Lance Mannion

You can't read and cross the Street at the same time

I've goofed again and begun another one of my infamous mult-part postings but this time Part 1 is over on the American Street.

This one's on politics and novels.  I'm writing it as a response to Christopher Lehmann's essay in the Washington Monthly, "Why Americans Can't Write Political Fiction."

My bold reply to Lehmann is, "You're right, they can't, except when they do, but they don't do it often, and here's why, maybe."

I posted Part 1, "The Novel Writing Class," yesterday.  Part 2, "The a-political novel," will be up late Tuesday afternoon.  If you want to stop by the Steet and drop off some examples of good political novels, please do.   But you should also read Lehmann's essay first.

Along the St Marys

River Greenway.  St Marys River.  Fort Wayne, IN.  Fall 1990.

October 30, 1988: A new world

Seventeen years ago today was also a Sunday.   We were living in Fort Wayne.   Early that morning I went for a walk along the banks of the St Marys River.

Frost in the night.  Green leaves freeze-dried on the branch.  Hardly a breeze, but the slightest stir drops a leaf.  Leaves plane down, nose dive, hit with weight, making a crunching noise on impact that can be heard yards away.

Walk through a couple of patches where trees have denuded themselves in a heap of still green leaves—mostly basswood; maples, elms having turned.  Cottonwoods holding on to their leaves, which are browning at the tips and curling on the branch.—heaps look unnatural, manmade and repulsive.  Otherwise the morning is the finest of the fall.

Arguing mallards hard to make out in the glare off the river.  Skins of slushy ice at the riverbends.  Go off the path into the woods on some high ground that rises up from the the river.  Crunching of frosted leaves underfoot startle geese at the foot of the bluff.  Hear splashes and the whiffle of their wings as they wing-walk out of the red sedge into the clear water where they gather complaining, “Hank hank hank hank.”  Count thirty-five in the flock, more whiffling out of the sedge.

I need binoculars and a better memory.  Robin or starling-sized birds, four or five in a single tree, with buff bellies spotted brown or black.  Looking up into the sun, it’s hard to tell the color of their heads and wings.  Audubon gives me three possibilities.  Female redwings, starlings whose winter plumage includes flecks of white, and wood thrushes.  My birds have small heads—thrush?  But bent tails, Groucho’s coattails—starlings.  Musical call, not clucks, so I lean toward wood thrush.  Audubon calls it a familiar bird and puts it in the neighborhood: “Nests regularly in the vicinity of houses.”  Quotes Thoreau on the wood thrush’s song:

“Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring; whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of Heaven are not shut against him.”

Shallow theatrics

Charisma.  The most skillful psychopaths know how to play it like a guitar.  Sometimes the smartest ones get to the top of the corporate ladder or the highest rungs of elected office.  In the end, though, shallow theatrics are often counterbalanced by laziness and sloppiness.

---from Rage by Jonathan Kellerman.

Brainiac twists slowly, slowly in the wind

I'm not there, I don't know, and I shouldn't even try to guess.  Even if I was there, there being Washington DC, I wouldn't know.  I'd have no contacts, no sources, no inside information.  Even the anonymous cabbies who chatter away nonstop whenever any tired old pundit climbs into their cab would clam up around me.

But ignorance doesn't stop me from having an opinion.

And my opinion is that Karl Rove is not a genius.

At any rate, I've never seen any evidence that he is.  All I've seen is evidence that he wins elections by playing dirty in the most old-fashioned and obvious ways and he's good at using what clout he has to take revenge on anybody who crosses him.

Seems that every article and op-ed piece about the man contains a gratuitous reference to how brilliant the guy is.  Paul Begala, speculating for the TPMCafe about the stresses upon people working inside the White House with the spectre of Patrick Fitzgerald haunting their offices, refers off-handedly to Rove's "prodigious brain."  Begala worked for Bill Clinton so he knows from prodigious brains.

So I don't doubt that Rove is smart.  Very smart.

But is he that smart?

From all I've seen over the last 6 years, Rove's "genius" consists of a pair of twinned insights

That there are people who admire winning so much they will forgive the winner just about anything, and among them are a good number of journalists and many of your political opponents.

And that there are a great number of people so blinded by party loyalty, or naive patriotism, so trusting, so convinced that their leaders' hearts must be in the right places, that they can't bring themselves to believe that the President of the United States would employ somebody as dirty as Karl Rove.  They can't believe their own eyes when you steal candy from babies right in front of them.  You can grab the lollipop from the kid's sticky fingers, rap the brat on the head with it, wave it in front of his tear-streamed face making Nyah nyah nyah nyah naaaan-yah noises and the rubes and suckers watching you do it will blink, shake their heads, rub their eyes, look again, and decide that they couldn't have seen what they just saw, nobody would be that brazen and mean, the poor tyke must be crying for another reason and the Tootsie Pop now in your mouth you must have obtained by magic---by an act of pure genius.

And among this second group are a whole bunch of other journalists and politicians.  Rove figured out he could cheat and no one would ever catch him or call him on it.

If anybody has any evidence of real genius at work, I'd like to hear it.  Please make it something more than he got those anti-gay referenda on the ballots of 13 states because it doesn't take genius to figure out that stirring up the hatreds of voters is a good way to get them to turn out to vote your way.  Same with the Swift Boat Vets.  It is not genius to concoct a scheme to pay a bunch of angry and disappointed men to go out and tell lies about a man they all already hate.

If you want to argue that he has a genius for getting away with cold-blooded murder in broad daylight, you may be onto something.  But is that genius or the luck of coming into power just at the time when the news media had foresaken their public duty as watchdogs and the Republicans had taken control of both houses of Congress so that there was no one around to call him to account?

George Bush has been in such increasing trouble since he was re-elected that it's hard to remember he wasn't doing all that well before last November.  He squeeked out a win in an election that should have been the cakewalk we were promised Iraq would be.  At one point in 2003 Rove himself was predicting that Bush would win all 50 states.

His margin of victory turned out to be within the statistical margin of error and to get that he needed massive voter suppression, probably widespread fraud and outright theft, and an opponent who was prone to taking his eye off the ball and relaxing into a trot at moments when he needed to gallop.

I love to mix sports metaphors.

To win Bush needed all of Rove's "genius."

How did that happen?

And when did it start?

I've picked out the moment when Bush's downfall began.

"Mission Accomplished."

Various lap dogs, partisans, sycophants and pro bono flunkeys in the Media swooned over Top Gun Bush prancing about the deck of the aircraft carrier in his flight suit.  But I think most people thought he looked pretty silly.  Even supporters were embarrassed for him.  He was supposed to look like an action hero.  Instead he'd turned himself into an action figure.  Presidents aren't supposed to play at being GI Joe.

The stunt was obvious, trite, vulgar, crass, and a failure.  And it was Karl Rove's.

If he didn't dream it up himself, he approved it.

The point of this grotesque pantomime was to plant in the rubes' heads the idea that George Bush had personally defeated Saddam, as if they'd gone at it mano a mano and GI George had whupped the A-Rab good and proper.

Besides being unseemly, it was unnecessary and unwise.  What followed was predictable---and it wouldn't have taken a genius to predict it.  Rove had tied Bush's popularity directly to the War in Iraq, and this turned out to be as smart as Jimmy Carter's imprisoning himself in the White House during the Hostage Crisis.

