florence Cray, Honoria Glossop, Madeline Bassett, and Bobbie Wickham, temperamentally unsuited.  But unlike Bertie, the writer’s entanglement with this said unsuitable female does not get him into trouble by landing him in jail, or in the clutches of the unspeakable bully Spode, or sending him fleeing the country to escape yet another scolding from his Aunt Agatha.  The writer gets into trouble by getting into her bed and getting her into his.

The result, as it concerned me as a reader, wasn’t high hilarity as much as it was a mixture of arousal and embarrassment, as if Ames, had somehow found out about a cherished erotic episode in my life and used it in his novel in a way that was not flattering to my opinion of myself as a man and a lover.  It was pretty much like learning that a former girlfriend hadn’t had quite as much fun in my company as I thought.

Except I had never dated a girl like the girl the writer makes a fool of himself over in Wake Up, Sir!

I had never had a relationship that was in similar.

For the simple reason that at the time in my life when I was a young writerly type whose circle of acquaintances included any number of girls like the one in the novel---hyper-intelligent, creative, sexually aggressive, extremely neurotic---I made a point of steering well clear of them.

Which didn’t mean I wasn’t attracted to them.  I was.  Strongly.  I just had a feeling.  Kind of like the feeling that has kept me from bungee-jumping, rock climbing, and visiting war zones as a reporter.  The thrills that I know I would enjoy come with too many risks and attendant pain.

But I always wondered what it would have been like if I’d been braver, or dumber, particularly with one girl, a dancer and composer who was probably a genius but who could never put her genius to work for herself because as soon as she began to get her intellectual engines revved up she started hearing her mother shouting over the roar about what a disappointment she was as a daughter.

I would have gone to bed with this girl in a heartbeat if I didn’t suspect it meant also going to bed with her mother.  What are those messages from home Mrs Weasley sends to Ron at Hogwarts?  Howlers?  This girl received howlers every hour on the hour.

Still, she was nice and she was interested and she was a dancer, so I always wondered…until I read Wake Up, Sir!  Then I knew, because Jonathan Ames knew and he’d written it down for me.

It would have been very sexy, and terrifying, and exhausting, and constantly and finally humiliating.

In the video below Ames talks about how sex scenes in his writing are opportunities for character development.  He describes sex as “this little theater where all sorts of issues and problems can express themselves.”  That’s what an affair with her would have been, a constant drama of issues and problems.

It might also have been funny.  In hindsight.

Here’s Ames.

You can watch the whole interview or read the transcript at Big Think.

PS.  I’m still hoping someone out there has recorded the whole season of Bored to Death and won’t mind burning me a copy.

Re: @SarahPalinUSA. Latest updates to The Adventures of Lance Mannion. More twitter notes to the authorized unauthorized autobiographer

LanceMannion Nope. Not gonna follow @SarahPalinUSA. Not till she apologizes.  about 1 hour ago from web

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LanceMannion She knows what for.  about 1 hour ago from web

 

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LanceMannion Personal not political.  about 1 hour ago from web

 

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LanceMannion Ok if you must pry. about 1 hour ago from web

 

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LanceMannion Yeah, I know. Prying’s yr job. Cant write a bio w/o prying, I guess.  43 minutes ago from web

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LanceMannion Lets just say it took a long time for the wounds to heal  42 minutes ago from web

 

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LanceMannion By wounds I mean *wounds.* Blood, stitches, argument w/insurance co.  40 minutes ago from web

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LanceMannion Well, sure, there was some psychic damage too. 37 minutes ago from web

 

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LanceMannion Not that @SarahPalinUSA cared about that either. 35 minutes ago from web

 

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LanceMannion No nobody licked my wounds. 33 minutes ago from web

 

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LanceMannion Wiseguy.  30 minutes ago from web

 

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LanceMannion Besides, already told you. Wont discuss that aspect of our friendship. 27 minutes ago from web

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LanceMannion Actually, tho, Buck, @SarahPalinUSA ’s surviving sled dog did lick my wounds.   25 minutes ago from web 

