Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Personal

  • New (ish) Job

    Okay, I’m going to be a bit less here for a while. For one thing, I think I’m fairly toasted from the election season.  My blood pressure hasn’t been this consistently tasked since, I don’t know.  And the aftermath has gone from bad to silly.  Sure, I could probably comment on the silly (oh, the stupid—it hurts precious, it hurrrtsss), but why?  Just seeing it should be enough and I don’t need to get angry all over again every day.

    Look, guys (yeah, you old white farts who seem to think the only two things of value in this country are money and the military), Romney lost.  He lost because people didn’t like him.  Although, to be fair, a lot of people apparently did like him.  Maybe.  Maybe it was just that a lot of people don’t like Obama.  But apparently not enough to vote for Romney.  Anyway, you seem to be trying to find every other reason under the sun (or under a rock) to explain that so you don’t have to face the most likely reason—your policy positions don’t appeal, Romney didn’t have enough “charm” to overcome his deficiencies as a candidate, and a majority of people, in spite of a long campaign of disinformation, defamation, and distraction, think Obama should have another four years to see what he started through.  Romney lost because voters preferred something else.  It’s that simple.  You want to change that for next time?  Do something about the nonsense in your party, grow up, and stop fooling around with issues that piss people off.  Then come back and talk to us.

    Also, it is not the end of the world.  It’s not even the end of the world as you know it.  Obama is not the anti-christ, he’s not a socialist, he’s not going to end liberty (I actually saw that declaration often, that his re-election would be the end of our freedom, and I couldn’t help but wonder: what do you people think is going to happen?  And ancillary to that is: just what can’t you do today that you could do five years ago, other than maybe afford the mortgage on your McMansion? Jeez, folks, get a grip!)  In four years you’ll have another shot at trying out your vision, the election will happen, and people will vote.  America will go on.

    Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about today. Ahem!

    I have a new job.  Newish, anyway.  I’ve been doing some on-again off-again work for Left Bank Books this past year.  They opened a downtown St. Louis location a few years back and it’s been taking a while for people to become aware of it.  So I took walks around, meeting people, letting them know the good news, that they have a full service—independent—bookstore right in their midst.  Now and then, I’d repeat, remind, find some new folks, and it seemed to have a small effect.  Business picked up.

    I’ve now joined them as part of their regular staff.  Part time.  I’m still trying to launch a literary career, after all, and I need time to, you know, be literary.  But how cool is this, that I get to work in a bookstore now?

    Peruse their webpage.  These folks do a lot.  Many, many author events, lots of programs, reading groups.  Now, obviously, to do cool things requires cool people, and they have more than enough.  The last few weeks I’ve been trained by some and they rate high on my cool people meter.

    So if you wonder at my lack of comment here or you can’t get me on the phone as often as you might like, well, this is why.  As we wait for the fuse to catch on the rocket of my best sellerdom (yeah, right), I’ll be there, wandering amid the shelves and offerings and drooling (dryly, dryly, can’t get the pages wet) and wondering why I won’t live long enough to read all the really great books.

    Oh, yeah, I’m still writing stories.  I have a little news on that front as well, but I’ll save it for later.

    So have a good rest of the year, check back from time to time (I’m a little compulsive about this, I will be posting something), and maybe if any of you are in St. Louis, come on by Left Bank.

  • A Final Thought (Maybe)

    I’m listening to Bartok.  The Miraculous Mandarin, a recording by the St. Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin conducting.

    Earlier I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR.  A report caught my attention about—you guessed it—why Mitt Romney lost.  Or, more to the point, why he almost won.  It had to do with something I find utterly baffling about the American political consciousness.  I don’t know, maybe it’s true everywhere.

    Basically, that during most of the campaign Romney ran on issues and did little to “let people know him personally.”  This, according to the report, was the cause of his low approval numbers.  People didn’t “like” him because he seemed cold and distant.  In August, his campaign turned that around by presenting a more “homey” Mitt, highlighting his “personality” and his “likeableness.”

    It worked.  Suddenly people warmed to him, his approval rating rose, and, as we saw, he took 48% of the popular vote, something six months earlier seemed unlikely in the extreme.

    Because people liked him.

    It reminded me of George W. Bush’s first campaign, when we kept hearing this “he seems like a guy I could sit down and have a beer with.”

    As it turned out, that quality did not translate into good policy.  Honestly, there are many people I like but I wouldn’t even let them watch my dog.  Like does not translate to ability.

    So my reaction was—is—what the hell?

    What this tells me is that a candidate can misrepresent, lie, withhold, distort, tease, and otherwise spew nonsense, but if the voters like him, none of that matters.  (Let me remind you, Romney kept to a very casual relation to the truth in the debates; none of this is arguable, he either didn’t know what he was talking about or flat out lied.)  Furthermore, as I indicated early in the election cycle, he was an advocate for a failed policy.  People have had it demonstrated to them by everything short of utter and total economic collapse that the fiscal and tax policies of the GOP have not worked.