From the day Bush stood in front of that Mission Accomplished banner, every little piece of evidence that the mission wasn't accomplished yet was evidence of his personal failure to accomplish it.

Some genius.

Yet even now, after that, after the nearly blown election, after the continued PR disasters---the whole string of them following Katrina providing fine examples that there is no genius at work, only somebody desperately trying to recapture a moment of success four years ago atop the rubble of the World Trade Center---the myth of Rove's genius continues.

Mostly now the myth is retold in negative terms---what's wrong with the White House these days?  Why all the missteps?  All the screw-ups?  Where's Rove?  What happened to Rove?  Karl Rove would never have let this, that, or the other thing go on!  Something must be the matter with Rove!

The general consenus among the Rove Fan Club, to which it appears most of the Beltway Insiders belong, is that what's gone wrong isn't a result of bad policy, a President who isn't up to the job, an institutional commitment to cronyism, corruption, incompetence, and powermongering for power's sake, or even to misguided thinking.  All that's gone wrong is that Karl Rove is for some reason not on top of his game.

The reason most often suggested is that Rove's been distracted by the Plame Affair.

Begala, who I don't believe for a moment is in the Fan Club but who would know what's being said in Washington, sums it up:

When he came to Washington, Mr. Bush surrounded himself with tough-minded people who seemed not to be afraid to stand up to him. But now his team is loaded with weak-kneed toadies, and Mr. Bush is home alone.  Karl Rove, of course, is fending off a potential indictment.  His prodigious brain has not entertained another thought in months.  (That's why, I suspect, some months back Rove popped off and said liberals wanted to give terrorists psychotherapy after 9/11. It was a loopy, stupid, and distinctly un-Rovian, meltdown - the first public sign that the pressure was causing Karl to crack.)

There's that prodigious brain reference---which now sounds a tad sarcastic to me.  Like I said, Begala knows from prodigious brains.   But that's the CW in a nutshell, I think:  "His prodigious brain has not entertained another thought in months."

How can he concentrate on business with an indictment dangling over his head?

But whatever the definition of genius is, part of it is that genius is focused.

One of the ways you recognize geniuses is by their ability to continue to work and work well under circumstances that would have the rest of us cowering in our beds and hiding our heads under the pillow so that no one can see us weeping in despair.

Geniuses don't get distracted.  They don't lose their concentration.  If anything, when under pressure, they tend to work harder!

I suppose, then, you could argue that all Rove's genius is being directed towards keeping himself out of jail or that genius is not an immutable quality, the greatest minds experience a falling off, and Rove is a former genius now.

Maybe.

But I say, "Mission Accomplished."

Rove's reputation has benefited from hyperbole and toadyism.  There is no real evidence of it, and there never was.  What there was was a rule that if you wrote about Rove you wrote about how smart he is, and the source of this rule it now appears was Rove himself.

In a column for the LA Times (registration required, natch), Jonathan Chait suggests that Rove is the chief source for all things Rove.

Chait starts from a premise that strikes me as bizarre---that the Bush Leaguers and their apologists in the media have been in cahoots to pretend that Karl Rove doesn't have the influence he's reputed to have, because if Rove is what we think Rove is, Bush really is a mindless puppet.  It's always seemed to me that they've been proud of Rove and his genius and boasted that it's a sign of George Bush's greatness that he recognizes Rove's talent and isn't afraid to have such a superior mind in the same room with him.  But Chait is a real reporter and the DC cabbies probably talk to him, so he'd know and I wouldn't.  Doesn't matter.  What matters is what Chait is saying here:

...in the case of Miers, Rove was out of the picture, distracted by his potential indictment in the Valerie Plame/CIA scandal. As the New York Times reported last week, "Some conservatives and Rove allies say [Chief of Staff Andrew] Card kept Mr. Rove in the dark about the seriousness of Mr. Bush's intentions until very late in the process, thus sidestepping the advisor who would have been best able to anticipate dissent among Republicans." This is what scientists call "isolating the independent variable."

The result was a disaster that bore none of the hallmarks of your normal Rove-driven strategizing. The outreach to the base was almost nonexistent. The smear campaign against the critics was clumsily handled. The Bush who made this selection bears almost no resemblance to the Bush we've grown accustomed to.

Ironically, the very fact that Rove is facing indictment is causing some of Bush's staunchest allies to admit Rove's influence at last.

In the latest issue of the Standard, Fred Barnes calls Rove "irreplaceable." Rove "made Bush more conservative," writes Barnes, and now that he's tied up with Plamegate, "Bush appears to be drifting ideologically."

What happened to Bush having thoughts of his own? I'll tell you what. Rove desperately needs conservatives to rally behind him to keep his job or maybe to stave off prison.

So now the pretense that Rove was never pulling the strings behind the surface has been dropped for the more immediate imperative of saving his hide.

Rove is out to save Rove so Rove is running around telling everybody how smart Karl Rove is and how desperately Bush needs him.  "If I go down, the President goes down.   Remember how I told you all that stuff showing you how smart I am?  Remember how I said it was all, wink, wink, 'off the record?'  Well, it's not off the record anymore!  Write it up!"

Anyone disappointed that Rove wasn't indicted yesterday along with Libby should consider this.

I don't know if Harriet Miers withdrew when she did because she just couldn't go on any longer or because, knowing she couldn't last much longer, she withdrew on the day Fitzgerald was expected to report in order to distract from the report.  But I'm pretty sure that people in the White House, probably including Rove himself, hoped that they could use the announcement of Miers' replacement to change the subject after the indictments had been announced.

Except that only one indictment was announced.

Karl Rove is still "under investigation."

Rove may or may not be a genius.

But Patrick Fitzgerald is smarter.

A word to the wise

Publius sees signs that the self-styled conservatives on the Right who advocated for the withdrawl of Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court are going to be too quick to forgive and forget.  Having practiced a form of tough love on their beloved Hero President---and in some cases actually breaking up with him in their hearts and taking his picture out from under their pillows and tearing it up---these conservatives are already putting a light in the window to guide their wandering boy home.

Publius, who would rather have not touched this post by Cornerite KJ Lopez with a barge pole, cites her effusion as an example of a fatted calf being rushed into preparation for dinner:

You know what the relief is this morning? A return to the feeling that this president gets the big things right. There was a detour, but I’m confident we’re going to have good news shortly on SCOTUS, because this president tends to get the big things right. That’s the confidence so many of us have always had in him.

Angry and disappointed as they were with Bush for nominating an obvious political hack who besides being a judicial embarrassment couldn't even guarantee she was going to vote the right Right way when she took her seat on the Supreme Court bench, they are willing to excuse Miers as the one and only big mistake W. has ever made.

But Publius asks them to take a long hard look at what really happened and what such a mistake tells them about their hero's feet of clay.

I hope this little episode taught you something about your President – because there is an important lesson to be learned. The lesson is that this administration makes bad decisions. And the reason that it makes bad decisions is because it makes uninformed decisions.  And the reason it makes uninformed decisions is because it lacks any sort of decision-making process.  As ex-Bush aide DiIulio warned long ago in Esquire:

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio tells Esquire. "What you've got is everything--and I mean everything--being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

It’s not that the administration is bad because it’s too mean or too conservative or whatever.  It’s bad because it is necessarily incapable of making sound decisions because the process by which it reaches decisions is completely corrupted. (Corrupted is actually too kind in that it assumes the existence of some past condition that was better.)