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LanceMannion Great dog, Buck. Wouldnt be here if not for him.  24 minutes ago from web

 

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LanceMannion Upshot?  Dont ever trust @SarahPalinUSA re: wolves. 22 minutes ago from web

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LanceMannion  They arent cute and cuddly. 21 minutes ago from web

 

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LanceMannion  And they dont respond to command no matter how firm you are w/them. 20 minutes ago from web

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LanceMannion Also probably not good idea to stare them in the eye.  19 minutes ago from web

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LanceMannion Ppl always praising @SarahPalinUSA ’s puckish sense of humor.  Some joke.  15 minutes ago from web

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LanceMannion Never convince me she didn’t know the gun wasnt loaded. 14 minutes ago from web

Time out for a totally trivial observation about Renee Zellweger.

Renee Zellweger doesn’t look like a movie star.  She looks like a community theater actress who is the only one in her theater group who can be made-up and dressed to pass as a credible impersonation of a movie star.

No reason for this observation and there’s no criticism implied.  Just happened to remember that a movie she stars in that I want to see is now out on DVD,  My One and Only.

Now back to whatever it is that I’m supposed to be doing around here.

_________________

PS.  In My One and Only, Zellweger doesn’t play a movie star.  She plays a movie star’s mother.  Sort of.  That movie star is George Hamilton.  You’ll have to read Stephen Holden’s review in the New York Times to see why it’s “sort of.”

Save the live-blogging, save the world

Whoops!  Live blogging has been cancelled due to extreme technical difficulties.  Oliver apologizes for any inconvenience and promises to return next week after his wonderful, smart, super-competent dad solves the problem.

Oliver Mannion will be back at it again tonight, live blogging Heroes, starting at 8 PM Eastern.

Please stop by his comments section and join in.  He has a Spanish quiz this week, so if you could leave your comment in espanol, he’ll be muy argreciado.

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to itemize on the list of assets for the bankruptcy court

“Freedom!”

House Republicans invoked Braveheart every two seconds or so during the debate Saturday night.

You’d think that considering what they accomplished in Iraq in the name of “Freedom” none of them would use the word without flinching and checking the sky for a well-aimed lightning bolt.

The GOP leadership has decided that the best way to get back into power is to stoke the fears of the craziest of their base that Obama and the Democrats are commies and fascists bent on turning the United States into a Muslim dictatorship.  They figure that the crazies will understand that the armed insurrection they’re inciting is purely optional.

And, yes, they are inciting violent rebellion.  If it’s true that the country is being taken away from us by totalitarians bent on robbing us of our freedom, then it’s the duty of every true patriot to reach for a gun.

I would.  I might yet.  Depends on how far they get.

The only way they’re not calling for blood to run in the streets is if not only they know they’re lying---sorry, exaggerating for emphasis---and most of them do know it, but they have reason to be sure that their base knows they’re only kidding.

Look at the signs outside the Capitol Eric Cantor signed autographs under---and which he later called “inappropriate”---and tell me these folks have that kind of a sense of humor.

At any rate, in the words of House Minority Leader John Boehner and echoed by that brave draft dodger, former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo, the Democrats’ proposed health care reforms are the biggest threat to freedom ever seen, which makes you wonder why they think their hero, Ronald Reagan, bothered with ending the Cold War but also explains why Tancredo and so many other Right Wing chickenhawks couldn’t be bothered serving in Vietnam---Ho Chi Minh never threatened to force American insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions---so it’s no wonder the Republicans went all Robert the Bruce on the House floor.

If only they’d painted themselves blue.  That would have been really cool.

There they were, defending our freedom to continue with the exact same miserable system we have now under which every thing they claim will happen if the Democrats achieve even the very modest reforms they seem to be on the brink of failing to achieve---thank you, Senate blue dogs---we already have, including, essentially, death panels.

It’s been said before, it needs to be said again.  What we have is a system that awards some people Christmas bonuses for letting other people die.

