ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

"A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from."
-- William Faulkner, from Light in August

1.

This is a story about dead folks, or more accurately a dead era, although it might be said that anything this dead has no damn business being so very much alive, right now, in the year 2020. The retelling itself has proven difficult, and a definitive rendering eludes me.

I’ve read all about humankind’s past pandemics and those famous plagues of old, and assumed these lessons were clear to me, but the part they don’t teach you is the way seismic public health crises peel back the layers of your soul – or, in my case, what passes for one. Atheist with souls? Nah, surely not.

To begin this beguine, let’s go back to the beginning.

2.

These many years later, the way I remember it is that much of my father’s self-worth revolved around good, old-fashioned hard work.

In another place at another time, he might have been an enthusiastic Stakhanovite, a term originating in the Soviet Union to describe “workers who modeled themselves after (epic farm-near-me/">mining hero) Alexey Stakhanov. These workers took pride in their ability to produce more than was required, by working harder and more efficiently, thus strengthening the Communist state.”

We’re Americans, of course, or so we are told by the looters, and it’s all bound up into a different set of precepts. Unraveling these many motivations decades after the fact wouldn’t be easy in the best of times – and as you may have noticed, these aren’t.

It remains that my father was ideally suited to socialism. He just never realized it. A military veteran, working man, salt of the earth, the common folk, Joe Six Pack; my father was eternally suspicious of concentrated wealth and hoity-toity, over-educated elites.

By his own admission drawn to the underdog, he did not cheer for the New York Yankees or US Steel. My father died in 2001, and yet I can imagine him turning the air blue upon learning that Greg Fischer proposed to award Amazon half the city of Louisville (and a state park to boot) in order to lure the company’s headquarters to Louisville.

Conversely, and the hard part for me to accept, is that my father quite likely would have been enamored of Donald Trump’s bait ‘n’ switch brand of cynical populism. That’s because he always was drawn to charlatans, like a moth to the light fixture.

Ross Perot was great, at least until he proved to be an utter flake. Ronald Reagan? A godlike figure, except when those two presidential terms concluded, my father was disillusioned when he realized the rich had gotten far richer; trickle down, but treasure up.

Before them, there was another recipient of my father’s political affections, a passionate straight talker who spoke to the people, not the snobs, and understood what needed to be done to make the nation great again.

He was George Corley Wallace (1919-1998), seeker of the presidency from 1964 through 1976, although most convincingly in 1968 and 1972.

3.

My unanticipated journey through childhood days began innocently enough with a book, the title of which aptly conveys the essence of its content: Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (James Shapiro; 2020).

The second prompting came during a chat with a friend, who mentioned a 1968 television appearance by Wallace, soon to become a presidential candidate as an independent: "Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Wallace Crusade" (1968).

I watched the episode, and was strangely disquieted. Something began to stir. Concurrently, I started reading another book called Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America (George Yancy; 2018).

At this point, little things began nagging at me. Something was troubling, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the culmination of six months spent largely at home, contemplating humanity, pandemics, racism and presidential politics – numerous strange disturbances coming together at the crossroads amid tumultuous news cycles.

Soon it became clear that the specific flash point came with the introduction of Wallace into the narrative; moreover, it flared after watching the Alabamian in peak crusading form on "Firing Line." Watching it made me physically uncomfortable, something uncharacteristic for a history buff with a customarily strong stomach.

It became apparent that I needed a more comprehensive refresher course on Wallace and his epoch, which came courtesy of a PBS "American Experience" documentary film titled "George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire" (2000).

It took far longer to absorb than the three-hour running time because at the start, I couldn’t endure more than five minutes at a sitting. I studied the bathroom mirror. Could someone please explain why I was having such a visceral reaction to this?

4.

George C. Wallace was a four-time Alabama governor whose failed presidential candidacies in 1968 and 1972 functioned as grandiose overtures to the ensuing civil rights flip-flop of America’s two main political parties.

Wallace, who began as a New Deal “liberal” in relative terms, became etched in the minds of Americans as a racist bogeyman; his presidential platforms were swallowed whole by Richard Nixon and co-opted into the emerging “Southern strategy.” Black America subsequently deserted the erstwhile Party of Lincoln for the Democrats, now the presumed defenders of social justice, while Republicans scooped up the South’s (shall we say “reactionary”) electoral votes.

The ambitious Wallace’s political career was like an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. He told his children only two things mattered in life, money and power – and he didn’t care about money; friends remarked that Wallace’s muse was the thrill of the campaign chase, and he became bored quickly when relegated to the day-to-day grind of governance.

And yet in 1958, when Wallace mounted his first Alabama gubernatorial campaign, he did so as a populist champion of all poor and working class residents, black or white, only to be badly beaten in the Democratic primary (the race that mattered; at the time, a Republican was lucky to get 35% of the vote in the fall).

A humiliated Wallace had an epiphany in 1958, and it brings us full circle, back to the opening exchange from the "Firing Line" of 1968.

Buckley … highlighted Wallace’s 1958 gubernatorial campaign against John Patterson, a race which Wallace lost and which led the young politician to claim that he would never again be outmaneuvered on the issue of segregation. Moderator C. Dickerson Williams had his hands full as Wallace attacked numerous peripheral details of Buckley’s comments, such as whether he really uttered terms like “out-segged” or whether he picked his teeth with a dirty toothpick, as the New York Times supposedly claimed.

“Out-segged.”

Hearing these words on a 52-year-old broadcast that I’m sure I didn’t watch as an 8-year old nonetheless struck me like a baseball bat to the cranium. On the face of it, they’re perfectly accurate words in the context of the discussion, but upon hearing them, I immediately guessed that something important was missing.

Wallace denied Buckley's attribution, openly sneering: “There’s no such expression as ‘segged’ in the vocabulary of southerners. I have never heard of the word ‘seg’ or ‘segged.’”

Duh. Of course he hadn’t.

Wallace was telling the whole truth; as you may already have guessed, and as the documentary film corrects the normally accurate Buckley, what the failed candidate actually said was this: “I was out-niggered, and I will never be out-niggered again.”

This may seem like a minor point given the slur. However, Wallace had already mastered the sort of coded language and dog whistles that have remained a valued component of the right wing’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge vocabulary to the present day. Buckley afforded Wallace a euphemism, but should he have done so?

Consequently, this had the effect of reminding me that the “N” word was explicitly forbidden in our household during the days of my habitation there.

As an ex-Marine, my father was a walking encyclopedia of creative profanity, but he doubled as family censor. THIS obscenity was okay to use in front of your mother, sparingly, but never THAT one. And the “N” word? Not at all; never. Soap, meet mouth.

Have I mentioned that my father was a strident, outspoken, sign-planting supporter of George C. Wallace in 1968 and 1972?

Ding, ding … ding.

Clearly this accounts for the dissonance in my Swiss cheese of a soul. Now, what’s to be done with it?

5.

I was born in a New Albany, Indiana hospital and spent the first 25 years of my life in or near the presumably anodyne settlement of Georgetown, less than ten miles away from the city, situated a few hundred feet above the Ohio River flood plain.

My guess is townies at the time would have denied Georgetown was a “sundown town,” just a law-abiding Mayberry clone utterly devoid of diversity even before white flight suddenly animated dozens of new subdivisions to sprout like noxious weeds, filling the former pastures of farms, all of it exploding into existence in the wake of Louisville’s 1975 desegregation order.