Now this is all fine and dandy when it comes to dumb nominations. You can always withdraw a nomination. But here’s what you need to understand – the same decision-making process that brought us Miers was precisely the same decision-making process that took us to war in Iraq. And it’s precisely the same decision-making process that planned the war in Iraq. And it’s precisely the same decision-making process that administered the post-war occupation. Take a moment and think about that now that Miers has opened your eyes to the reality of the man behind the curtain.

But it’s more than Iraq. The process that led to Miers is the same flawed decision-making process that responded to Katrina. It’s the same flawed decision-making process running our budget and taxing our children. It’s the same flawed decision-making process that gave us an incoherent, budget-busting train wreck of a Social Security reform proposal. And it’s the same flawed decision-making process that concluded that authorizing torture was ok. All respect to KJ Lopez, these are “big things,” and the administration has been very wrong on all of them.

Publius mentions K-Lo and wouldn't mind if she and other Right Wing bloggers like her learned the lesson.  Small chance of that.  Their biggest objection to Miers is that she was a wound to their vanity.  But wise conservatives in Congress and in general might be ready to listen.

I disagree with Publius on only one point.  Harping on it wouldn't help Publius' argument, but since I'm pretty sure no Republican Congressman read my page and I've already established myself as a hopeless partisan jerk in the eyes of wise conservative civilians who drop in from time to time, I'll harp.

Publius separates the corruption of the Bush Leaguers' decision-making process by politics from accusations of their meanness.  But their meanness is their politics.

Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have always run the show and they aren't just mean men, they are nasty and hate-filled men.  The third member of the triumvirate, Donald Rumsfeld, is no model of sweetness and light either, it's just that unlike Cheney and Rove, Rumsfeld might actually have wanted to accomplish something.

Rove and Cheney have wanted power for power's sake.  They have had no agenda but personal aggrandizement.  Rove wants to stick it to his enemies.  Cheney just wants to give away the store to his friends.

In these limited and mean ambitions, both men have been resounding successes.

Their meanness is their politics is their policy is their outcomes.

Since World War II we have suffered through three disasterous Presidencies.  Johnson's, Nixon's, and now George W. Bush's.

Whatever you think of Carter and Reagan, neither one of them burned down the house around them the way those three did.

And all three of them governed in anger, out of spite, and full of hatred.  Nixon was just being Nixon.  Johnson gave in to his own darker side.  George W. Bush, no moral paragon, has been the tool of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove for all of his political life.

Right Wing bloggers admire the Bush Administration for its collective meanness, which they call toughness, because it matches and gives powerful expression to their own petty hatreds and vindictiveness.

But wise conservatives will take note and remember that none of the successful Presidents, and certainly none of the great ones, ever let their angers and hatreds show, let alone control them.  FDR, Lincoln, and Washington weren't just forgiving and patient with their political enemies; they were actively conciliatory.  They were tough, but they weren't vindictive or spiteful.   For the sake of this argument, let's say Reagan was as successful as conservatives believe him to have been.  Then they should look at Reagan's sunny disposition, his ability to get along with everybody, the fact that he was truly friendly with Tip O'Neill, and then look at George W. Bush's irritability and his frequent lapses into spite and meanness.  Reagan's greatest achievement, recognizing that the Cold War was over and the United States had won, was a victory of temperament.

Iraq illustrates the same point in the opposite way.

As long as I'm giving them Reagan, I think they should give me Clinton, and impress upon themselves this:

During the whole of the Impeachment Crisis, once, and only once, did Clinton let loose on anyone working to destroy him.

And that one time was at one person.  Ken Starr.  A man so slimy, so hypocritical, so smug and self-righteous that he could have provoked Gandhi into taking a swing at him.

Clinton gave him the attention of a single sentence.

Every thing the Bush Leaguers have set out to do has begun with a pre-emptive character assassination of any possible opponents to their plan.  The point of this has always been to rally the base by getting them angry, a mean thing to do in itself, but Cheney has always taken grim satisfaction in that aspect it all and Rove quite clearly enjoys it so much that he can barely keep from giggling as he goes about it.

Publius is right.  Miers' nomination is not an any more of an aberration than was letting New Orleans drown or turning the running of the reconstruction of Iraq over to party hacks and Haliburton.

They don't think things through.  They often appear not to think at all.  They "go with their gut," which isn't even a virtue if your gut is telling you to do the right thing.  They are openly contemptuous and actively hostile to anyone who does think---the reality-based community, which was used as a description not of journalists, know it all eggheads and so called experts, Liberals and Democrats, but of anybody and everybody, including people inside the Administration who thought things through.

Because for them, all the thinking that needed to be done had been done, by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

They're the ones that corrupted the process, and the corruption is their politics and their politics is themselves and their personal meanness.

Miers falls on her sword

Ok, who here believes she picked today to withdraw on a whim?

I'm sorry that she dropped out.  Not just because it will either compete for headlines with the news from Fitzgerald's office or cause him to sit on the indictments for a few more days.

It means that there is no one in charge.

We have no President, folks.  We don't even have the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rove triumvirate.

We have a gang of very desperate men who are now terrified of losing their last supporters, the Right Wing crazies in Congress.  What else will they do to please them?

This is not good.

Shoeless Joe Who?

To celebrate the White Sox' first World Championship since 1917, Rox Populi salutes the Chicago outfield of 1919---Jackson, Felsch, and Nemo Leibold.

Nemo Leibold.  Talk about great baseball names.

Rox acknowledges that this wasn't the best outfield ever, but they were pretty darn good.  Shoeless Joe was, of course, Shoeless Joe.  Leibold led the league in errors with 19, but he had 26 assists and hit .302.  Hap Felsch led the league in assists and drove in 86 runs, which was a lot in those days.  Jackson himself drove in 96.  The league leader was some kid in Boston who had 114 RBI.  But then he hit 29 home runs while he was at it and back then home runs were considered uncouth, a word that rhymes with...?

Leibold, by the way, apparently kept his Sox white during the 1919 Series.  He played six more seasons and was in two more World Series, in '24 and '25, with the Washington Senators.  The real Washington Senators.

But in the 1919 Series Leibold had one hit.  Batted .056.  Jackson batted .375, with 12 hits, including a home run.  He drove in 6 runs and scored 5 himself.

So if Jackson, Felsch, and Leibold weren't the best outfield ever, Rox wants to know, Who was?

She doesn't say what she means by best.  Best as in best all around players?  Best as in if you hit a fly ball you'd better have hit it out of the park or you were on your way right back to the dugout?  Or best as in it didn't matter what they did out there with their gloves, they could play barehanded with their backs to the infield, if they wanted to, they were going to kill you when they came to the plate?

Since she doesn't limit it, you can answer any or all three ways.  And fair's fair, folks.  Her question, you should answer on her page.

Right now an outfield line-up of Dye, Rowand, and Podsednik looks awfully good.

Them's not fightin' words!

Shakespeare's Sister and the Heretik are disgusted by the news that the Democrats are adopting as their battle cry for the 2006 Congressional elections the rabble rousing "We Can Do Better."

If they're feeling really fiesty they might make it "Together We Can Do Better."

No word as to whether they're going to go crazy and add exclamation points.

Frankly, I don't believe the Party is dumb enough to use "We Can Do Better" as their slogan.

Unless they are addicted to losing, as Paul Hackett says, they can't have failed to notice that John Kerry used a similar slogan and John Kerry is not President right now.

It sounds like an apology, and not a convincing apology.

"We can do better!" shouts the Democratic candidate.