Health care reform, if it passes, will change that to a system that awards some people bonuses for for doing their best to prevent other people from getting the treatment they need so they don’t die.

Plus a few genuinely good things.

But the Republicans think it will take away precious freedoms.

Like the freedom to be forced to go to a doctor mill instead of your old family physician because the insurance company says you have.

The freedom to have your insurance cancelled because you were foolish enough to get a serious disease or suffer a hideous accident.

The freedom to have to decide whether or not you can afford the co-pay this week or if you’ll just have to hope that your kid doesn’t have anything worse than a cold.

The freedom to spend weeks in an agony of waiting while your doctor tries to persuade your insurance company that yes, you really do need that test.

The freedom to open a bill from your doctor several months later and find out that the test the insurance company said they would cover it decided not to cover.

The freedom to pay extortionary premiums for while praying that the cancer you licked when you were in your twenties doesn’t come back.

Then there are the more positive freedoms.

The GOP staunchly defends the right of insured to feel smug and superior when uninsured poor person gets sick.  The freedom to smirk smugly at another’s misfortune must be preserved!

As must the freedom of the lucky to believe that their good luck will never run out and the freedom of the momentarily fortunate that their good fortune is a proof of their virtue!

Let’s not forget that most precious freedom that our forebears shed their blood for, the freedom of to gouge customers they have over a barrel.   (Applies only to corporate contributors to the Republican Party and Blue Dog Democrats and any business that employs a spouse or close relative of same.  There are limits and a point where liberty becomes license, after all.)

I’m sure I’ve missed a couple.  But here’s Texas Democrat and Progressive populist Lloyd Doggett adding a few more:

I’m sure those freedoms will be ably defended by Republicans in the Senate where they will have the aid of Blue Dogs with real power to protect those freedoms by killing health care reform and the will to it.

You rake fifteen bags and whatdya get?

“Another day colder but deeper in sweat…” Just before the town truck came.  Seven-fifteen, this morning. Lyrics by Lance Mannion and Ann Bartow, with love to Tennessee Ernie Ford.

Stupak and the problem of representative democracy

Health Care Reform cleared the House last night.  Two cheers for that.

The Stupak Amendment passed along with it.  Maybe it passed because the Stupak Amendment comes with it.  Sixty-four Democrats voted for Stupak.  Thirty-nine of them voted for the final bill.

(Note: I can’t find where I got that number.  It’s suspiciously the same as the number of Democrats who voted against the final bill.  Anyone know the right number of Democrats who voted for Stupak and for the final bill?

Update: Ken Houghton has 38 Democratic votes for Stupak and for the final bill.)

That suggests that the bill could not have passed without the inclusion of Stupak.  Most of those Democrats who voted for Stupak probably would have voted for the final bill anyway, but it’s also likely that at least six wouldn’t have.

Looks like a triumph of theocracy over sensibility and compassion or a triumph of patriarchy over women’s rights.  What it is is an illustration of the problem of representative democracy.

Look at these maps from the New York Times.

This is the map that breaks down the votes for and against the final bill district by district.

This is a map that breaks down the votes for and against Stupak. 

One of the startling things about both maps is the reminder that there are Democrats representing districts in Utah and Idaho.

What’s not startling is that the Congressman from Utah voted for Stupak.  He also voted against the final bill.  It is startling---to me, at any rate, sitting here in New York almost 3000 miles away---that the Congressman from Idaho voted against it.

But it shouldn’t be.  Angry and disappointed Progressives might be wondering why Utah’s representative couldn’t be as bold or principled as Idaho’s.  There’s a simple answer.

Boise.

Idaho’s Walt Minnick represents the voters of his state’s largest city.  So does Utah’s Jim Matheson, but that city is Salt Lake City. Are the Irish Catholics of Boise more pro-choice than the Mormons in Salt Lake?

But Minnick voted against the final bill too!