    And yet.

    People will ignore measures of competence, reasonableness, sound judgment, and policy and vote for someone because they like him?

    For the record, I’ve done the reverse myself—voted for someone because I didn’t like his or her opponent.  I get that. (Heck, I did it this time.)  They did or said something that turned me off.  But frankly, how much I liked the candidate for whom I voted played little part in my decision.

    This is something that beggars the imagination.  I deal with this in the arts all the time.  Basically, there is the artist…and there is the work.  It is the work that matters.  I don’t care (usually) if the artist is the reincarnation of Simon Legree, if the work he or she produces has merit, that is what counts.  (Yes, there are exceptions, but it takes a great deal to force me to abandon this principle.)  What matters if So-n-So was an alcoholic womanizer who kicked puppies, if the novel he wrote or the music he made moves and inspires us, that is the salient point.

    So to—perhaps more so—with politicians.  I want someone who will do the job well, not someone I might be able to “sit down and have a beer with.”

    Like that would ever happen anyway.

    I didn’t respond to the nonsense about Romney putting his dog in a crate on the roof of his car, because it had nothing to do with his qualifications as a potential president.  We try to ignore the religious leanings of candidates for the same reason.  Personal foible, the vagaries of “character” are slippery, tectonic grounds on which to base such an important decision.  I don’t care how much I might “like” a candidate for the school board, if he or she doesn’t understand basic science or thinks the Earth is the center of the solar system, I will not vote for that person.  Competence trumps personality.

    (Besides, how the hell are we supposed to gauge “like” or “dislike” in such a context?  No matter what the image presented may be, none of us know that person, nor will likely ever know them.  “Like” in this case is purely a projection, our own hopes and desires put on someone we may never meet in person.  We aren’t “liking” them so much as liking what we want of ourselves that we imagine reflected in the candidate.)

    Back in 1952, Adlai Stevenson, possibly the most intelligent, educated, and competent politician vying for high office, lost to Eisenhower because, as it was spun at the time, he was an intellectual elitist.  I think we were fortunate that Eisenhower possessed a competence of a different sort, but the fact is people did not vote for him because of that competence, but because “We Like Ike!”  Kennedy defeated Nixon because of his “personality.”  (Famously, the debates held showed an interesting divergence—those who listened on radio said Nixon had won, those who watched on television said Kennedy had.  Depending on the medium, “personality” favored the candidate who could appeal best through the insubstantiality of “likeableness.”)  Hubert Humphrey lost to Nixon because he could not translate policy competence into the kind of popular “like” that Bobby Kennedy clearly had.  George McGovern, four years later, never overcame a certain dourness, which is something when you consider that Nixon was possibly the least likeable president since Coolidge.

    And on that note, it is only in recent years that people have been acknowledging what competence Nixon did possess, digging its way out from beneath the ignominy of his ultimate paranoid ogre image.

    George H.W. Bush was by far the better qualified contender in 1980, but Reagan had “like” all over everyone.  Reagan is still forgiven for the damage he did by virtue of a profound lack of grasp because people think back fondly on him as someone they liked immensely.

    This is a lousy way to choose a president.

    Competence should have favored John Huntsman in the primaries.

    Probably, if competence had triumphed, we’d be looking at a second term for Hilary Clinton today.

    But in fairness, just how are we to judge competence when we collectively know so little about what the job entails?  People vote for the candidate they think will be “on their side” and the only way to pick that is to go with gut reactions.  We “like” one or the other.

    That could be partly rectified by simply paying more attention.  But that’s the other problem with us, collectively—frankly, my dear, outside whatever issue adrenalizes us at the moment, we don’t give a damn.  And that’s why we keep getting representatives who in the end don’t really represent us.

    How do you like that?

  • 2016

    As usual, Florida is still undecided, a mess. According to NPR, though, it is leaning heavily toward Obama, despite the shenanigans of the state GOP in suppressing the vote.

    I didn’t watch last night.  Couldn’t.  We went to bed early.

    But then Donna got up around midnight and woke me by a whoop of joy that I briefly mistook for anguish.

    To my small surprise and relief, Obama won.

    I will not miss the constant electioneering, the radio ads, the tv spots, the slick mailers.  I will not miss keeping still in mixed groups about my politics (something I am not good at, but this election cycle it feels more like holy war than an election).  I will not miss wincing everytime some politician opens his or her mouth and nonsense spills out.  (This is, of course, normal, but during presidential years it gets much, much worse.)  I will not miss…

    Anyway, the election came out partially the way I expected, in those moments when I felt calm enough to think rationally.  Rationality seemed in short supply this year and mine was sorely tasked. So now, I sit here sorting through my reactions, trying to come up with something cogent to say.

    I am disappointed the House is still Republican, but it seems a number of the Tea Party robots from 2010 lost their seats, so maybe the temperature in chambers will drop a degree or two and some business may get done.