By then Wallace was in a wheelchair, crippled by the assassination attempt, with his national political career over and my father decamped to adoration of Reagan. After all, the GOP had cribbed all the disabled southern governor’s notes.

But this isn’t to say that my father was racist in any overt sense. He preached equality in matters like sports, although conveniently overlooking the realities of life off the basketball court or baseball diamond.

Dig deeper, and naturally it gets more complicated. My father was, in fact, an ordinary white guy in America. He was a muddled mixture of the admirable and indefensible, usually meaning well, sometimes revealing more than he’d intended, as when he would deny opposing biracial marriage – but shouldn’t they be thinking about the indignities those poor children will have to endure?

These indignities arose from my father’s and his coterie’s misplaced insistence that a biracial child was any of their business in the first place, all of which is to say that yes, my father was racist; he had to be a racist because I am, too, and this, to me, is an inescapable fact, part and parcel of hegemonic structural racism in America, hence the necessity of reading Yancy’s book.

"Racism, in short, is a way of being — exhibited by all white people, progressive and otherwise — that grants more freedom and benefits to whites at the expense of blacks and other people of color."

Am I deferring my own responsibility to listen and learn by somehow blaming my father for my upbringing? I don’t think so. I’m just trying to come to grips with it. Racism is society-wide. It’s endemic, shared and historical. On the surface, my father was better than some, and not as good as others. There’s not a lot to SEE here, such is the annoying and regrettable commonness of the topic.

To reiterate, my father doubtless would have explained his attraction to a populist demagogue like Wallace in non-racial language; obviously, they’re dog whistles precisely because they’re suggestive and implied, not overt.

He’d have said Wallace was a truth-teller who’d make American great again (half-century symmetry, anyone?) and would fight for the underdog. But my father and his buddies, well, they weren’t really underdogs, were they?

How could they be, given the eternal certainty, and those coded-language promises, that Blacks always would remain conveniently beneath them? To be blunt, that white Americans would always have a cushion between themselves and rock bottom: Black America, kept right where it belonged.

I’m angry with my father now, all these years later, not because he was a racist; as I’ve noted, it seems entirely reasonable to me that all whites are racist. Rather, it’s the one point of his that I always previously admired, and find now to be lamentably misplaced, this being his perception of the supposed underdog’s struggle.

Wallace wasn’t an underdog. He wasn’t really shielding the common white folks from mistreatment at the claws of evil central government, or the coming decades-long cancerous neoliberal pillage. Rather, Wallace was reassuring them they’d always stay a step ahead of Blacks, and so what if most of society’s wealth still somehow found its way straight to the 1%?

Maybe the poor would hit the lottery, and move up to the shining city on a hill where the accumulators of capital reside. But they wouldn’t move down THERE, below the (wink wink) invisible and therefore fully visible color line.

If the true underdogs are society’s most vulnerable, did the likes of Wallace really care for them at all? And while my father may have cared, he still supported Wallace and accepted the latter’s shell game. How do we explain this contradiction?

Later, when we both were older, I’d suggest to my father that he should take a closer look at the failure of exploitative robber baron capitalism as the root cause of certain of these maladies. Occasionally, it seemed that I was making headway against those headwinds, although in the end, he may have decided it was easier to humor me by listening, then enlisting with the next populist to appear.

6.

I can’t entirely account for the rise of this crushing angst, and it might well be the case that there’s nothing noteworthy about any of it, at least in the sense of these attitudes being common to a generation now passed.

And yet, as I’ve noted, a quick scroll of your social media feed will reveal the passing of the generational cohort, but not the diseased attitudes. They're very much still with us.

In 2016, dozens of commentators mentioned George Wallace’s racist and white nationalist legacies in the context of Donald Trump’s narcissistic theatrics, and as a well-read and informed individual, I shrugged and looked away. Of course, I recall thinking, but doesn’t everyone know it, and aren’t we past THAT?

Actually, no. Approaching the conclusion of Season Four of Aryan Nation: Trump Remixes the Racist Classics, we remain mired in it.

7.

My father's been dead for a while now. Our relationship was extremely complicated. We were very different people in many ways, and all too much alike in others. Most of the time it's nothing to dwell on, and I think we parted in 2001 with considerable mutual respect. We both gave ground. We both came around.

I'd use the word "love" if I could, but it isn't something he'd have said, so the notion seems superfluous. We were far tighter at the end than the beginning, and for this much I'm genuinely grateful.

Perhaps what I have learned the past few days while struggling to finish this demented jigsaw puzzle, all the while wearing a self-imposed blindfold, is that evidently I tried to bury quite a lot about those Wallace years as they pertained to my father – and to me. I buried it as deep as I could for as long as the memories would stay put, safely subterranean.

Maybe my boxing up of these memories and feelings, to be hidden in a dusty corner of the noggin, was a form of self-protection, with George Wallace merely a peripheral indicator. That’s because at the tender age of eight, I was an eager co-conspirator of my father's Wallace fetish, if for no other reason than the hope, so often forlorn, of this enthusiasm somehow making him happy.

My father was capable of a strange, unpredictable bad temper. He kept it inside the house, to our trepidation, and his contemporaries probably wouldn’t have known. When I was a kid, I'd try to figure out what was eating him, and couldn’t, so it became my habit to conclude that it was directed at me. My father erupted, then just as quickly erased the memory of his distemper.

It would seem that I didn’t.

Once enrolled in university, and intent on becoming the sort of intellectual calculated to irritate my father, it finally occurred to me that his anger likely stemmed from undiagnosed PTSD, a by-product of World War II; seeing as three years during your late teens on a leaky boat lobbing shells at people you couldn't see, until they came your way in kamikaze planes, is the sort of trauma calculated to stay with you.

Then, deciding the war was to blame, it compelled me to try to protect my father from his ghosts. It seemed terrible to me that one would go to war at 17, and be afflicted by the experience for decades afterward. Maybe he’d been shaped by these factors to be receptive to Wallace and his ilk.

52 years later, with the idiocy of racism and white privilege flaring all around us amid a deadly pandemic, tanking economy and global climate crisis, there remains sufficient depth of feeling – some level of feeling – about my father that out of nowhere exposed previously suppressed anger about the bill of goods my father peddled with regard to Wallace, as opposed to what Wallace really was about, and whatever part of all this involved me – or didn’t.

What’s the answer? I don’t know.

8.

It is well documented that during Wallace’s twilight years, in a dogged pursuit as vigorous as any of his campaigns for public office, he made an apparently sincere effort to atone for his mistakes. If his purported religious awakening was genuine, then the word “sins” might be more fitting.

According to Wallace’s friends, he finally understood that what he had done in order to possess political power caused great suffering to others, with his own accumulating illnesses and pain abetting this revelation. Wallace asked for forgiveness, and remarkably, Alabama’s Black voters supported his final runs for the governor’s office in the early 1980s.

A Black attorney who had figured in Wallace’s early period as judge during the 1950s responded to these entreaties by saying yes, he could forgive Wallace, but no, he could not FORGET what he'd done.

In another striking convergence, the late John Lewis – beaten by Wallace’s state troopers on Bloody Sunday in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a 19th-century Confederate general, politician and Klansman – also forgave the governor.

Forgiveness from Wallace’s victims in the play’s final act alone attests to the seemingly distant role of William Shakespeare in all this, although I think the Bard of Avon is twice applicable.