Move east to Colorado.  Jared Polis voted against Stupak.  Ed Perlmutter voted against.  Diana DeGette voted against.  Betsy Markey voted against. John Salazar voted for it.

But Polis’s district the university city of Boulder.  DeGette’s includes Denver. Salazar’s district includes sheep.

And copper mines.

But Markey represents a lot of sheep too.

And she voted against the final bill!

So, is Markey more or less principled and braver than Salazar or is she merely just as representative of her constituents?  Which one was taking the greater risk of losing in 2010 and with which vote?

(Markey says the principle at stake in her vote against the final bill was the cost.)

Now on up to the Dakotas where things are just as weird. 

Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota voted for Stupak and for the final bill.

Well, North Dakota is really screwy on the subject of abortion rights, apparently being both for them and against them.  But it’s the banks not the insurance companies that wield influence up there.

But then South Dakota’s Stephanie Herseth Sandlin voted against Stupak and against the final bill.

Does the Times have that wrong?

Drop down to the south and southwestern districts of Texas where three out the six Democratic Congresspersons voted for Stupak.  Those are districts with lots of Hispanic, which is to say Catholic, voters.  It’s not startling that they voted for Stupak or that they voted for the final bill.  But what about the other three?

Well, their votes were certainly principled.  But at least in two cases they were also representative.  Charlie Gonzalez represents voters in San Antonio.  Lloyd Doggett represents Austin.   

Somebody from down that way will have to explain Ruben Hinojosa and what goes on in TX-15.

The two Congressmen from Northwestern Indiana voted against Stupak and for the final bill, but that part of the state is Obama Country and in many ways an outcrop of Chicago.  The two districts in the southern corner of the state that are represented by Democrats are practically Kentucky.  Brad Ellsworth and Baron Hill voted for Stupak and for the final bill.

Meanwhile, in actual Kentucky, Ben Chandler voted for Stupak and against the final bill.

Now come on over to my state, New York.  All but three of our Democrats voted for the final bill, including now famously Bill Owens of NY-23 who got to be the 218th and deciding vote.  But three who voted against it, Mike McMahon, Scott Murphy and Eric Massa, voted against Stupak as well.

Massa and Murphy represent more rural and therefore presumably more conservative districts.  But are the conservative voters there more libertarian?  Are they pro-choice and anti-Big Government?  Or were Murphy and Massa voting their consciences in one instance and their voters’ interests in the other?

Mike McMahon represents State Island and Brooklyn.  Lots of Catholics there.  I’m guessing that neither of his votes made his constituents happy.

What gives?

I don’t know know.  And I’ll bet you don’t either, unless you live in one of those districts, in which case please explain what’s going on?

Some of the Democratic votes against the final bill were like Dennis Kucinich’s, protests against what those representatives consider a bad bill.

No bill is better than a bad bill, assuming that bill is truly, all-around bad and stands no chance of being improved upon down the line and you can be sure of getting the chance to write a better bill before another fifteen years goes by.

But no bill is not better than a flawed bill that can and probably will be fixed over time.   (Look up the original Social Security bill.)

Those voting against the final bill (and those voting for Stupak) could have been standing up for a principle.

Just as an aside, those votes were more likely protest votes than absolute statements of principle.  I would bet that none of them wanted to be the 218th vote and I think that if any of them had been they’d have voted for the final bill rather than kill it on principle.  But still, I don’t doubt that they hold to that principle.

The trouble with standing up for a principle is that people usually don’t have just one principle.

They have principles.  And those principles often conflict.

The Stupak Amendment put all liberal Democrats in the House in the position of having to choose which principles they needed to stand up for.

But it gave some the opportunity to vote the wishes their constituents.

Voters have principles too, and they expect their Congressmen and women to represent those principles in Washington. 

Progressives who are angry at “the Democrats” for letting Stupak pass, for bringing a flawed bill to the floor, for not bringing about some sort of miracle of unanimous agreement among members of Congress that Progressives know best are demanding that the likes of Dan Boren and Bart Stupak and Jim Matheson should not be representative of their districts.