    Gary Johnson, running as a Libertarian, pulled 350,000 votes as of nine last night.  Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, got around 100,000.  (Randall Terry received 8700 votes, a fact that both reassures me and gives me shivers—there are people who will actually vote for him?)

    Combined, the independent candidates made virtually no difference nationally.  Which is a shame, really.  I’ve read both Stein’s and Johnson’s platforms and both of them are willing to address the problems in the system.  Johnson is the least realistic of the two and I like a lot of the Green Party platform.

    But the Greens are going about it bass-ackward.  Vying for the presidency when you can’t even get elected dog catcher in most states is hardly the way to go about it.  What would she do if by some weirdness she got elected?  I think it fair to say a Green presidency this morning would guarantee both major parties working together for the foreseeable future against her.  No, what they need to do is start winning local elections.  Start with city councils and school boards, work up to state legislatures, then a governor or three, and finally Congress.  Yes, that will take time, maybe far more time than anyone has the patience for, but for goodness sake, start.

    Which leaves me feeling mixed about the next four years.

    Here is what I would like to see happen.  Obviously, Joe Biden is not going to run for office in 2016.  Even if he did, I doubt he’d win, but I think he’s V.P. the same way Dick Cheney was.  An ace in the hole if something happens to the Pres, but not a threat in the next election.  Therefore, the House Republicans have no excuse but to work with the Democrats to get something done.  However you spin it, the last four years have been, in my view, a criminal abdication of responsibility on the part of the GOP, all to “make sure Obama is a one-term president.”  They have squandered the People’s confidence and time and treasure in a party feud that frankly has no real basis other than on the fringes.

    That said, the next four years should give them permission to get something done for the country.  They don’t have to work to defeat Obama in 2016, he’s not running then.  Anything that gets done, they can take credit for.  Whoever runs for the Democratic nomination in 2016, it will be a repeat of 2008—two brand-spanking new candidates.  (Romney has said he won’t run again.  We’ll see.)  So there is no reason other than the meanest kind of pettiness to keep blocking.

    It is time we got over this artificial divide about capitalism vs. socialism.  We are supposed to be grown-ups here, labels shouldn’t scare us.  The best antidote for that kind of fear is to actually learn something about what scares you, and as far as I can see most of the people who are so terrified that Obama is some kind of socialist (or communist!) are exercising the same kind of intelligence on the subject as those who believe he’s a Muslim or is not a citizen.  (They are exemplified by the sign carrier demanding “Keep your government out of my MediCare!”)  For pity’s sake, people, read a book!

    I’ve said this before, probably to little effect, but I will say it again, Capitalism is a system, not some kind of organic natural law thing.  As such, we determine its shape and how it should be used, not the other way around, and it is the same with any other system (like Socialism).  After the Great Depression this country put in place a number of socialist ideas and whether certain folks wish it to be true or not, they have worked well for us as a nation.

    Here are a few things that people should consider.  One, any economic system is, at its simplest, simply a method for organizing latent wealth.  By latent wealth I mean the potential product in a given community.  (You can live on a mountain of diamonds but if some kind of organizing principle is not applied to take advantage of those diamonds, they just sit there.  The system you use organizes the work needed to exploit the resource.  But let’s be clear—the person or corporation that brings that system into that community does not by dint of that fact own the labor, the land, or the total product.  The community living there has to give permission, cooperate, and assist in implementing the organizing system, and therefore when Elizabeth Warren made her famous statement that “you didn’t build that all by yourself” that is what she meant, and anyone who claims not to understand that I think is being deliberately obtuse.)  Therefore, we should be willing to apply the methodology best suited to solve specific problems.  We are a polyglot nation, we already use a variety of methodologies depending on region and circumstance, we need to stop being knee-jerk reactionary about this subject.

    Consequently, we need to understand a couple of things in slightly different ways.  Currently, we have a problem with large businesses extracting latent wealth from communities and shifting it away from those communities, in fact away from our national borders altogether.  One of the chief tools to counter that is taxes.  Tax dollars drain off a portion of that wealth and return it to the community.  Taxes fix the location of a certain proportion of generated wealth.  Bitch about government spending all you want, the fact remains that money gets spent, in the main, here and therefore helps sustain the community.

    To a lesser extent, this fight over minimum wage and Right To Work is misguided.  Requiring businesses to pay a fair wage to their employees also serves to keep that wealth local.  You don’t build a business in Idaho and then, because shareholders are complaining that their dividends are too low, shift those jobs out of the country to increase bottomline.  It should be illegal for businesses to take advantage of location for fiscal purposes while utilizing outsourcing in order to extract money that then does not return to that community.  Right To Work is merely a tactic to suppress local ability to retain local wealth.  We need to start looking at these two things this way or we will see ourselves the richest Third World nation on the planet.