I’m not the first to see familiarly dramatic Shakespearean aspects of tragedy as pertaining to Wallace’s story: a lust for power, deals with the devil, the ironic cruelty of an assassination attempt leaving him crippled and in agony (but not killing him), and of course these later efforts to achieve forgiveness and redemption as intended to snatch his tattered soul back from Satan.

Also, like Oedipus in ancient Greece, Wallace’s ambition and arrogance carried both the seeds of success, and his own destruction.

My personal nod to Shakespeare comes with an early 1970s recollection that somehow has stayed fresh in my memory, perhaps as the perfect summary of how tense the relationship with my father was at the time.

I’d taken to checking out LPs of Shakespearean plays from the library, and trying to follow along, reading them while listening. My father came into my room one day, projected his finest facially contorted dismay, and ordered me to get ready for baseball practice by turning off “that shit.”

It’s very strange what you remember, and what you don’t.

At times, it can be downright debilitating.

The ghosts wobble, but they don’t fall down.

---

Recent columns:

August 13: ON THE AVENUES: In My Merry Oldsmobile.

August 6: ON THE AVENUES: Surrender.

July 30: ON THE AVENUES: Guys.

July 23: ON THE AVENUES: These overdue mask mandates should help us separate the bad actors from the good.

Cornel West: "The age of Barack Obama may have been our last chance to break from our neoliberal soulcraft."

I was delighted when Barack Obama was elected to the presidency in 2008, and it wasn't only because I viewed him as the lesser of two evils.

Now, eight years later -- eight years older, eight years closer -- it strikes me as important to be honest about Obama's legacy. West's essay nudges us in the direction of a balanced assessment.

I suspect the odds are in favor of posterity viewing Obama's terms in office as positive, especially when compared with the coming tumult.

Personally, I can't help thinking that numerous opportunities were lost.

Pity the sad legacy of Barack Obama, by Cornel West (The Guardian)

Our hope and change candidate fell short time and time again. Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility

 ... The president’s greatest legislative achievement was to provide healthcare for over 25 million citizens, even as another 20 million are still uncovered. But it remained a market-based policy, created by the conservative Heritage Foundation and first pioneered by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.

Obama’s lack of courage to confront Wall Street criminals and his lapse of character in ordering drone strikes unintentionally led to rightwing populist revolts at home and ugly Islamic fascist rebellions in the Middle East. And as deporter-in-chief – nearly 2.5 million immigrants were deported under his watch – Obama policies prefigure Trump’s barbaric plans.

Bernie Sanders gallantly tried to generate a leftwing populism but he was crushed by Clinton and Obama in the unfair Democratic party primaries. So now we find ourselves entering a neofascist era: a neoliberal economy on steroids, a reactionary repressive attitude toward domestic “aliens”, a militaristic cabinet eager for war and in denial of global warming. All the while, we are seeing a wholesale eclipse of truth and integrity in the name of the Trump brand, facilitated by the profit-hungry corporate media.

REWIND: Matt Taibbi, John McCain, The eXile, Rolling Stone and the Open Air Museum.

First, the update: Matt Taibbi is leaving Rolling Stone.

I've linked to his articles far less often than I might have, simply because I didn't want it to be a weekly habit. Back on November 23, 2008, it was time to provide some background. Here is the full reprint.

---

Matt Taibbi: "A Requiem for John McCain," in Rolling Stone.

My first exposure to Matt Taibbi came from a book called, “The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia,” which our on-line book discussion group tackled circa the year 2000. Here is what Publishers Weekly had to say about it.

In 1997, two American college-educated slackers began publishing the eXile, a no-holds-barred newspaper, in Moscow. The paper includes irreverent discussions of Russia's sex and drug scene and off-color humor pieces, such as an article poking fun at a U.S. African-American basketball player who was toiling for a Moscow team after he was kicked out of the NBA following a forced sodomy charge in the U.S. Their attitude toward Russia's expatriate community, including themselves, is clear: "Any affluent or even middle-class American who renounces the good life of sushi and 50-channel cable delivery" is "motivated by a highly destructive personality defect."

The pranks the newspaper plays are entertaining: convincing an aide to Mikhail Gorbachev that New York Jets football coach Bill Parcells wanted the former Soviet leader to give a series of inspirational pep talks to his team, for example. The eXile also takes on the herd mentality of reporters, managing to convince one of its rival papers that basketball hall-of-famer Wilt Chamberlain was considering a comeback in Russia. (In between its humor and its testosterone, the eXile has reported some important stories, most notably that much aid money from the U.S. went directly into the hands of some top Russian politicians.)

Only those with a National Lampoon mentality will enjoy the descriptions of the editors' sexual conquests and their comparisons of Russian and American women. Like much of the paper itself, the book, which recounts the newspaper's history, is tasteless. There's little doubt, however, that both incisively probe contemporary Russian reality--and the expatriate indset.

Wikipedia adds to the merriment:

Rolling Stone magazine said in 1998 that then-coeditors "Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi take the raw material of this decadent new Moscow and convert it into 25,000 instantly snapped-up issues of The eXile, consisting of misogynist rants, dumb pranks, insulting club listings and photos of blood-soaked corpses, all redeemed by political reporting that's read seriously not only in Moscow but also in Washington."

To be honest, I lost track of Taibbi’s writing for a number of years, and having ceased subscribing to Rolling Stone some time back, it wasn’t until the recent election campaign that I became aware of his work covering it. I still haven’t figured out how the subscription resumed without my paying for it.

Subsequently, I've been delighted to read Taibbi’s political essays. He grafts Hunter S. Thompson’s chemical-addled sneer atop the more urbane (and less overtly aggressive) analysis of mainstream journalists like Frank Rich of the New York Times, leaving me with yet another writing role model to absorb in small doses only, lest I subconsciously seek to emulate too obviously. It’s a quality I formerly admired in P.J. O’Rourke, at least until the ex-Lampooner dove completely off the deep end and abandoned pants-down Republicanism for the genuine non-ironic and fascistic article.

Like Thompson before him, Taibbi thrives in a habitat of surreal absurdity, and his descriptions of the waning daze of the doomed McCain/Palin bid for the nation’s highest offices are filled with sassy but deadly accurate imagery, as in this passage documenting the extent of the Arizona “maverick’s” sell-out to the dark side of the GOP (warning: the following contains brutally graphic figurative language):

In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's cock in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?

Seeing as surreal absurdity is also the order of the day in learning-impaired New Albany, it’s a shame we couldn’t bring Taibbi here for a brief time and turn him loose among the ward-heelers, rednecks, underachievers and Luddites. However, the results might hit too close to home, and after all, we’ve been documenting the Open Air Museum’s freaks and foibles for four years ourselves, dodging shrapnel when merited and beginning each and every day with a glance at the prices for one-way tickets out. It isn't a mere coincidence that "The eXile" stands as metaphor for the experience of leftists in New Albany.

Here are beginning and concluding passages from Taibbi’s piece on McCain, and the link to the whole story. Enjoy.

Matt Taibbi: A Requiem for John McCain

It sounds strange to say, but this election season may have done to the word "Republican" what 1972 did for the word "liberal": turned it into a poisonous sobriquet that no politician with bipartisan aspirations will ever again welcome. The Republicans didn't just break the party — they left it smashed into space dust. They weren't just beaten; the very idea of Republican conservatism was massively rejected in virtually every state where large chunks of the population do not believe in the literal existence of a horned devil, and even in some that do …

… When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome
sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.

For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.

"Bobby Kennedy: Democratic apostate, political opportunist, liberal idealist."