"You sure can!" the party faithful shout back.

Of course it's meant to imply both a criticism and a comparision.  Things need to be improved and we Democrats can do the job of improving them.  But it doesn't place blame.

Why do they need to be improved?

Because George Bush and the Republicans have run the damn country into the ground!

But if that's the case, just doing better isn't much of a response, is it?

It's like promising that when you drive the car you will obey the speed limit or when you get your hands on the crayons you will color inside the lines or when you take a girl out you will be on time to pick her up and buy the popcorn and not try any funny stuff unless she says it's ok.

Good for you.  You're a nice boy.

Being nice is the default position, though.  Nobody goes to heaven for being nice.  Nobody gets rewarded just for following direction and obeying the rules.

Wait.

There is one class of people who are rewarded regularly just for following directions and obeying the rules.

Schoolchildren.

And that's what makes the slogan so exasperating.  It sounds like it was written by someone who followed the teacher's instructions to the letter.

And turned it in on time, of course, on a clean sheet of paper, inside a plastic report cover.

"Oh, Democrats, what a lovely slogan!  Class, didn't Democrats come up with a lovely slogan?"

Somewhere behind "We Can Do Better"---"Perhaps, Democrats, it would be better if we said, 'Together We Can Do Better?'  We don't want anyone to feel left out, do we?"---are some words with meaning and bite.

No more screw-ups!  No more lies!  No more criminal incompetence and outright criminal acts!

It's the economy, stupid!  It's the lost war, and the busted budget, and the terrorists who got away, and the drowned city, stupid!

It's everything they've done and everything they've failed to do, stupid!

"Paul, Barbara, Johnny C!  We do not call people names in this class."

The Heretik, Shakespeare's Sister, and everybody else with an ear for language and a righteous anger at the Bush Leaguers are dismayed by the slogan because it drips with timidity, apology, defeatism, and even self-loathing.

Res of Republic of Dogs might say, as he did in a brilliant take-down of a post by Kos, that it's another example of:

..the gang-rape of the English language by business majors, lawyers, and management consultants..

It's all that.  But I think it's more.  I think it underscores another of the Democrats' great weaknesses.  It reinforces their image as the Party of the Schoolteachers and their pets.

The virtue most encouraged in classrooms these days is conflict-avoidance and over the last decade and a half the Congressional Democrats sure have earned straight A's in that one, haven't they?

Politeness, sharing, sitting still and paying attention, waiting one's turn, following direction and no talking back---they're very good at those too.

Honestly, with a few stand out exceptions, you watch the Democrats at work and you can't help thinking that they aren't paying any attention to the Republicans at all---"If you ignore the bully, children, he will get bored and stop picking on you."---except when they go out of their way to be nice to them, usually at the moment when they should be fighting back hardest---"Remember, boys and girls, bullies have feelings too.  They wouldn't be bullies if they weren't insecure and lonely."

Cynics think that what happens to the Democrats when they should be standing up, fighting back, and beating up on the Republicans is that they remember that their own big corporate donors are conservatives and Republicans.

But I can't help thinking that what overcomes them and turns them into namby-pamby goody-goodies is the memory of their Third Grade teacher, the one they had a crush on and tried so hard to please.

"We Can Do Better" just sounds to me like it was invented as part of a class project.

That got me thinking.   What if schoolteachers had edited great battle cries and campaign slogans of the past?

"David, we do not use that language here, nor do we ignore any onrushing projectiles in the water; we will proceed cautiously and attain full velocity as quickly as is prudent."

"John Paul, I think it would sound much nicer and show a greater willingness to get along with others if you said, 'I have not yet commenced to find the best way to negotiate our differences and settle this like reasonable adults.'"

"Oliver, use your big boy words and mind your manners.  It would be much more persuasive and polite, if you said, 'Please, don't relinquish any claims upon this vessel without carefully considering all the alternatives.'"

"Winston, it is never nice to brag and we do not encourage fighting.  I suggest, 'We will do our best to defend ourselves on the beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets, and hills.'  And then say, 'We do not plan to surrender but we will show good sportsmanship if we find we have to.'"

"Happy days will be here again, Franklin, at the proper time; at the moment we are all doing our seat work.  You may join us, if you wish.  And I hope you've brought enough of those happy days for everybody."

"Harry, in this classroom, we do not give people H-E-double hockey sticks."

We can do better, sheesh.

Like I said, I can't believe the Democrats think this will rally the troops.

I think they'll come up with something with more spunk, with more fire.  A slogan that is a battle cry.

Something that will take the fight right to the Republicans!

Or in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny:

"Of course you realize that this means we are feeling a bit hostile towards you right now and may not be able to deal with our emotions calmly."
_______________________________________________________

Shakespeare's Sister asked her readers to come up with fiestier, more inspiring battle cries for the Democrats, and her readers came through with some serious suggestions and some suggestions that aren't as serious, except in the way they express anger and frustration with the Party.

Gone With the Wind, my eye!

Followed a link from the Linkmeister---always a worthwhile undertaking---and wound up at TIME Magazine's list of the 100 Best English-language Novels published since 1923.

1923 being the year 1 A.H.L., the year of our Lord Henry Luce, the year he stared TIME.

Link asked which books are on the list that shouldn't be and which ones aren't that should, and I wrote:

A quick glance over the list and my first gut reaction was that at least HALF the books don't belong on it. Here are just a few I'd scratch right off: Possession, Ragtime, Falconer, The Sot-weed Factor, The Sportswriter, Tropic of Cancer, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Infinite Jest, The Corrections, Play It As It Lays, Blood Meridian, Revolutionary Road, Red Harvest, Dog Soldiers...

Thinking it over, I decided that I'd scrap 2/3rds of the list.

Off goes A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire (It's a clever joke, not a novel), Deliverance, Gone With the Wind, Atonement, The Assistant, The Sheltering Sky, Naked Lunch (Don't try.), Never Let Me Go, The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway really couldn't write novels, but A Farewell to Arms is his best), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Housekeeping...

Enough, Lance!

There are some very strange choices.  John Cheever was a great short story writer, not much of a novelist, and he knew that and didn't write many novels, but Falconer is the worst of the few.

Nothing by Somerset Maugham, but Richard Ford's The Sportswriter makes the list?

Gone With the Wind's on the list.  It's one of Nancy Nall's favorite novels (She also loves Lolita, so don't judge) but for crying out loud!

But it's on the list for the same reason Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Are You There, God?  It's Me Margaret are on it---so that there are novels that the average TIME reader will have read.  All of those, except for Gone With the Wind, are good books too but they have another virtue as well.  They are all standards of high school reading lists, which means that teenagers can have a connection with the list, a good thing, sound business even, but not a truly meritocratic consideration.

And as many of my readers will agree, the very best writer in English, of the whole 20th Century, nevermind just since 1923, is not on the list.

P.G. Wodehouse.

The Code of the Woosters is far superior to any of the novels I want dumped from the list and most of the ones I'd leave on it.

All lists like this are suspect.  There's almost no point to a list that doesn't provoke some discussion, which means that the listmakers are always facing the temptation to make deliberately provocative choices, and who knows how well they resisted the temptation.

And there's the affirmative action factor.  I believe that there's no way a list of the 100 best novels published since any given date won't include many works by women and minorities, but as soon as you set out to make a list thinking it must contain novels by women and minorities you've introduced criteria that are not literary or artistic.  Then the temptation arises to over-correct the other way and you find yourself excluding women and minorities because you're not sure if you want their novels on the list because the novels are good or because they're written by women and minorities.