    I want to see the military-industrial complex curtailed if not shut down.  Eisenhower warned us of this, but his warning was not based on something that hadn’t happened.  The Spanish-American War is our most famous example of a war begun by private industry for the sole purpose of increasing profits.  We are locked in a cycle of perpetual preparedness and in order to justify the expenditures, we engage in constant military conflict.  We have provided the United Nations with the backbone of its policing power for decades, and while this made sense in the aftermath of WWII when most of the world was devastated, it no longer does—the world has recovered, they can afford to pony up soldiers and materiél.  I support the idea of the United Nations, but the United States has been shouldering a disproportionate share for decades.  I suspect the main reason we have not stopped has entirely to do with the money-making of the defense contractor sector.

    Along with that, we must pull back from the blatantly unConstitutional internal security and intelligence practices that have become worse since 9/11.  I was sorely upset when Obama reauthorized the defense authorization act.

    But worse than the standing military, that act, along with others, has allowed us to do an end-run around Posse Commitatus by militarizing local police forces.  Our police have become more and more akin to the Stazi in make-up and outlook and this has to stop before we are so inured to it that we can’t recognize loss of civil rights until the cop is knocking on our door for a warrantless search of our home.

    A large step to undoing this would be to do something about this absurd war on drugs.  I am not a fan of drugs—hell, I never even smoked a joint—but our response has been distorting of our courts and our police and our national priorities.  The only thing that keeps us from doing something rational is the huge amounts of money involved at all levels.  This has to stop.  We can’t afford to keep doing this, not so much from a fiscal point of view but from the effect it has on all of us, a coarsening of our national psyché, a desensitization to individual circumstance.

    Lastly, I would like to see an effort made to address the pathetic state of our educational priorities.  We are becoming a severely divided nation, not so much along class lines (although that is true, too, and I suspect the two are linked), but along the lines of the Knows and the Know Nothings.

    Todd Akin sat on the House subcommittee for science.  Need I say more?  (Yes, I probably do.)  All right.  Akin is a supporter of creationism.  I don’t have any problem with someone espousing that view—what I have a problem with is someone with that view serving on what should be a science committee, and with people being okay with that.  If that were not enough, his statements about women’s biology demonstrated that he knows little—or doesn’t care—about actual science (never mind what his views on women’s rights are), and this is a very serious problem, not so much that an elected official should be ignorant along these lines, but that he is representative of people who are even more ignorant.  That goes to education.

    No Child Left Behind was one in a string of legislative actions that turned schooling into a horse race.  Getting the scores up are all that matter, so our “ranking” doesn’t fall.  This has nothing to do with what it actually taught or what kids really know when they get out of school.  We need a serious reform lest we keep producing people who, through no real fault of their own, believe the Earth is only six thousand years old and understand next to nothing about biology, never mind evolution.

    And I’m sorry—just because you have decided in advance that you don’t believe something doesn’t make it either not true or give you the right to keep others from learning about it.  Nor does it let you off the hook from knowing enough about it to make an informed decision about rejecting it.

    I am not by disposition an isolationist, but I do believe this country has been engaging the rest of the world in the wrong way.  We have been—always—very proactive when it comes to defending our business interests overseas, and the overwhelming amount of our foreign policy is less individual-oriented as it is corporation-oriented.  Granted, this simplifies things—but it also distorts things and leads us to make bad choices in places where we don’t know the culture.  We’re paying a heavy price for that from the Fifties.  Our priorities need to change from corporatocracy to our oft-stated and seldom-deployed belief in the individual.

    There are other things on my mind, but that’s enough for now.

    That’s what I would like to see happen.

    What do I expect?

    We have been engaged, at street level, in a battle over what it means to be an American, and the ingredients have gotten bizarre.  We have forgotten somewhere along the way that our right to have that battle is our chief defining national characteristic, that winning it is both impossible and beside the point.  Being able to disagree and still have barbecue together has always been the American miracle, and we’ve been losing that.

    But I expect it to continue.  Both parties, plus the corporate backing of both parties, have been feeding that conflict because, well, it’s been good for business.  In the crossfire we have forgotten what is genuinely important and started handing over our liberties like good soldiers in an endless war.  So in truth, I expect any real progress to happen on the margins, at times and in places where national attention is elsewhere, under conditions of exhaustion, when no one is paying much notice.  The bread and circuses will continue—well, the circuses, anyway, I’m not so sure about the bread.

    The world chimed in recently in polls that asked who other countries wished to see win the election.  In the run up, surveys in over 20 countries indicated a vast preference for Obama—the only two that favored Romney were Israel and Pakistan.  Hm.

    But for now, what I’m looking forward to is a few weeks with considerably less politicking.  I’m a bit frazzled from concern.  I have some fiction to write and Christmas to prepare for.

    The thing I’m most pleased about?  Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren.  I’ll leave you to figure out why.

    Have a good day.