Yesterday was the 45th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's assassination. At the website of The Guardian, Michael Cohen subjects the mythology to examination, with thought-provoking results.

Bobby Kennedy: Democratic apostate, political opportunist, liberal idealist … All of the above: the 45th anniversary of his death is a chance to peel away the myth of RFK and grasp his contradictory character

... Yet, it was precisely this type of apostasy that made Kennedy such a compelling and intriguing political figure: it was not his philosophical firmness, rather his ideological suppleness. He was a politician nearly impossible to pigeonhole with static labels like liberal, moderate or conservative. He was, at various times, all of the above.

Kennedy was the rare figure for whom, as his prospects for higher office grew, so, too, did his political personality evolve – and the two were in conflict until the day he died.

Finally, some good news: "Tattooed composer polling strongly in the Czech elections."

Amid worries about propriety voiced primarily by professional politicians, it should be self-evident that Vladimir Franz, an artist and composer, would be a far worthier successor to the spirit of former dissident, playwright and president Vaclav Havel than any number of party hacks.

The post is largely ceremonial, anyway. Just imagine the symbolic properties of Franz's state visits with Angela Merkel, Hugo Chavez and Mitch McConnell.

Excerpts and photo courtesy of the Associated Press, via The Guardian.

Vladimir Franz: tattooed composer polling strongly in the Czech elections ... University professor's pro-education, apolitical stance wins significant popularity in presidential campaign – although he has spent little and is also distracted by the premiere of his new opera

Vladimir Franz, an opera composer and painter, is tattooed from head to toe, his face a warrior-like mix of blue, green and red. He's also running in a surprising third place ahead of this week's Czech presidential elections ...

 ... He is tipped to win around 11% in the first round on Friday and Saturday – not enough to make the runoffs. But he may end up a kingmaker, as the leading candidates – former prime ministers Jan Fischer and Milos Zeman – would be eager to pick up his supporters if the vote goes to a second round ...

 ... Franz says his tattoos are simply body art and that the election is not a beauty contest. "A tattoo is a sign of a free will and that does not harm the freedom of anyone else," he said ...

 ... As the campaign approached its end on Tuesday, eight candidates were busy on the stump. The ninth – Franz – had other matters to deal with: a final rehearsal of his work War with the Newts at the State Opera. Torn between art and politics, Franz cut short his appearance at an election debate to return to the opera house that is part of Prague's national theatre.

Today's Tribune column: "Mourning in America, circa 1984."

Just think of the progress we've made. This year, I can drink Elector.

BAYLOR: Mourning in America, circa 1984

... It was one of those years — strike that; it was one of those decades. Whenever I was in my cups, that comfortably numb region conducive for enduring brain-dead patriotic platitudes and acute disgust with condescending Falwellian theocrats, and while toiling multiple jobs to accumulate enough money to travel somewhere in the world more civilized, I’d grimace, stare balefully at the date, and rationalize: Just four more years.

Matt Taibbi: "A Requiem for John McCain," in Rolling Stone.

My first exposure to Matt Taibbi came from a book called, “The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia,” which our on-line book discussion group tackled circa the year 2000. Here is what Publishers Weekly had to say about it.

In 1997, two American college-educated slackers began publishing the eXile, a no-holds-barred newspaper, in Moscow. The paper includes irreverent discussions of Russia's sex and drug scene and off-color humor pieces, such as an article poking fun at a U.S. African-American basketball player who was toiling for a Moscow team after he was kicked out of the NBA following a forced sodomy charge in the U.S. Their attitude toward Russia's expatriate community, including themselves, is clear: "Any affluent or even middle-class American who renounces the good life of sushi and 50-channel cable delivery" is "motivated by a highly destructive personality defect."

The pranks the newspaper plays are entertaining: convincing an aide to Mikhail Gorbachev that New York Jets football coach Bill Parcells wanted the former Soviet leader to give a series of inspirational pep talks to his team, for example. The eXile also takes on the herd mentality of reporters, managing to convince one of its rival papers that basketball hall-of-famer Wilt Chamberlain was considering a comeback in Russia. (In between its humor and its testosterone, the eXile has reported some important stories, most notably that much aid money from the U.S. went directly into the hands of some top Russian politicians.)

Only those with a National Lampoon mentality will enjoy the descriptions of the editors' sexual conquests and their comparisons of Russian and American women. Like much of the paper itself, the book, which recounts the newspaper's history, is tasteless. There's little doubt, however, that both incisively probe contemporary Russian reality--and the expatriate indset.

Wikipedia adds to the merriment:

Rolling Stone magazine said in 1998 that then-coeditors "Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi take the raw material of this decadent new Moscow and convert it into 25,000 instantly snapped-up issues of The eXile, consisting of misogynist rants, dumb pranks, insulting club listings and photos of blood-soaked corpses, all redeemed by political reporting that's read seriously not only in Moscow but also in Washington."

To be honest, I lost track of Taibbi’s writing for a number of years, and having ceased subscribing to Rolling Stone some time back, it wasn’t until the recent election campaign that I became aware of his work covering it. I still haven’t figured out how the subscription resumed without my paying for it.

Subsequently, I've been delighted to read Taibbi’s political essays. He grafts Hunter S. Thompson’s chemical-addled sneer atop the more urbane (and less overtly aggressive) analysis of mainstream journalists like Frank Rich of the New York Times, leaving me with yet another writing role model to absorb in small doses only, lest I subconsciously seek to emulate too obviously. It’s a quality I formerly admired in P.J. O’Rourke, at least until the ex-Lampooner dove completely off the deep end and abandoned pants-down Republicanism for the genuine non-ironic and fascistic article.

Like Thompson before him, Taibbi thrives in a habitat of surreal absurdity, and his descriptions of the waning daze of the doomed McCain/Palin bid for the nation’s highest offices are filled with sassy but deadly accurate imagery, as in this passage documenting the extent of the Arizona “maverick’s” sell-out to the dark side of the GOP (warning: the following contains brutally graphic figurative language):

In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's cock in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?

Seeing as surreal absurdity is also the order of the day in learning-impaired New Albany, it’s a shame we couldn’t bring Taibbi here for a brief time and turn him loose among the ward-heelers, rednecks, underachievers and Luddites. However, the results might hit too close to home, and after all, we’ve been documenting the Open Air Museum’s freaks and foibles for four years ourselves, dodging shrapnel when merited and beginning each and every day with a glance at the prices for one-way tickets out. It isn't a mere coincidence that "The eXile" stands as metaphor for the experience of leftists in New Albany.

Here are beginning and concluding passages from Taibbi’s piece on McCain, and the link to the whole story. Enjoy.

Matt Taibbi: A Requiem for John McCain

It sounds strange to say, but this election season may have done to the word "Republican" what 1972 did for the word "liberal": turned it into a poisonous sobriquet that no politician with bipartisan aspirations will ever again welcome. The Republicans didn't just break the party — they left it smashed into space dust. They weren't just beaten; the very idea of Republican conservatism was massively rejected in virtually every state where large chunks of the population do not believe in the literal existence of a horned devil, and even in some that do …

… When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome
sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.

For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.

The Onion: "Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress."

Another nail hit squarely on the head.

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Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress, from The Onion.

WASHINGTON—After emerging victorious from one of the most pivotal elections in history, president-elect Barack Obama will assume the role of commander in chief on Jan. 20, shattering a racial barrier the United States is, at long last, shitty enough to overcome.

Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.