Or put it another way they believe that the people of eastern Oklahoma and northern Michigan should vote like the people of Cambridge, Massachusetts or San Antonio, Texas.

I happen to believe that they would be better off if they did, but they’re not required to accept my judgment over their own when it comes to choosing who best represents their interests and principles.

Voters choose their Representatives because they think they will be representative and not just of their interests and principles but of them.

They want their representatives to be like them.

That likeness, though, does not have to be exact or fall out along the expected political, socio-economic, or cultural lines.  Which is how it can happen that a district that  looks on paper as though it ought to be represented by a conservative can send a liberal to Washington, a fact Democratic strategists have not always kept in mind. 

Liberal as Massachusetts tends to be, Ted Kennedy was more liberal than most of his constituents across the state.  He certainly was richer.  But he was still one of them.

Ted Kennedy was great, but he was only able to be great because the people of Massachusetts chose him to represent them in the Senate.  He could never have been elected Senator from Oklahoma.  Dan Boren could not be elected to Congress from Massachusetts.

Barney Frank might have been able to have a career similar to the one he’s had representing the people of Seattle or Chicago.  He could never have represented the people of Salt Lake City.

The Democrats won in 2006 and 2008 because more people across the country voted for them over the Republicans.  But they didn’t do it as a whole.  They did it district by district and state by state.  And while presumably voters understood that by choosing a Democrat they were choosing someone who’d vote with other Democrats in Congress most of the time, they were still choosing to be represented there themselves as themselves.

It’s ridiculous to expect that the people of North Dakota and the people of New York are going to expect exactly the same things out of their representatives even if both did choose Democrats to represent them.  They have different interests and those interests can and often do conflict.

What we’ve been watching over the last several months is the spectacle of 258 people trying to figure out how best represent the people who sent them to Washington and reconcile that with what’s best for the Party and best for the country as a whole.

The Republicans don’t have this problem because they decided twenty years ago that the interests of the voters are always and everywhere the same as the interests of the Party leaders, which would explain why they’re held in such low regard everywhere outside the South.

The final House bill is what you’d expect when you try to represent the wishes and interests of 259 Congressional Districts. (One of those districts is represented by a Republican, Joseph Cao, who is the Democrats’ new favorite Republican and the Republicans’ newly identified and targeted traitor in their midst.  But Cao’s district went heavily for Obama last year.  Was Cao being principled, expedient, or simply doing his job of representing his district?) It’s no wonder the result is a big bleeding mess and that few Democrats are really satisfied with the result, as opposed to being happy to have accomplished something no previous Democratically controlled House managed.

It’s a flawed bill.  It couldn’t not have been a flawed bill.  It might have been less flawed.  It might have been flawed in other ways that made it less of a disappointment to some Progressives but then that bill might have been more of disappointment to other Progressives.  For instance, Stupak could have been defeated or not even allowed to come to the floor without losing a single vote for the final bill. (How, I don’t know.  I think if Nancy Pelosi could have figured out a way, she’d have done it.  But I’m kind of a child about these things sometimes.)  But some other conservative could have introduced an amendment stripping the bill of these provisions instead and Progressives would have been just as sick at heart this morning at the sellout of gay Americans.

So I don’t see the final bill as a failure of the Democrats to do the right thing.

I see it as a failure of the leadership to solve the problem of representative democracy.

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Update:  Two Upstate New York Democratic Congressmen.  Two votes against Stupak.  One vote for the final bill.  Paul Tonko and Scott Murphy explain their votes.  The Times Union reporter  assumes readers know this.  Tonko’s district includes the Democratic cities of Albany and Schenectady.  Murphy’s district contains no real cities unless you count the Republican town of Saratoga Springs.