And by calling it a list of the best English-language novels you are committing yourself to including novels written in places other than the United States and England, but both the United States and England seem over-represented here to me.  Canada, Scotland, Ireland, and Australia seem to have been given short shrift.  If the listmakers said, For the sake of argument, let's pretend that English is only spoken in England and the United States, then the United States appears to be over-represented anyway.  So should there have been an affirmative action for the rest of the Commonwealth and former colonies?

TIME's list seems skewed by another kind of affirmative action, a desire not to include the usual suspects and to expand the boundries of what counts as serious fiction.  So a few mysteries and science fiction novels are included, a good thing, except that the ones picked seem like the usual suspects from their genres, Hammett, Chandler, Gibson, Dick.  No John D. MacDonald?  No Elmore Leonard?  No Ray Bradbury, Delaney, or LeGuin?

Another kind of affirmative action is probably at work too, one that results in a definite form of reverse discrimination.

Great novelists tend to write a bunch of great novels, a fact that is so obvious it isn't even worth noting except when you're trying to compile a list of 100 great novels.  If you accept that Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and Hertzog are his best books (debatable, but not indefensible), then that would make, say, Humboldt's Gift, Mr Sammler's Planet, and Seize the Day his next best, with Henderson the Rain King coming in close behind.  And all four of them are better than at least 70 of the books on the list.  It's a similar consideration with Faulkner, Graham Greene, and Iris Murdoch.  And I know people who would make the same case for Roth and Margaret Atwood.

Think like that, though, and you could very easily come up with a list of 100 Best Novels that includes only 15 or 20 novelists.

And I have a personal problem with the list, which stems from the I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me for a member principle.  A list of 100 best novels of any kind that includes 90 books that I've read has to have been dumbed down in some way.

90 and a third, actually.  I've read four of the novels in Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which, by the way, I'm not sure counts as a single novel the way Lord of the Rings does.

But to get back to Link's question, at last:

Which books are on the list that you'd toss and what books would you put in their places?

I'll start with just a few.  Maybe save some for another post.  I've already said what I'd remove.  Here are some I'd add, besides The Code of the Woosters:  Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, Little Big Man by Thomas Berger, Continental Drift by Russell Banks, and Ironweed by William Kennedy.

Your turn.  Since the Linkmeister asked first, I think you should leave your answers at his place.  But I won't hit the delete button if you put them here.  You can also tell us which ones you haven't read and which ones you've read you think are so bad you'd tell a castaway to toss back into the sea if it washed up on his desert island, which ones you've read that most belong, and which books you think I'm nuts for wanting to scrap.

For extra credit:  By way of Apostropher, by way of Dr B, a compilation of one-star Amazon Reader Reviews of TIME's picks.

Seven deadly sins

"There's seven deadly sins," Rudy said.

"Deadly?  What do you mean deadly?" Francis said.

"I mean daily," Rudy said.  "Every day."

"There's only one sin as far as I'm concerned," Francis said.

"There's prejudice."

"Oh yeah.  Prejudice.  Yes."

"There's envy."

"Envy.  Yeah, yup.  That's one."

"There's lust."

"Lust, right.  Always liked that one."

"Cowardice."

"I don't know what you mean.  That word I don't know."

"Cowardice," Rudy said.

"I don't like the coward word.  What're you sayin' about a coward?"

"A coward.  He'll cower up.  You know what a coward is.  He'll run."

"No, that word I don't know.  Francis is no coward.  He'll fight anybody.  Listen, you know what I like?"

"What do you like?"

"Honesty," Francis said.

"That's another one," Rudy said.

---from Ironweed by William Kennedy.

One hundred bottles of beer on the wall, one hundred bottles of beer

Revised and corrected.

Last fall I chaperoned the then 8 year old, then 3rd grader's class field trip to a local art museum.  We traveled by school bus.  40 kids, six adults.  That was probably the first time since I was in 3rd grade I'd heard all one hundred verses of One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

Yesterday the Cub Scouts took a trip to New York City to see the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.  We traveled on a chartered "coach."  A bus with all the amenities.  Nobody sang One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.  Nobody sang anything.  Nobody played I See Something or 20 Questions or The License Plate Game.  Nobody played any games, unless some kids I couldn't see in the back seats had Game Boys.  Practically no one looked out the windows.

The bus had a DVD player and eight monitors stragically positioned, four over each row of seats, and almost all eyes were glued to the screens to watch Bionicle 3 on the way down and The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie on the way back.

I'd come prepared.  When I chaperoned another class field trip in the spring that bus had a DVD system too, so I knew what a horror lay in store for parents.  I had my Walkman and Jonathan Kellerman's Rage on tape.  The 9 year old, who was sitting with a friend, didn't feel ignored, but he felt cheated on the way back.  He didn't mind watching the Bionicles on the way down.  But he's seen SpongeBob  more than enough times to satisfy him.  He'd brought a book to read but he couldn't concentrate on it.  He tried to talk with me, but that meant sitting with me and not with his friend, and he was torn.  Eventually he went back with his friend and slumped in his seat and watched the movie with the bored, distracted, slightly grumpy look of a Cubs fan watching this World Series.

Now I frankly hate the whole idea of watching TV in the car.  I don't care how far you're traveling, I don't care how antsy your kids are, they don't need to watch any more TV and you don't need that distraction.  Yes, I know wild kids are a bigger distraction, but if your kids can't amuse themselves on a trip and you don't have a traveling companion to help keep them entertained and relatively docile, dope them with Mickey Finns an hour before setting out and let them sleep it off on the ride.

If you are one of those timid, namby-pamby, over-protective parents who shudder at the thought of drugging their children, try this.  Books on tape.

It was bad enough that the DVD player had to be turned on to amuse---that is, pacify---the kids.  But the dad in charge of the trip made the mistake of letting the kids vote on what to watch.  He should have asked the parents.  I happened to glance up a couple of times during the Bionicle movie.  It was appalling.

First off, it's an hour and a half commerical for a toy.  Second, it's badly made.  Third, it is as violent and frenetic and amoral as a video game.  (Yes, I could tell all that from just a few glances, because it was also stupid and obvious.)  It is not anything the blonde and I would let our kids watch at home.  And if we heard they were watching it at a friend's house, we'd tell the friend's parents that our kids aren't allowed to watch that kind of junk.  The blonde would probably not use the word junk.

She can be tactful sometimes.

One of the things that drives me berserk is listening to people who don't have kids brushing aside the concerns of parents on things like video games, TV shows, pop music, and pop culture in general.

"If you don't like it, turn it off!"

First, you turn it down.  Doesn't do me any good to not play certain music in my car if you have your windows down and your CD player cranked up.

Also, you could watch your mouth in public.  Sailors, at sea, under enemy fire, curse less.

And what's with the t-shirt?  You're a grown person!  Dress like one.

That's the problem with the Turn it off/Don't let them watch advice.

How are we supposed to do that when as soon as they set foot out of the house they walk into it the same as they walk out into the air?

Their whole world is polluted with it, visually and aurally.

And before you think I'm about to advocate V chips and censorship and maybe even a return to the Index, read this next sentence carefully.

The biggest pollutant is other people's children.

Read this next one carefully too.

This is another way of saying that the problem is parents.

Not Hollywood, not the Media, not degenerate Liberal Values.