"Today the American people have made their voices heard, and they have said, 'Things are finally as terrible as we're willing to tolerate," said Obama, addressing a crowd of unemployed, uninsured, and debt-ridden supporters. "To elect a black man, in this country, and at this time—these last eight years must have really broken you."

Added Obama, "It's a great day for our nation."

Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked. Another contributing factor to Obama's victory, political experts said, may have been the growing number of Americans who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American.
Citizens with eyes, ears, and the ability to wake up and realize what truly matters in the end are also believed to have played a crucial role in Tuesday's election.

According to a CNN exit poll, 42 percent of voters said that the nation's financial woes had finally become frightening enough to eclipse such concerns as gay marriage, while 30 percent said that the relentless body count in Iraq was at last harrowing enough to outweigh long ideological debates over abortion. In addition, 28 percent of voters were reportedly too busy paying off medical bills, desperately trying not to lose their homes, or watching their futures disappear to dismiss Obama any longer.

"The election of our first African-American president truly shows how far we've come as a nation," said NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. "Just eight years ago, this moment would have been unthinkable. But finally we, as a country, have joined together, realized we've reached rock bottom, and for the first time voted for a candidate based on his policies rather than the color of his skin."

"Today Americans have grudgingly taken a giant leap forward," Williams continued. "And all it took was severe economic downturn, a bloody and unjust war in Iraq, terrorist attacks on lower Manhattan, nearly 2,000 deaths in New Orleans, and more than three centuries of frequently violent racial turmoil."

Said Williams, "The American people should be commended for their long-overdue courage."

Obama's victory is being called the most significant change in politics since the 1992 election, when a full-scale economic recession led voters to momentarily ignore the fact that candidate Bill Clinton had once smoked marijuana. While many believed things had once again reached an all-time low in 2004, the successful reelection of President George W. Bush—despite historically low approval ratings nationwide—proved that things were not quite shitty enough to challenge the already pretty shitty status quo.

"If Obama learned one thing from his predecessors, it's that timing means everything," said Dr. James Pung, a professor of political science at Princeton University. "Less than a decade ago, Al Gore made the crucial mistake of suggesting we should care about preserving the environment before it became unavoidably clear that global warming would kill us all, and in 2004, John Kerry cost himself the presidency by criticizing Bush's disastrous Iraq policy before everyone realized our invasion had become a complete and total quagmire."

"Obama had the foresight to run for president at a time when being an African-American was not as important to Americans as, say, the ability to clothe and feed their children," Pung continued. "An election like this only comes once, maybe twice, in a lifetime."

As we enter a new era of equality for all people, the election of Barack Obama will decidedly be a milestone in U.S. history, undeniable proof that Americans, when pushed to the very brink, are willing to look past outward appearances and judge a person by the quality of his character and strength of his record. So as long as that person is not a woman.

Smart at last … smart at last.

Retro-posted here. Originally a MySpace, day-after posting.

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Indiana's blue.

What next: Texas?

John Gonder was elected to New Albany's city council last year. While we've disagreed on some matters, we concur on the importance of last evening's transformative presidential outcome. In stark contrast to a handful of council persons, John is both intelligent and articulate, in themselves apt metaphors for this year's election.

For perhaps the first time in American history, an effort to win power by dumbing down was defeated by a message of lifting up. Exit polls show that in spite of the breathtakingly malicious attacks on Barack Obama, most people didn't take the (race) bait. If that isn't an example of lifting up, nothing is.

Lifting up also means getting up, which was the theme of one of John's blog postings just prior to yesterday's election. I encourage you to read the whole essay. Here's the part that spoke to me.

Thankfully, the Bush regime is on its way out.

Thankfully, the Obama administration is on the way in.

We still have much work to do.

And it starts with the advice Joe Biden's father gave him, "Get up."

Keep getting up. We've only just begun.

The United States is the only country on planet earth where John McCain could get as much as 46% of the vote. Period. Elderly Spanish Falangists, Thai monarchists and Swiss bankers ... Obamaists all.

If you find in this a reason to berate the rest of the world, I find it incredibly sad. Come what may, an Obama presidency means that we've again chosen to be a part of the world, not to stand apart while thumping our chests about our singular superiority. In the office or at the gym, the ones who constantly advertise their superiority are the ones we all avoid. Why, then, do we tolerate the same behavior on a national scale?

Smart at last ... smart at last.

An Extra Golden moment.

We're all going to be intensely busy saving the planet (and perhaps a neighborhood or two) soon enough. Until tomorrow when local hammers start banging out native rhythms again, enjoy a bit of celebration, fusing Chicago indie rock with Kenyan pop sensibilities.

Having been there when this video was shot, I'm in favor of Extra Golden opening for Wilco at the inaugural ball, completing a Windy City troika "powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline"-- which really isn't a half-bad idea for either Midwestern or African geographies when you stop to think about it.

President Barack Obama. Perhaps the Civil War was worthwhile, after all.

I'm taking the day off on Wednesday. Comment if you wish. We'll consider the local races on Thursday. Right now, there are larger matters to consider.

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President Obama, an editorial in The Guardian.

They did it. They really did it. So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world. Though bombarded by a blizzard of last-minute negative advertising that should shame the Republican party, American voters held their nerve and elected Barack Obama as their new president to succeed George Bush. Elected him, what is more, by a clearer majority than one of those bitter narrow margins that marked the last two elections.

Having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2000 and 2004 it felt at times fated that the Democrats would somehow complete a hat-trick of failures on election day 2008. Instead, fuelled by unprecedented financial support, the key things went right for them yesterday, from the moment just after midnight when Dixville Notch voted 15 to six for Mr Obama (the first time the early-voting New Hampshire hamlet had gone for a Democrat in 40 years), through to the early Obama success last night in the prized swing state of Pennsylvania and on into the battleground areas of middle America.

In the last two presidential elections, the American people divided down the middle, producing a both a geographical and a demographic divide that seemed increasingly set in stone. Blue Democratic America consisted of the west and the east coasts plus the upper Midwest. Red Republican America covered the swaths in between. Women, minorities, the poor and the highly educated voted Democratic. Men, white people, the rich and the religious delivered for the Republicans. In the mind of Mr Bush's strategist Karl Rove this division was the template of 21st century American politics, a base for a conservative counter-attack against 20th-century liberalism.

Rove's America was not just turned on its head yesterday. It was broken up and recast in a very different mould. One of Mr Obama's many achievements has been his refusal to accept the permanence of the blue-red divide. He has reached out across the divide to states and voters that the embattled Democratic party of the Reagan-Bush years had forgotten about, places like the South and the Rockies, voters like farmers and small business people.

With the Democrats powerfully consolidating their position in both houses of Congress yesterday, the shift was consolidated at state and district level. This marks the end of the conservative ascendancy of the past 30 years. Whether it now marks a new, sustained era of American liberalism of the sort which followed the election of 1932 must remain to be seen. What is not open to doubt is that Mr Obama's win is a milestone in America's racial and cultural evolution. It is 45 years since Martin Luther King, in the greatest of all late-20th century American speeches looked forward to the day when his children would not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. Almost unbelievably, that dream has now become a reality in the shape of America's first African-American leader and its first black first family. It is a day many thought they would never see. It is hard to know whether to weep or shout for joy now that it has arrived - probably both - but it is a lesson to the world.