  • Rolling Feast

    Fortune sometimes favors the impulsive.

    For years, we’ve been toying with joining PBS. The cycle of fund drives that present interesting specials on our local station (Channel 9, KETC) both annoys us for the interruptions and for the twinges of conscience triggered because we feel like we’re not doing our share to support it. The question has always been, when to do it?

    Because they always offer gift packages to sweeten the deal and we’ve been tempted. Last spring, though, they came through with something we couldn’t turn down—tickets for a dinner train.

    Both of us like trains, though we have ridden them fewer times than the fingers on one hand. There’s a romanticism about them that appeals to both of us, even though we don’t frequent them. (We took one train trip to Chicago, which was novel and unromantic, and I’ve taken the train from St. Louis to Kansas City twice—well, once, really, since one of those trips was during a time when the line was coopted by freight line after a flood and my ticket was fulfilled by bus—and none of those trips endeared us to the fact of train travel. But the idea lingers on and one day we may well do a cross-country in a sleeper.)  So for our pledge of X dollars, we found ourselves with a guidebook to such trains across America, a DVD about them, and a pair of dinner tickets for the Columbia Star.

    We’d planned to do this in mid-August, but fate intervened in the form of a ruptured appendix and we had to delay until I could actually sit through a three-hour gourmet meal on a rolling vehicle. So it ended up in mid-October.

    Which was kind of ridiculous, really. After all, part of the novelty—we assumed—was the passing scenery. After seven in the evening in mid October, what exactly would there be to see? “Oh, we have floodlights mounted on the cars to light the way,” I was told by the charming scheduler when I asked. Hmm.

    In any event, we were getting special treatment. The tickets were time-limited and we’d delayed past their due date. I explained the reasons and pity was taken. We were slated for October 20.

    It’s a hundred and twenty plus change miles from St. Louis to Columbia, so we arranged to make a weekend of it and stay with out friend John in Jefferson City. The weekend turned out to be spectacularly beautiful, the drive down Highway 50 relaxed, and peppered with scenic delight.

    We ambled from Jefferson City up 63 to Columbia and found our destination easily enough (earlier, Donna had fun playing with Google maps on John’s iPad, finding the location). It was off in a combination of old farmland and industrial development that was still active but had seen more plentiful times. The Columbia Star terminal looked nicely restored and a large parking lot filled with cars and guests as the sun headed down for the day. (The range of vehicles ran from modest—older Nissans—up to opulent—a couple of new Lexus and Mercedes.) (The plural—would it be Lexuses or Lexi?) We walked around the train, admiring it like some great antediluvian beast brought back from a cloud-obscured plateau, uncertain of its provenance but impressed by what we thought we knew of it, both its power and its rarity.

    The dinner train phenomenon, as we learned from the PBS special that brought us to this place, is widespread and one of the chief ways many old, historic trains have been preserved. Some of them run quite a long distance and they are day-long excursions. This one runs between Columbia and Centralia, rumbling at a stately pace for about three hours, there and back, long enough for the repast on offer.

    People continued arriving after we parked, leaving ample time to inspect it. The gathering on the parking lot reminded me of scenes on docks, crowds facing the ships about to take them away. A line of track acted as psychological barrier—a steel rope in the tarmac—keeping onlookers safely separated from the docile beast until its handlers declared it safe to approach.

     

     

     

    But a few minutes before seven, people with clipboards began sorting us out, allowing us to board, directing us to tables within the finely-restored dining cars.

    The lack of scenery beyond the twenty or thirty feet the floodlights illuminated was ostensibly compensated for by the fact that people were placed at tables with strangers—unless you had a larger group—with whom you were forced to either engage pleasantries and become cordially acquainted or stoically endure if you’re not the gregarious sort. I admit to having difficulties in that department and were we to do this again we’d make plans with another couple at least.

    But to be fair, the couple with whom we were paired was pleasant, the conversation, while shallow, was not without moments of shared laughter and some interest. After fifteen minutes, though, it was also clear that we really lacked anything very much in common with them and while it was not awkward it was not the kind of experience one would necessarily wish to repeat.

    But the food!

    Our waitress brought our drinks and then took our opening orders (the main courses were already set in advance) and I decided that this was excellent training for them—serving on a moving platform that rocked (gently, yes, but nevertheless) and none of them spilling a bit, drop, or particle.

    There was a pulled-pork on cornbread appetizer, followed by an acorn squash bisque that…well, I’d never tasted anything quite like it. I could have done with a full bowl of it and been wholly content.

    That would have been a shame, though. The main course—there were several to choose from—was superb. Now, both Donna and I have high standards for prime rib. We were spoiled. All joking aside, the best prime rib either of us ever had was at the long-defunct St. Louis Playboy Club. I’m serious. The chef there could turn prime rib out like ambrosia. We’ve had close before, but never better. This was probably as good. It was wonderful.