Parents.

Me first.

We are lazy, inconsistent, hypocritical, and, when you get right down to, dumb.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

The kids on the bus yesterday didn't want to watch TV nearly as much as the parents on the bus wanted them to watch TV.

As far as I've been able to make out in my 12 plus years of being a parent, what most parents of my generation want first and foremost out of their kids---even before wanting them to do wonderful things on the ballfield or in the classroom that will reflect well on them, the parents, and shine their, the parents', egos---is for the kids to shut up, sit still, and leave them alone.

Oh, we all talk a good game.  I'll bet you a hundred bottles of beer that every parent on that bus would tell you that they value a good education for their kids, that they are careful about what their kids watch and consume, that they are disgusted by the hyper-materialism of the culture we are raising our children in.  It's probable, given where we live and the fact that this was a Cub Scout field trip, that a majority of the parents on the bus are church-going Republicans and self-avowed social conservatives who at the snap of Fast Billy Bennett's fingers can launch themselves into rants against the hyper-sexualization of the media and the general assault on "traditional" values.

But I'll also bet that their homes are full of the stuff they profess to despise and want to keep from their kids and that the examples they set contradict the values they preach.

Liberal parents, we aren't off the hook.  Our houses are full of that junk too and we say we hate it just as much as conservative parents say they do.  But while they duck responsibility by blaming it all on Hollyweird and godless Liberals, we duck it by saying things like, "I played/watched/listened to/smoked/drank/did the same sorts of things when I was their age and I turned out all right."

Who says we turned out all right?

And what's the principle being defended here?

That no amount of sex, drugs, and rock and roll is bad for kids?

Or that nothing we did when we were young was stupid, destructive, immoral, or unhealthy?

I think social conservatives are less self-aware or less honest with themselves than Liberals on this subject because the social conservatives, being for the most part also conservative Republicans, won't confront the real driving force behind the corrupt pop culture they despise and fear---capitalism.

There would never be a naked human being in another second of another movie or TV show if it could be proved that pretty naked bodies didn't sell tickets.

What's more, their focus on sex as the only corrupting force---as a corrupting force---blinds them to other and more destructive corruptions.

The Parents Television Council just released its list of the worst shows in prime time for family viewing.  The top four are all Fox soaps and comedies, which isn't surprising.  But the Council's list of best family shows includes American Idol and Extreme Makeover.

Think about this.

What's best for your family to watch is a show that promotes, celebrates, and rewards, not talent, but celebrity.   You don't win for singing well.  You win for looking and acting like a star while you happen to be singing well.  What's best for you family to watch is a show that tells you that if you want to be happy, spend a lot of money, time, and energy on redecorating you face.

Both shows teach that the first and most important values are narcissism and self-aggrandizement.

I'm mad at myself.  I knew the bus would have TV screens and I didn't speak to the Pack Leader beforehand to request that either no movies be shown or that parents get to pick.  I could have stood up in the middle of the Bioncles and said something.

But besides being mad at myself for my lack of gumption, I'm feeling like a hypocrite too.  I condemned the Bioncles as overly commercial, senseless, violent and stupid, but our house is practically a shrine to Star Wars.

We don't let the guys play video games but we let them play games on the computer.  The computer games are supposed to be educational, but most of them aren't really.

I tell you not to let your kids watch TV in the car, but I'll bet I let mine watch more TV at home than you let yours watch.

Our kids read a lot---the 12 year old was the top reader in his age group in our library's summer reading program, thank you, and the 9 year old has vowed to win his age group next summer, and when he sets his mind to something, he does it.  That's how he won most improved speller last year, not that you'd know it by reading his school work---but they read too many comic books.

I have no business lecturing you on how to raise your kids, I know that.

But I know one thing.  Next time we go on a field trip?

Before anybody gets a chance to put on a DVD, I'm standing up and starting to sing.

Loud.

"ONE HUNDRED BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL, ONE HUNDRED BOTTLES OF BEER..."

Major Correction:  A commenter who wishes to remain anonymous points out that the Parents Council put the Home Edition of Extreme Makeover on their list.  That goes with their choice of Three Wishes as another of the best shows for family viewing.  Both shows' premises make me a bit queasy.  I'm not sure it's really charitable to get a sentimental thrill spying on other people's need for charity, but at least both shows are meant to be about helping others.

Frost on the pumpkin

Frost this morning.  Ice on the doorstep took the 12 year old by surprise as he dashed out the front door to fetch the paper from the mailbox.  He skidded into a pumpkin on the stoop and kicked it into the bushes, where it landed upside down but unharmed.  Car windows needed scraping.  37 degrees now.  Bright sun but clouding up.  Walked down to the post office.  Thick mist lay heavy on the river.  Half mile or so downstream it climbed up to make a curtain of fog erasing the view.  Nearer trees a sketchy veining in the gray.

Just practicing.

So does Scott Podsednik

The Astros, however, are thinking I was right.

Paul Konerko...

...disagrees with me about a little rain.

Call the game!

I don't care that it's the World Series.  Call the game.

There was less rain in the Yucatan yesterday.  Call the game.

It's not even fun to watch when it's raining like that, nevermind that it's dangerous.

Call the game!

It takes a tough man to save a tender chicken

I don't know which is harder for me to get my head around.

That there is a religious practice that involves swinging a live chicken over your head to atone for your sins.

Or:  That there's an animal sanctuary that takes in chickens.

Story by Jeremiah Horrigan in this morning's Times Herald-Record:

Saugerties – Their name is their fate – broilers. And, but for the efforts of a local animal sanctuary, 200 or so abandoned Brooklyn broilers were saved from a fate worse than deep-frying during the weekend.

Animal rescue officials believe a dozen crowded crates of starving chickens discovered Sunday in an empty Coney Island lot were unused leftovers that had been scheduled for slaughter as part of an unusual religious ceremony.

The atonement ceremony, called "kapparot," is practiced in some ultra-Orthodox Hasidic sects on the eve of Yom Kippur. The ceremony requires a man or woman to wave a chicken over his or her head three times while reciting a prayer. The chicken is then slaughtered and given to the poor.

It wasn't the practice itself that caught the attention of the Manhattan ASPCA last weekend – it was the discovery of the dying and dead broilers that eventually sent the chickens north to the Catskill Animal Sanctuary.

Joe Pentangelo, a special agent for the Manhattan ASPCA, said yesterday that an investigation was continuing into who was responsible for leaving the chickens behind. No arrests have been made, he said.

Most of the bedeviled broilers escaped their fate a second time Sunday, even though the ASPCA is best suited to saving cats and dogs, not squadrons of chickens.

But before that could happen, an ASPCA official reached out to the Catskill Animal Sanctuary, which agreed to accept and care for the starving and dehydrated creatures.

Two vanloads of bedraggled broilers arrived at the sanctuary's 100-acre spread on Monday. A warm corner of a barn was the flock's first taste of freedom, according to Kathy Stevens, director of CAS.

At least a dozen of the new arrivals didn't survive the trip, she said. But by yesterday, the vast majority were recovering nicely, hunkering under heat lamps and gorging themselves on high-octane feed and the equivalent of chicken Gatorade.

Under the best of conditions, the life of a broiler is a short affair. Those that escape the butcher block don't have a lot of time to savor their luck.

Other, luckier breeds can live as long as 10 years. But a typical broiler dies within a year of birth of heart attack or heat stroke, no longer able to carry its own weight.