Mr Obama will take office in January amid massive unrealisable expectations and facing a daunting list of problems - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the broken healthcare system, the spiralling federal budget and America's profligate energy regime all prominent among them. Eclipsing them all, as Mr Obama has made clear in recent days, is the challenge of rebuilding the economy and the banking system. These, though, are issues for another day. Today is for celebration, for happiness and for reflected human glory. Savour those words: President Barack Obama, America's hope and, in no small way, ours too.

The Economist for Barack Obama: "This cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear."

In its current edition, The Economist endorses Barack Obama. It should be noted that there exists no record of this 165-year-old publication issuing such an endorsement for a socialist or a terrorist. According to Wikipedia:

The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd and edited in London. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843. While The Economist calls itself a "newspaper", each issue appears on glossy paper, like a newsmagazine. In 2007, it reported an average circulation of just over 1.3 million copies per issue, about half of which are sold in North America.

The Economist claims it "is not a chronicle of economics." Rather, it aims "to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress." It practices advocacy journalism in taking an editorial stance based on free trade and globalisation. It targets educated readers and boasts an audience containing many influential executives and policy-makers.

The senior editor sez: Don't forget to look at The Economist's "Global Electoral College."

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The presidential election: It's time
(Oct 30th 2008 ... from The Economist print edition)

America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world

IT IS impossible to forecast how important any presidency will be. Back in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with the federal government’s huge budget surplus. Nobody foresaw the seismic events of the next eight years. When Americans go to the polls next week the mood will be very different. The United States is unhappy, divided and foundering both at home and abroad. Its self-belief and values are under attack.

For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.

Thinking about 2009 and 2017
The immediate focus, which has dominated the campaign, looks daunting enough: repairing America’s economy and its international reputation. The financial crisis is far from finished. The United States is at the start of a painful recession. Some form of further fiscal stimulus is needed, though estimates of the budget deficit next year already spiral above $1 trillion. Some 50m Americans have negligible health-care cover. Abroad, even though troops are dying in two countries, the cack-handed way in which George Bush has prosecuted his war on terror has left America less feared by its enemies and less admired by its friends than it once was.

Yet there are also longer-term challenges, worth stressing if only because they have been so ignored on the campaign. Jump forward to 2017, when the next president will hope to relinquish office. A combination of demography and the rising costs of America’s huge entitlement programmes—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—will be starting to bankrupt the country. Abroad a greater task is already evident: welding the new emerging powers to the West. That is not just a matter of handling the rise of India and China, drawing them into global efforts, such as curbs on climate change; it means reselling economic and political freedom to a world that too quickly associates American capitalism with Lehman Brothers and American justice with Guantánamo Bay. This will take patience, fortitude, salesmanship and strategy.

At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.

The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans’ candidate was a powerful reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular positions—for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq, tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with both Democrats and America’s allies.

If only the real John McCain had been running
That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.

Meanwhile his temperament, always perhaps his weak spot, has been found wanting. Sometimes the seat-of-the-pants method still works: his gut reaction over Georgia—to warn Russia off immediately—was the right one. Yet on the great issue of the campaign, the financial crisis, he has seemed all at sea, emitting panic and indecision. Mr McCain has never been particularly interested in economics, but, unlike Mr Obama, he has made little effort to catch up or to bring in good advisers (Doug Holtz-Eakin being the impressive exception).

The choice of Sarah Palin epitomised the sloppiness. It is not just that she is an unconvincing stand-in, nor even that she seems to have been chosen partly for her views on divisive social issues, notably abortion. Mr McCain made his most important appointment having met her just twice.

Ironically, given that he first won over so many independents by speaking his mind, the case for Mr McCain comes down to a piece of artifice: vote for him on the assumption that he does not believe a word of what he has been saying. Once he reaches the White House, runs this argument, he will put Mrs Palin back in her box, throw away his unrealistic tax plan and begin negotiations with the Democratic Congress. That is plausible; but it is a long way from the convincing case that Mr McCain could have made. Had he become president in 2000 instead of Mr Bush, the world might have had fewer problems. But this time it is beset by problems, and Mr McCain has not proved that he knows how to deal with them.

Is Mr Obama any better? Most of the hoopla about him has been about what he is, rather than what he would do. His identity is not as irrelevant as it sounds. Merely by becoming president, he would dispel many of the myths built up about America: it would be far harder for the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein; and far harder for autocrats around the world to claim that American democracy is a sham. America’s allies would rally to him: the global electoral college on our website shows a landslide in his favour. At home he would salve, if not close, the ugly racial wound left by America’s history and lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism.

So Mr Obama’s star quality will be useful to him as president. But that alone is not enough to earn him the job. Charisma will not fix Medicare nor deal with Iran. Can he govern well? Two doubts present themselves: his lack of executive experience; and the suspicion that he is too far to the left.

There is no getting around the fact that Mr Obama’s résumé is thin for the world’s biggest job. But the exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.

Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.

It is hard too nowadays to depict him as soft when it comes to dealing with America’s enemies. Part of Mr Obama’s original appeal to the Democratic left was his keenness to get American troops out of Iraq; but since the primaries he has moved to the centre, pragmatically saying the troops will leave only when the conditions are right. His determination to focus American power on Afghanistan, Pakistan and proliferation was prescient. He is keener to talk to Iran than Mr McCain is— but that makes sense, providing certain conditions are met.

Our main doubts about Mr Obama have to do with the damage a muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy. Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his speeches, Mr Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor record of defying his party’s baronies, especially the unions. His advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre that Mr Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the country as a whole.

He has earned it
So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

B. W. Smith: "It's not just that Ward (Cleaver) is more hip than any of us recall, it's that, were he around today, he'd vote Obama."

Thanks, Brandon.

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Ward Cleaver would Vote Obama, by B. W. Smith (Open Salon).

That's right. You read it here first.

Recently, it occurred to me that, despite my best efforts, I had turned into Ward Cleaver. I wore the suit, had the elegant stay-at-home wife, kid, and heck, I even lived in a ranch house built, you guessed it, in the 1950s.

Ward's only a television character, of course, but he's an iconic figure in American pop culture - a symbol of an era that conservatives want us to believe was a golden era of the nuclear family. It turns out, however, that when you examine his record on Leave it to Beaver (courtesy Wikipedia), Ward's not the guy our collective conscious remembers.

It's not just that Ward is more hip than any of us recall, it's that, were he around today, he'd vote Obama. Sure, he looks like a country-club Republican on the surface and kept up appearances for the neighbors, but consider the lesser-known record:

-He reads the newspaper…everyday.

-He played basketball in school.

-He smokes, but he’s subtle about it.

-He dries the dishes for his wife.

-He drinks brandy but not to excess.

-He only owns one car, and he sometimes leaves it at home on a work day.

-He occasionally works from home.

-His job is mysterious, but it involves a briefcase and predicting the needs of women (he was once spotted working on a women’s marketing survey).

-He has a cool bachelor uncle, Billy, the world traveler.

-He was a philosophy major in college.

-He’s a veteran, attends church, and loves his country, but he’s not smug about it.

Thus, extrapolate Ward 50-some years into the future, and you’ve got a college-educated, middle-class professional, green-leaning, family man, non-wacko, main-stream, Midwest blue-state American…an Obama supporter. Just like you and me.

Sean Kennedy: "Obama’s better ideas, McCain’s bad ideas, and McCain’s poor record on some rather critical issues."

For me, voting against John McCain would be the easiest thing in the world to do.