    We trundled along through small town Missouri. After our trip to Chicago, I decided that contemporary passenger trains really take you through America’s back yard. That’s pretty much what you see, the back end of what is hidden from the highways and main streets. This was no different. However, some people whose houses stood along the line knew the schedule of the train and were outside, with fires going, a few barbecues still underway, waving as we passed by.

    Our table mates imposed on us to take a picture of them and we asked the same in return, something we almost never do. But I felt that this deserved a bit of commemoration. There was a moment of intimidation when I handed across my Canon 60-D, but I’d already set it up and pointed to the button. The picture was successful.

    We drove back in a state of satisfaction, heads filled with nothing but agreeable impressions and an unspoken decision to do this again. That’s as good recommendation as an establishment can get, the promise of repeat business. It helps that we think the idea behind it—preserving a bit of history—is a worthwhile one.

    But it is the food that makes it worth doing.

    Bon appetite!

  • Oh, And One More Thing…Or Two…

    Yes, yes, I said no more politics till after the election, but that just goes to show you the pitfalls of making promises you may be unable to keep.  But I didn’t actually make a promise, not like, um, a politician.

    The weekend is upon us.  Next Tuesday a goodly portion of the citizens of this country will step into voting booths and choose…the next four to six years of leadership.

    I have written about why I will not vote for Mitt Romney.  “Mitten” as he is affectionately known by those in Massachussetts glad to see him no longer governor, is not my idea of a president.  To reiterate what I wrote in that piece, my chief problem with him is that he is an advocate for a failed fiscal policy.  Trickle down economics did not work, has not worked, will not work, so it seems ludicrous—no, stupid—to assume it would work just because it’s Romney and not Reagan.

    But have Obama’s policies done much better?

    If you’re one of those still un- or under-employed, you probably don’t think so. All you have on your mind is “Where are the jobs?!?”  (Interestingly, Romney this week started talking about the unemployed who are not usually counted by the national labor board, a subject I’ve complained about in the past—actual unemployment is much higher than the number cited monthly, much higher, and always has been.  Do I think Romney has twigged to a deeper truth and might do something about it?  No.  It’s a tactic.  Someone whispered in his ear “Hey, boss, if we talk about these people we can make Obama look really bad.”  It’s bullshit coming from him.)  But for a lot of people who either were at risk for losing their jobs or have found employment in the slowly growing economy, no, things aren’t as bad or worse than they were.  Romney is citing the fact that this month’s unemployment went up—from 7.8% to 7.9%, which is higher than when Obama took office.  This is spin, of course, because Obama took office just when the real toll of the Bush recession (and why they keep calling it that, I don’t know, it was a depression and still it, because of all those folks Romney just discovered) was washing ashore.  It was over 10%, we must not forget, and has dropped.

    Now, the thing a lot of people are bitching about is how slowly the recovery is happening.  They overlook the fact that recovery is happening and is expected to continue steadily for the next four years (so much so that Romney has been taking advance credit for jobs that would be created no matter who wins next Tuesday).  It is frankly better in the long-run for this to happen slowly rather than do something to superheat it and blow up a new bubble that will burst in 10 or 15 years, but that doesn’t matter much to people who can’t find work. Fair enough.  But that begs the question as to why these same folks might vote for someone who has sided with policies that will only hurt them more.

    More?  The GOP as it currently exists is anti-union, anti-minimum wage, and anti-fiscal regulation.  If you work for a living any one of these runs counter to your best interests, but we have a trifecta here of antagonism toward the working class and a good chunk of the middle class.  Every state that has adopted Right To Work as law and busted the unions has seen standards of living go down.  Wages go down.  Quality of working conditions go down.  As for minimum wage laws, they barely raise the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of people in the first place—eliminate it and you drive those people even further down.  Those who have never worked for minimum wage may not realize that this is not for students anymore, but a lot of families are trying to get by on minimum wage.

    As for the demand to deregulate the financial sector further, pardon my directness, but just how stupid are you?  It was deregulation that allowed the practices of the banks which caused the 2008 meltdown.  So now you want to go back to those circumstances?  Capitalism is a wonderful thing if you put a harness on it and control it, but left to “the Market” it is a ravening beast that could care less about Bob Cratchitt and Tiny Tim.

    So given all this, just why in hell would anyone vote for these people?  It beggars the imagination.

    But—politics is like sex: when you get right down to it, it’s just a matter of what turns you on, what appeals. It’s a limbic system thing, and generally makes no sense.

    Which in that regard makes Romney ideal.

    Not many people have talked about his religion through the campaign, which for the most part I approve.  Religion ought to have no part in this.

    But that’s not the same as saying it doesn’t play on people’s minds, that it isn’t a consideration.  Sure, it bothered me when Jimmy Carter made a deal out of his evangelicalism.  Every time some politico mouths off about “putting god back in [fill in the blank]” I cringe.*

    In this case, I will remark on Romney’s religion as an aspect of his character.  He has campaigned diligently with unexpected agility.  He’s told a lot of half-truths, some outright lies, fabricated some stuff out of whole cloth.