"The factory has replaced the farm," is how Stevens described the situation.

CAS is effectively farming out their refugees to places like the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary and several other outfits that rescue and protect bottom-of-the-pecking-order breeds like the Brooklyn broilers.

"It's not much of a life span," Stevens said while holding one of her new arrivals. "But that's not so important at times like these."

Mornings like this...

...a perfect fall morning, when the sun's out but's cold, autumn cold, no touch of winter in it yet, and a sweater and a little motion are enough to make you blaze from within like a furnace, and the air is clean, and the trees are turning, with some at their peak and others still green or just starting to show their colors, when you can walk along kicking up leaves on the sidewalk but still have fully-leafed branches of honey locusts overhead, although those leaves are buttery yellow now, and I'm on my way back home from dropping the kid off at school and a long side trip down to the convenience store on the riverbank, where I sat for a while sipping good coffee that did not taste like soup, on mornings like this what I want is to come home to my computer and write an ode to autumn-ish post, like this, only better, a post worthy of Thoreau or John Burroughs, a Mary Oliver poem of a post, that captures not just the sights and the sounds but the sense of the day and the weather both without and within, a post like some of the posts I used to write, the kind of posts I imagined I'd be writing lots of when I opened Mannion Feed and Grain for business about a year and a month and day ago today.

Posts like that one over there.

And this other one, back over here.

Those of you who've become regulars since last December or so might be surprised to browse through the archives and discover that I kept the Bush bashing to a minimum before then, no more than one bash a week, if that, and that I was far more regular with how the weather was posts.

I started this blog last fall after I came home from a long bike ride and instead of writing it all up in my notebooks I brooded about how writing about my bike rides in my notebook was about all the writing I was doing anymore and I was tired of writing for an audience of me.  After a couple of days of brooding it finally dawned on me that I should take Nancy Nall's advice and start my own webpage, where at least I would be writing for an audience of two.  Maybe even three, if any of my other friends could be bothered.

So I did it.  And I should have known what was coming when the first real post I wrote wasn't about that bike ride.  It was a Bush Bash.  But I didn't read the signs and portents and forged ahead, thinking that what I was about was a junior grade version of Thoreau's notebooks, which, by the way, are proof that the only thing new media about blogs is literally that they're written for a new medium---or haven't you read the Blog of Henry David Thoreau?

Things could change again.  I might tack back onto my original course, although if I do it will probably be as unconsciously as I drifted into politics and polemics.   But for now I don't feel up to the challenge.  Writing about nature is I think the hardest kind of writing to pull off.  It's too easy to go purple.  Get carried away even a little bit and all of a sudden you're writing Hallmark cards and a phony and embarrassing sort of lyric poetry that would make a ninth grade girl with an advanced case of Emily Dickinson disease rip the page out of her notebook, tear it into a thousand shreds, dump the shreds in the nearest wastebasket and set them on fire if she'd written it herself.

Rein yourself in and you wind up typing entries for field guides.

Which is why I love reading Frogs and Ravens.

Which isn't about frogs and ravens.  It's about squirrels too.  And about moths and spiders.  And about mowing the lawn.

And about the author.

Rana writes the best how the weather was posts I've found on the web, and I'd much rather read what she's seeing than write about what I've seen on mornings like this.

Inscrutable hearts

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

---from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

The poor we will always have with us, goddamn them

Forgive me for quoting myself, but:

If the Goverment is a car setting out to give every one a ride to work, then for 40 years the Republicans have been puncturing the tires, pouring sand in the gas tank, stealing the distributer cap, and, whenever they can get their hands on the wheel, driving it straight into the nearest ditch and then, pointing to the wreckage as the tow truck backs up to it, saying, See, this proves that people were meant to walk.

Since the dawn of the Progessive Era, if not earlier, when the Government began to get behind the idea that, quoting myself again:

...there is no heaven on earth and everybody can't have everything, everybody should have something.  Some things.  The things they truly need.

A decent job, a good school to send their kids to, a doctor within reach and whose bill they can pay, a life without fear that they will have to go hungry, or go sick, or go without a home, just because some rich guy finds it useful and profitable that they go hungry, sick, homeless and cold.

Everybody should be able to live without fear, of attack by enemies from outside and within their own neighborhoods and enemies who call themselves their bosses, their landlords, their betters...

[And] Government exists to help people secure those things they need...

it has been the creed of the Conservative Wing of the Republican Party, "Not on my dime, buster!"

Conservative Republicans, of which there are very few left, what we have now are mostly Right Wing Reactionaries, who are even more stubbornly stingy when it comes to making sure the Government doesn't cost them or the people who pay their bills a dime, have been very good at throwing monkey wrenches into the machinery of Progressive government.

They did it to the Progressives at the turn of the last century.  They did it with the New Deal.  As Erik Loomis pointed out in a comment on my post Conservative Folklore:

It's true that the New Deal didn't end the Depression. It did what FDR meant it to do--it gave hope to the American people, it put at least some Americans back to work, it stabilized the economy, it established further government regulation of the economy, and it undercut radical movements becoming overly popular.

But it did not end the Great Depression.

Why?

It simply wasn't big enough. The New Deal spent far too little money to end the Depression. The reason WWII did end the Depression was that the nation spent an amazing amount of money which put people back to work. Had FDR been able to spend the kind of money in the 30s as he could in the 40s, the Depression would have ended almost immediately.

They did it to the Great Society.  They've done it all along.  But as good political Luddites as they've been, they've had to be selective about which gears they jam, or at least very careful about which gears they could afford to be caught jamming.

So over the years programs whose main beneficiaries are the poor have been the primary targets for sabotage.

It's only lately that they've felt bold enough to go after programs that help the middle class.  The poor, though, were and still are their favorite prey.

The Republicans were always the party of the well-to-do even when they were truly the Party of Linclon, but they became the party of the Rich and of Big Business almost before Lincoln was cold in his grave.  After the Civil War they held a fire sale and the Railroads and the bankers bought them out lock, stock, and barrell.

I know there are good-hearted rich folk, kind, decent, generous to a fault; they freely give to charity and they have the common touch; some of them are even Democrats.  But if there's a corrollary to one bad apple not spoiling the barrell, it isn't one good one improves the whole lot to Grade A.

An awful lot of rich people just hate the poor.  And as we saw during the drowning of New Orleans an awful lot more of the rich's hangers-on, toadies, apologists, and political flunkeys in the blog world, on the radio, on the op-ed pages, and in Congress hate the poor even more on their masters and mistresses' behalf.

I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's because it's hard to enjoy your seven course meal with all those hungry children's noses pressed up against the window.  Maybe it's because they see the Poor as jinxes, living reminders that your luck can turn in a heartbeat and they don't want to be reminded.  Or maybe it's just a reaction to vistigial twinges from their consciences reminding them of the teachings of the Chrisitianity so many of them so piously profess to believe.

Whatever the reason, they do hate the poor, and the Republican Party, as a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Business Inc. and the coupon-clippers who run them and feed off them, has made a central platform plank out of that hatred.

The Poor can go suff!

Up until recently, though, they've been careful not to let themselves say "Let them in cake!" in public.

Their attacks on programs that help poor people were presented as brave and principled stands against Fraud, Waste, and Dependency and for Thrift, Prudence, and Self-Reliance.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, folks, unless you're flying business class.

Better fifty children go hungry than one imaginary Welfare Queen buys one more imaginary Cadillac.