The fact that he married into Anheuser-Busch wholesaler money is reason enough for me to reject him. The fact that McCain has tirelessly sought make stupidity into something fashionable is an equally solid reason to check another box, as is his unwavering support of the worst president in United States history, the marvelously shrivelled George W. Bush.

However, what I've waited seemingly forever to do is be genuinely inspired to vote for a presidential candidate. This essay by Sean Kennedy summarizes my reasons for voting for Barack Obama on November 4, and touches firmly on the reasons not to vote for McCain. I hope Kennedy doesn't mind the reprint, which is titled "The Case for Obama.

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I am an independent thinker with an independent mind. Therefore, I've been a registered Independent since 1992. I'm an issues voter; I don't vote for a party. I don't even have to like a candidate; I just have to like where he/she stands on the issues. I vote for the best, most qualified, candidate, or the best, most constructive, ideas to help our nation.

That’s why I support Barack Obama for president over John McCain.

I have reached this decision out of a combination of Obama’s better ideas, McCain’s bad ideas, and McCain’s poor record on some rather critical issues.

The critical issues facing America right now are the economy; energy independence and the need for clean, renewable energy sources; affordable healthcare that doesn’t hinder workers or employers; global warming; education; the two wars our military is presently fighting in separate countries; and paying down our massive national debt through budget restraint and spending controls.

When it comes to the environment, Barack Obama clearly comes out on top.

Right now, we have the scientific knowledge and the cutting-edge technologies we need to create new jobs and industries, cut global warming pollution, and build a cleaner, greener energy future. But technology isn't quite enough—we also need to have acommitted, pro-environment president. Obama is that person.

The League of Conservation Voters – a non-partisan, independent group that champions environmental issues – backs Obama.

On its 2007 National Environmental Scorecard, the LCV gave Senator McCain a score of ZERO. According to the scorecard, McCain was the only member of Congress to skip all 15 crucial environmental votes scored by LCV.

Then in February, McCain continued this pattern. He was the only Senator to duck a crucial vote on thefuture of clean energy in America -- dooming to failure the measure that would have helped make renewable energy more affordable and accessible.

McCain's lifetime LCV score of 24 (out of 100) reveals “a history of siding with polluters and special interests, and a consistent pattern of ducking important environmental votes.”

McCain has voted against increasing fuel efficiency standards (twice recently) and renewable energy, and supported billions in subsidies for Big Oil and other polluters. According to the LCV, “John McCain's energy plan is nothing short of a continuation of the Bush-Cheney dirty energy plan.”

However, the LCV says the Obama-Biden team has “the most comprehensive energy plan ever put forward by a presidential campaign.”

When it comes to healthcare, the Obama plan is reasonable, sound and comprehensive.

Contrary to some hysterical conservative claims, Obama’s plan does not call for government healthcare. Instead, the Obama plan would strengthen employer coverage, make insurance companies accountable, and ensure patient choice of doctor and care without government interference.

The plan would provide affordable, accessible health care for all Americans, building on the existing health care system, and using existing providers, doctors and plans to implement the plan.

Importantly, the Obama plan would do the following:

- Require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions for all Americans, regardless of their health status or history.

- Require coverage of preventive services, including cancer screenings.

- Give the public access to a plan based on the benefits available to members of Congress, allowing individuals and small businesses to buy affordable health coverage.

- Create a new Small Business Health Tax Credit to help small businesses provide affordable health insurance to their employees.

- Ensure everyone who needs it will receive a tax credit for their premiums.

- Prevent insurers from overcharging doctors for their malpractice insurance and invest in proven strategies to reduce preventable medical errors.

- Lower drug costs by allowing the importation of safe medicines from other developed countries, increasing the use of generic drugs in public programs, and taking on drug companies that block cheaper generic medicines from the market.

- Require hospitals tocollect and report health care cost and quality data.

- Reform the insurance market to increase competition by taking on anti-competitive activity that drives up prices without improving quality of care.

This reform plan would be paid for through cost savings, by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for Americans earning more than $250,000 per year, and by retaining the estate taxat its 2009 level.

While one in seven Americans remains uninsured, McCain proposes nothing but tax credits ($5000 for a family; $2500 for an individual). But the poor aren't paying much in taxes to begin with, so their policies would still be socialized, which is anathema to Republican ideology. And the credits they’d receive under such a plan won't cover the expense of health insurance anyway; this year, the average family policy cost $12,680. So the poor would still need to come up with money they don’t have in order to cover the difference.

In a 60 Minutes interview, when asked if he agreed with Hillary Clinton's assertion that providing universal healthcare is a moral responsibility, McCain answered, "Well, I think that's one of the big differences we have about the role of government. If you think that the government should mandate anything to the American people besides a safety net -- and I don't view it as a safety net -- I view Medicare and Medicaid as a safety net. But to mandate that all Americans are required to do something, then that's just not within the fundamental philosophy that I have about the role of government in America."

But universal healthcare is the fundamental definition of a safety net. Yet, incredibly McCain doesn't recognize this. That's tough to reconcile -- especially since he has been protected by such a safety net for the vast majority of his life.

From the mid-'50s, when he entered the Naval Academy, to his retirement in 1981, McCain was covered by government healthcare. And from the very next year, 1982, until now, McCain has remained covered by government healthcare. That's over a half century, and yet, he still opposes government healthcare. Strange, isn't it?

It is, indeed, time for a change, and John McCain in no way represents change. McCain is part of the old guard and represents the past. His time came and went. The 2000 election should have been his time, but it wasn’t. I liked and supported McCain back then. But now the only change I associate with him is the fact that he’s changed -- for the worse. He now seems like a callous, bitter and angry old man.

McCain makes the case that he would bring change and reform to the White House. Here’s the problem with that claim: McCain has already been in Washington for 26 years. How is that change? The Republicans have controlled the White House for the past eight years. How is that change?

According to Congressional Quarterly, John McCain voted with President Bush 100% of the time in 2008, 95% of the time in 2007, and 90% of the time during the Bush years.

As McCain himself acknowledged, “I voted with the president over 90 percent of the time, higher than a lot of my even Republican colleagues.”

With all of this in mind, how could the election of McCain possibly represent reform? It would just be more of the same. And isn't the status quo the opposite of reform?

The Republicans have cynically attempted to turn being intelligent into something bad – “elitism” is what they shamelessly call it. No matter, intelligence is never a bad thing; rather, it is critical quality, an asset and an attribute. Barack Obama has it in spades. The man served as the president of the Harvard Law Review and graduated magna cum laude from this most prestigious of law schools. At every point in our nation’s history, this fact would have been lauded and heralded in a presidential candidate. If this is now deemed too “elitist” for some, we have regressed as a nation and truly lost our way.

On the other hand, we have been introduced to the intellectually bankrupt and incurious Sarah Palin. John McCain’s selection of her as his running mate is an affront and an insult to all Americans, whether they realize it or not. There were so many other competent, qualified, conservative women on the national scene, with vastly greater experience than Palin. And yet McCain chose her. How’s that for judgment?

The great misadventure that is the war in Iraq has become a national disaster of epic and historic proportions. Iraq was not behind the 9/11 attacks and did not possess the WMD promised by the Bush Administration. Yet, the ghastly cost of the war has exceeded $845 billion – higher than the cost of the Vietnam conflict. And the costs just keep mounting, at $10 billion each month. It is bleeding our Treasury and keeps us from being able to invest in our own country; schools, hospitals, healthcare, roads, bridges, and other critical infrastructure.