    And apparently believes every word of it.

    He’s a Mormon.  As such, he must be facile at accepting nonsense as truth.  (Disclaimer: my parents were Mormons, I am more than passing familiar with Mormonism.  While never one myself, I’ve had many a conversation with visiting teachers.  I’ve read the two principle books—yes, there are two of them, The Book of Mormon and A Pearl of Great Price—and I considered joining, so allow me to claim I know a little something about it.)  We have the documentation, the history, and can weigh the claims of Mormonism.  This isn’t some ancient thing of which most of the pertinent texts are missing and the civilization that invented it lies in ruins over which archaeologists must pore to reconstruct.  It’s a recent advent.  It is very much like Scientology in many ways.

    It is a compendium of the improbable, the fantastic, and the patently false.  In order to believe it, one must be willing to suspend all credulity, divorce it from critical thinking, and pretend the world is different from what it clearly is.  One must ignore evidence, be willing to cut off friends and family who dare to speak ill of Joe Smith and Brigham, accept a cosmogeny created virtually from whole cloth by a man fleeing New York ahead of creditors and charges for fraud.  It is so obviously bullshit, that it is the perfect mirror of the mindset of a politician willing to front for things he or she might never accept outside of the arena.

    I will therefore also not vote for Romney because he is so utterly gullible.

    Okay.

    So am I gleefully and whole-heartedly casting my vote for Obama?  I will vote for him because I do not want a GOP-dominated government.  But it is far from whole-hearted.  He has disappointed me in many things, but I can’t in clear conscience vote my choice and risk seeing Romney win.

    (In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a very partisan post—not so much partisan for anyone as against.)

    I’d like to vote for Jill Stein.  Not so much because I agree with everything she touts, but because she’s so utterly despised by all the folks I despise.  She would be a refreshing change.

    Look, under ordinary circumstances, the two parties we have dominating our politics are not really that different from each other.  These are not ordinary circumstances but the divide is over things that are normally at the margins.  If you want to fix the core, both parties need to be overhauled completely.

    We need a viable third party, one not funded by corporate money or tied to the people with the biggest mouths.

    But until someone like Jill Stein can garner better than the paltry percentage she does, most of us see our choices forced.

    So this coming Tuesday I’m voting against Mitt Romney…and against just about every Republican candidate on the slate, because they are all of them espousing nonsense in my opinion.  They’re not even good Libertarians, not that I’d particularly want them to be, but that way they’d at least keep their opinions about peoples’ private lives out of the public arena.

    But come 2016 I’d love to see a viable third option.

    VOTE!

    ________________________________________________

    * Let me explain.  It’s not god per se that I object to (how can I when I don’t believe he exists?) but the fact—the fact—that all this sanctimony is pretty much, in this context, Show.  Nothing but an act to parade piety in front of people and mask the fact that serious problem solving is not going on.  Putting god back in city hall will not stop the corruption.  Putting prayer back in school will not fix your failing educational system.  The public lip-service to a religiosity especially not embraced by the political actions of the people demanding it the most is a massive distraction.   Many of the same people most vociferously demanding this nonsense wouldn’t know “christian spirit” if it visited them on Christmas Eve.  What it really is, to be clear, is a song-and-dance to make their opponents appear curmudgeonly, evil, and on the wrong “side.”  I’m tired of people professing their christian values from one side of their mouths and then defending the death penalty out of the other.  Hypocrisy is a poor way to advocate for your country.

     

  • All Hallowed Eve Is Upon Us

    Drink

    So…be careful out there.

    Bwahahahahahaha!

  • Mountainous Majesty

    Colorado, 1984

     

    Just ’cause.

    And I didn’t want to put up something predictable, like a full moon or a werewolf or blood spatter.

    Happy Hallowe’en.  Be safe.

  • Okay, I Couldn’t Resist

    I know, I said no more political posts till after the election, but I couldn’t NOT put this one up. Before you freak out, watch all the way through. Then, I’m sure, no matter who you’re voting for, everyone will have a reason to freak out.

    Oh, and one more thing. Check this post by P.Z. Myers. This pretty well sums up my feelings as well. I’ve had a low-level concern about the congressional elections longer and more consistently than the presidential campaign, but really, we ought to be worrying more about local elective offices even more—offices which traditionally get the lowest voter interest.

    Anyway, I just wanted to share. See you on the other side.

  • Meanwhile

    Hard upon the heals of my previous panegyric, a placeholder.

    Last week Donna and I enjoined our first dinner train, the Columbia Star out of—you guessed it—Columbia, Missouri.  Here’s a photograph and a promise that I will shortly be writing about it at more length. Meanwhile, have a pleasant next few days.