Very latest updates from The Adventures of Lance Mannion: Tonight’s twitter notes to authorized unauthorized autobiographer

LanceMannion Hiding out at Barnes and Noble. Pretty sure I lost my police tail. Cops don't twitter much, do they?  about 1 hour ago from web

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LanceMannion Might've spoke too soon. There're at least six people here in the cafe wearing mirrored sunglasses. One of them's the barista.  about 1 hour ago from web

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LanceMannion Shades-wearing barista getting yelled at by irate machiato-drinking customers. She keeps mixing up the caramel and chocolate drizzles.  about 1 hour ago from web

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LanceMannion Thinking the barista not a cop. Probably a Fed. about 1 hour ago from web

 

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LanceMannion Just noticed all the guys in shades are all reading books in the Twilight series. Either all have 13 yr old daughters or they're..gasp! 43 minutes ago from web

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LanceMannion Vampires!  42 minutes ago from web

 

 

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LanceMannion Fleeing Barnes and Noble now. Will stop at grocery store on way home to pick up garlic.  40 minutes ago from web

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LanceMannion Safe at home. Garlic strands around all windows. No sign of cops or vampires. Learned valuable lesson. less than 20 seconds ago from web

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LanceMannion Should have checked to see if those guys were picking up each other's reflections in their sunglasses. less than 5 seconds ago from web

All the mad men and all the mad women need an extra order of cream

Season 3 Finale of Mad Men this Sunday night, and here’s a sneak preview:

Milk Men - A Mad Men Parody

Atom.com: Funny Videos | Spoofs | TV & Movie Spoofs

Whoops.  Sorry about that.  Oh well.  At least there were no spoilers.

The best thing in this is the Milk Man’s Draperesque speech about milk being bottled innocence, although that one actresses’ Peggy-isms are hilariously dead-on too.

Are any of these actors old enough to remember real milk men?  Once, when the sixteen year old was five, we were in the Dairy Pavilion at the New York State Fair and I tried to explain to him what a milk man was and what he did.  “Your nana used to put a note out at night in the milk box and very early in the morning the milk man would come in his truck and leave whatever nana ordered.”

His response was, “You’re joking with me, Dad.”

Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny made more sense to him.  Of course he had proof they existed.

When did the last milk men deliver their last quarts of buttermilk?

Back to the milk as bottled innocence speech.  That was perfect, but it reminded me of that episode of Naked City I wrote about a few weeks back.

David Janssen’s character, the proto-Don Draper, delivers a speech to his mad men that could be written straight into an episode of Mad Men without the slightest edit:

Gentlemen, Sparrow Farm Products spent six and a half million dollars this year on an advertising campaign we designed for them.  That campaign did not say tractors are great, it said Sparrow Tractors are great.  The farmer buys a tractor and gets up in the seat.  He doesn’t know whether that tractor’s going to be good or bad but he does know that Sparrow Tractors are good.  He knows it because we sold him.  We told told him.  So let’s reassure him.  Let’s make it very clear to him he’s sitting on a Sparrow Tractor.

I wonder if the writers of Mad Men have been cribbing.

Doesn’t make any more sense than the things Draper tells his staff, but David Janssen gives it an authoritative edginess that makes you believe his guys are going to snap to in a way Draper’s won’t because they’re going to waste time trying to figure out what the heck it all means.  Janssen’s speech comes across as an instructive order.  Hamm’s speeches have a opiate haze about them, as if they were zen koans delivered by a master who is completely but not necessarily blissfully stoned.

That’s not a criticism.  It’s an illustration of the different ways the two shows see the time period.  On Naked City, a product of the time, the early 1960s is a period of energy, dash, and forward momentum.  Characters who can’t keep up or who get too far ahead or who are otherwise out of synch get into trouble, which is sometimes comic, more often tragic, but not inevitable or inescapable or irreparable.  On Mad Men escaping the time is the desired end, but that escape is practically out of the questions and most of the characters don’t even know they need to.  They’re trapped in their era as if in a giant bottle of mineral oil in which they swim in extreme slow motion with the object of simply not sinking.

The only way out is if someone breaks the bottle from outside.

Which is sort of what happened last week, isn’t it?

Big thanks to Greg Mitchell for the video.