They haven't been entirely successful.  For a long time they were the minority party.  The best they were able to do was to make the Democrats agree to take stands against Fraud and Waste too.  The idea, phrased benignly, was that only the truly needy---the Deserving Poor---should benefit from the Taxpayers' largesse.

The rules for applying for and collecting benefits were written in ways to make it as humiliating, inconvenient, troublesome, and complicated to apply and collect as possible.  That way, you see, only the most desperate, the truly needy, would bother.

Everybody else could go get a job, dammit!

Nevermind that most people who apply for benefits like Medicare and Food Stamps have jobs, jobs they would have to risk to go stand in long lines for hours to be sneered at, scorned, and lectured at by underpaid, overworked, and therefore highly irritable bureaucrats.

This kind of system, like all systems designed with the idea that money is more important than people, winds up costing more money and encouraging the cheating and wastefulness it was intended to prevent, so in most places where sensible people are in charge, the system has been streamlined and made if not exactly people-friendly at least not outright hostile.

Sensible people aren't in charge in California.

Arnold Schwartzenegger is.

And via Cali Dem at nite swimming I learned this morning that Arnold has vetoed a reform of the state food stamp program that would have made obtaining food stamps less complicated, less humiliating, and less onerous, and therefore more actually helpful to people who need the help.

Marital bliss, Part one

Yesterday I got to play vicarious marriage counselor---twice.

Yesterday morning I was at Starbucks enjoying my triple halfcaf defcaf vanilla mocha latte-frappe-cino and there were a couple of college students at the next table, which means, in that Starbucks where the tables are placed so close together that they look like some giant set out to lay a parquet floor, the three of us were pretty much having coffee together.  The students, in that way Americans out in public have, seemed to think they were alone on the face of the planet and so carried on a lenghty, intimate conversation full of details guaranteed to make a modest and polite stranger feel squeamish with a vague sense of voyeruistic guilt.

But I pretended to be absorbed in my newspaper.  They pretended I didn't exist.  And we got along swimmingly that way.

They were complaining about marriage.

The first student was complaining about her older brother's marriage.  The second student complained back about her parents'.

The first student did not like her sister-in-law, not at all.  According to her, her brother's wife is selfish, self-centered, and completely self-absorbed.   Her brother never gets to see any of the movies he wants to see, his wife refuses to go to any of the restaurants he likes.  She makes fun of him in public, rolls her eyes and groans whenever he tries to tell a story or a joke, generally treats him like an idiot and criticizes everything he does.  She's not the least bit interested in anything he is and won't even acknowledge it when he does something well that doesn't involve her.

The student's brother is a salesman for a chemical company and he's totally miserable, she said.  Last year he wanted to start taking education classes at night so that he could teach high school.  His wife wouldn't hear of it.  They couldn't afford it, it would take up too much of his time, and anyway he made more money as salesman than he could as a chemistry teacher.

But then this year the wife quit her job to go to law school.

Besides thinking this monstrously unfair, the first student was convinced that her sister-in-law doesn't even want to be a lawyer.  She thinks she just wants to be a student and impress people with the news she's in law school.  On top of that, she believes that as soon as her sister-in-law gets her law degree, she'll dump her brother.  The sister-in-law, the student said, thinks her brother is a loser and when she's a lawyer she'll tell herself she's too good for him.

The sister-in-law's biggest failing, though, in the eyes of the student, is that she's an indifferent mother.  They have two little girls, both in grade school and the student claimed her sister-in-law almost totally ignores them.  She doesn't put them to bed at night, ever.  She doesn't get up in the night when they're sick or scared by bad dreams.   She doesn't play with them.  On weekends, whenever she can she pushes them off on the student's brother for the day.  The sister-in-law talked a good game.  Around people who don't really know them, she sounds like the most devoted of mothers and even accuses herself of spoiling the girls.

The sister-in-law insists on hiring a baby-sitter every Saturday night so she can "escape."

And, most shocking to the student, her brother doesn't seem to be bothered by any of this or even aware of it.  He thinks he has a perfect marriage!

Meanwhile, the second student, while attempting to sound sympathetic, seemed to me to be totally on the sister-in-law's side, mainly because she was convinced that her friend's brother was really a version of her father, who is a total rat of a husband.  Her motto in this conversation seemed to be that there are two sides to every story, the wife's and the wife's friends'.  For every example the first student gave of how her brother was done wrong by her sister-in-law, the second student countered with an example of how her father abused her mother.

Her father, she said, was vain, egotistical, short-tempered, self-indulgent, and completely irresponsible.  He bullied her mother and ran around on her.  He'd had multiple affairs, including one that lasted for 10 years while the second student was growing up.  He was never at home at night because he was over at his girlfriend's house.  He didn't have a good job and spent most of what he made on himself.  The second student was putting herself through college, without any help from him, because he said he couldn't afford it.  But that didn't stop him from buying a new truck.  And a new boat.  And a big screen TV.

Now, all that the second student said came across to me like implied criticisms of the first student's brother.  The second student's point seemed to be that although it might look to the first student like her sister-in-law was a bad wife, it was more likely that her brother was a bad husband who by his rotten behavior forced his wife into acting withdrawn and selfish as a defense.  I'm guessing the second student believed this because she insisted that everybody who didn't know her parents thought her dad was a great guy, a devoted father and loving husband, and thought her mother was a dull frump who never had anything to say for herself and they couldn't understand what a guy as charming and outgoing as her father saw in such a boring person as her mother.  But the truth was that her mother was just totally exhausted by everything and was afraid to say anything to anybody in case she accidentally let on how tired and miserable she was.

I was worried that their conversation was going to turn into an argument and I would have to make a run for the door leaving my coffee and paper unfinished.  But the first student didn't take what the second student said as being criticisms of her brother and the two of them had one point of agreement that they reached quickly and that kept them busy sympathizing with each other at least until I had to leave.

Neither one could believe that the "wronged" spouses in both marriages still loved their partners.  But they did.  Or said they did.  The first student's brother seemed proud of his wife and to dote on her.  And the second student's mother got angry with her whenever the student suggested that her father was being a louse.  Her mother insisted that her father was the best man in the world.

That was yesterday morning.  Last night at a Cub Scout meeting I wound up eavesdropping on another conversation about bad marriages.  This was between two mothers who were discussing what bums their ex-husbands were.

But that's the next post.

End of part one.

Embalming love

``I'm sorry marriage depresses you, Ferris. Surely when two people love each other and mean to go on loving each other.''

``Marriage is not a process for prolonging love, sir. It merely mummifies the corpse.''

---from The Small Bachelor by P.G. Wodehouse.

Marry a chump

Chumps always make the best husbands.  When you marry, Sally, grab a chump.  Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains.  What good are brains to a man?  They only unsettle him.

---from Sally by P.G. Wodehouse.

All wives are like that

"When I'm at home, I don't get a chance of little games of cards.  My wife objects."

"Some wives are like that."

"All wives are like that.  You start out in life a willing, eager sportsman, ready to take on anybody at anything, and then you meet a girl and fall in love, and when you come out of the ether you find not only that you are married but that you have signed on for a lifetime of bridge at threepence a hundred."

---from Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse.

Men of quiet tastes

Left alone, Lord Emsworth sat for a while savouring that delicious sense of peace which comes to men of quiet tastes when their womenfolk have had their say and departed.

---from Pigs Have Wings by P.G. Wodehouse.