    Walkin’ Down The Line

  • At The Risk Of…

    Another GOP candidate has stirred the hornet’s nest of women’s rights and abortion by making one of the most blatantly absurd statements— no, that’s inaccurate, mainly because there is no way to gauge “most absurd” in this context. So many of them have come out and said shit everyone knew they were thinking but till recently had managed to either not say or have couched in more sophisticated and euphemistic language.

    Richard Mourdock said that any pregnancy resulting from rape is “God’s intent.”

    How to delicately respond to this…?

    Oh, fuckit. This is bullshit.

    The basic assumption of Biblical literalism these asshats have been using is a compendium of tribal law no one would approve across the board anymore because we don’t believe that shit anymore!

    Did you know that, per the Old Testament, if a woman is raped and does not immediately scream and accuse the man, she is presumed guilty of adultery and is to be stoned to death? (All the various sexual rules related to this can be found in Deuteronomy 22.)

    What is wrong with this is that it all—all—reduces a woman to property. I don’t care how you dress it up, interpret it, or reconstitute it, the reason we no longer regard Old Testament morays as valid is that they treat so many categories of people as property. It condones slavery, chattel bondage, the rights of fathers to kill children. They are rules, sure, and it does not give categorical rights to the father, but that doesn’t matter because it is all based on a construction of human rights we no longer support.

    At least, most of us don’t.

    Here is the basic problem and the reason I have always supported a woman’s right to choose.

    It is her body, her life, her choice. Period. It’s not yours, it’s not the state’s, it doesn’t belong to the man who fucked her or her father or her husband and certainly not her rapist. It belongs to her, to decided what to do with. If people did not own their own bodies, then we wouldn’t have to get permission from them as individuals for organ donations (even after death).

    So at what point does this cease being true? How does becoming pregnant alter that fundamental fact, especially if said pregnancy was not her choice?

    I’m sorry if you think that embryo/zygote/fetus is a human being, it does not by its simple existence trump a woman’s right to decide if she is willing to serve as incubator to it. It does not trump her right to determine how she wants to live her life from that moment on. It does not trump her right to be able to say yes or no to a situation that will irrevocably alter any course she may have set or predetermine what options she may have in the future, regarding career, partners, and personal matters having nothing to do with other people.

    Because it doesn’t trump any of these things for a man, who can walk away and have nothing further to do with what he has left behind.

    The argument that, among certain seriously neurotic types, that if she didn’t want to be pregnant she should not have had sex is nothing more than a different set of constraints to tell her what she can or cannot do with her own body. Besides, she invited him inside, she never said he could leave any relatives behind.

    I base my support on a lifetime of privileged autonomy, knowing that this was not something I, as a man, would ever have to deal with, so any pronouncement on my part would be at virtually no risk that my life would ever have to change. Realizing that, I knew that I rather liked that autonomy and would never deny it to anyone else. I see it as the epitome of hypocrisy for men to dictate this to women. They would have to enforce a situation on women that they themselves would never be subject to. This is the basis of discrimination.

    I, were I a woman, would damn well insist on being able to live the life I want to live and determine my procreative future entirely for myself. No one should insist, through law or any other means, that a woman do something not of her choice.

    But we have been seeing the naked assertion of male privilege in all this, of men insisting that women should not have the same choices they do.

    Well, to be perfectly blunt, fuck that.

    Unless you are willing to embrace all of the rules in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, your presumption of speaking for Biblical morality is a sham. If you do embrace all that nonsense, then you have no place in the government of a democracy, because all of it is born out of an autocratic mindset that has no problem predetermining what people are—master, chattel, slave, outcast.

    Now. This is all, ultimately, a major distraction. The GOP was never serious about rolling back Roe v. Wade—why would they give up such a wonderfully effective campaign issue by fulfilling the implied promises they’ve made since the 80s and actually outlaw abortion? Furthermore, they know very well the shitstorm that would create. Most of the antichoice movement is leery of discussing legal redress—punishment—for what they claim is murder. Most don’t want to talk about it. The leadership very well knows why—because the fervent hope of most of these folks is that abortion simply go away. If you punish people for it, it will never go away. It will be in the courts forever, until one day the tide reverses again and it is once more legal, and maybe after that it will remain so because we will have really locked down this argument over who owns a woman’s body.

    But now all it does is serve to obscure other issues and delude a large segment of the voting population into thinking this is something that will really make any difference. By this tactic, they have you all voting for people who while touting “family values” have just been picking your pockets and diverting your real power into the hands of oligarchs.

    I have one parting question for all you people so bent on ending abortion. How come none of you advocate mandatory vasectomies, not even for dead-beat dads? I never hear anything like that, even as a theoretical argument, from any the antichoice folks. Nothing that would shift the focus to the man. You don’t want people getting shot (pregnant) don’t take their guns away, just the bullets.

    That was rhetorical, yes, but the question is legit. Why is this all put on the woman, every time?

    I think I may write nothing more political till after the election.

    Vote!