John McCain acts as if his support for the so-called “surge” (simply a troop increase) makes his unwavering support for this poorly conceived war from the very beginning okay. It isn’t okay. The “surge” isn’t the end, and it certainly doesn’t justify the means.

If that isn’t enough, McCain - the war hero - doesn’t walk the talk and put his money where his mouth is. The Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that advocates on the behalf of returning military personnel and their families. It just released its 2008 report card, detailing which members of Congress are working for veterans, military members, and their families. McCain received a grade of D, while Obama received a B. Go figure.

Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate born in the '60s (1961). A new generation is finally coming of age.

He is the classic outsider, a man beholden to few in Washington; he is just the man to break grip of the special interests. He has lived around the world and is anything but simple or provincial. He will not take a cowboy approach to foreign policy and will restore our once great international image. He has forsaken big business opportunities in order to address the problems of the working class; he may be ambitious indeed, but he has also proven himself to be selfless.

Barack Obama possesses the power of charisma, a critical element that allows a politician to inspire a nation, lend confidence to its citizens, rally them to a cause, and keep them focused and determined in the face of great difficulty, or even desperation. It is exactly what this nation needs at this moment in its history.

I believe that Obama can compel the American citizenry, and invest in them the will to participate in a common venture with their fellow citizens. Obama has the gravitas to focus the country on a common goal -- like renewable energy and energy independence -- by illustrating the common good that can be served when we are united, not divided, in pursuit of this goal.

America needs to think big. There are very clear national goals and objectives at hand. We are facing many crisis' all at once. I think that Barack Obama, as president, will possess the necessary charisma to inspire this nation, create the will to rise to these many challenges, and see to it that our missions are accomplished.

For all these reasons, I think Obama is best suited to be the next President of the United States.

Billy Reed: "Obama's ... talent is obvious and his potential unlimited."

During the coming days, we'll be bringing you selected essays from elsewhere. See also: This post's got no title, just words and a tune ...

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Obama: Right Man, Right Place, Right Time, by Billy Reed at his Billy Reed SAYS blog (credit: Billy Reed Enterprises LLC).

This year’s Presidential election is the more important than most because never in our nation’s history has our government strayed as far from our fundamental American values as it has in the eight-year reign of George W. Bush and his Machiavellian Vice-President, Dick Cheney.

From President Bill Clinton they inherited a federal government that was at peace and held in high esteem by its friends around the world. They inherited a government that was serious about the environment, energy, and education. They inherited a government in which the economy thrived.

Piece by piece, they tore it down until, at the end, we have the most incredible mess any new administration has inherited Franklin Delano Roosevelt was mercifully elected to replace the bumbling Herbert Hoover in 1932.

It was bad enough that through their propaganda ministers on right-wing radio, the Bush-Cheney gang got away with vilifying those who opposed them. They cynically wrapped themselves in the flag and their religion. In the most shameful display of demagoguery since the McCarthy era, they even perverted the language, redefining “Democrats” and “liberals” as being synonymous with “unpatriotic” and “anti-religious.”

Even worse, however, they betrayed the traditional conservative core beliefs of the Republican Party. From the days of Lincoln, Republicans have opposed big government, espoused fiscal responsibility, been wary of foreign entanglements, and supported every citizen’s constitutional rights.

But the Bush-Cheney gang – the ultimate “Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” – abandoned those principles in favor of what the respected conservative pundit George Will calls “faux conservatism.” They grew the government, plunged the nation so deep in debt we may never dig out, invaded a sovereign nation that had not attacked us, flouted the rules of the Geneva Convention, and systematically tried to deprive Americans of our civil rights.

Whatever the Republican Party has become on the Bush-Cheney watch, it is not the G.O.P. of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Everett Dirksen, John Sherman Cooper, Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan.

John McCain, the Republican nominee, knows this, but can acknowledge it in only a limited way. He has tried to distance himself from the Bush-Cheney gang while maintaining the support of their diehard followers, also cryptically known as “The Base.”

It has been a juggling act beyond McCain’s limited capability. For all his doubletalk about change, he has not pulled it off. He has voted with Bush almost every time and even bragged about it. He has said America should stay in Iraq 100 years, if that’s what it takes to win.

Of course, victory is impossible in Iraq, unless we engage in the doublespeak of Orwell’s “1984,” in which “War Is Peace!” and “Ignorance Is Strength!” It is, in fact, obscene to speak of victory when we already have lost more than 4,000 American lives, untold billions of dollars, and our hard-earned position as the world’s conscience.

But there’s hope. Thank God Almighty, there’s hope.

Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, is a charismatic leader in the tradition of FDR, John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Clinton, and, yes, Ronald Reagan. Even his most bitter opponents acknowledge, however grudgingly, his eloquence as a speaker. Of course, they also are quick to contend that he’s far more style than substance, one of the nicer things they’ve said about him during a campaign that has been ugly and dishonest even by Karl Rove’s standards.

The truth is, Obama could be the poster child for the Republican belief that minorities should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. He has done that. When you examine Obama’s roots and his career path, he never enjoyed any of the advantages that belonged to McCain, the son and grandson of Navy admirals.

Obama also could the poster child for the Republican definition of family values. By all accounts, he’s a wonderful husband and father, a dedicated breadwinner, and a spiritual man who practices what he preaches. He also practices a healthy lifestyle, except for the cigarettes he sneaks.

Unable to find any dirt on him, and unwilling to stick to the issues, the neo-cons have employed various diversionary tactics, most notably the old guilt-by-association trick. They have talked incredible amount of time, money, and energy talking about Obama’s past associations with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers than about any of the critical issues confronting the nation.

Instead of promoting McCain in a positive way, his campaign handlers have opted for a negative strategy of attacking Obama. They have tried to play upon many Americans’ fear of the unknown by harping on what they perceive to be Obama’s lack of experience. They haven’t overtly played the race card; but they have wooed the rednecks who do not, under any circumstances, want an African-American to be President.

They have painted him as a “socialist” because he wants to find a way for all Americans to have quality health care and because he wants to change the tax structure in a way that will help young people just getting out of college and trying to start their own businesses.

Perhaps most amazingly, they have drug out the old anti-intellectual stratagem that Eisenhower’s handlers used to defeat Adlai Stevenson twice in the 1950s. Like Obama, Stevenson was from Illinois. Also like Obama, he was an educated man of great intellect. So the Republicans appealed to the Joe Sixpacks of that day by portraying him as an elitist “egghead” who was out of touch with the common man.

Through all this, remarkably, Obama has maintained his cool. His focus has never strayed from the issues. He has stayed on the high road, refusing to get down in the gutter. He has demonstrated, repeatedly, that he when it comes to race and religion, he believes in diversity, inclusion, and tolerance instead of just paying lip service to it.

Given the choice between talent or experience, almost any sports coach or manager will take talent every time. In Obama’s case, his talent is obvious and his potential unlimited. Although he’s almost three decades younger than McCain, he already has demonstrated that his judgment is far more reliable and solid.

Consider, if you will, the judgment the candidates exercised when selecting their runningmates. Obama picked Joe Biden, a distinguished and respected veteran member of the U.S. Senate with special expertise in foreign policy. McCain picked Tina Fey – no, sorry, Sarah Palin. Both make me laugh. It’s impossible to tell them apart.

The more Palin has appeared in public, the more responsible Republicans – the spiritual descendants of Dirksen, Ford, et al – have become horrified by McCain’s hasty and irresponsible choice. Her vision of America coincides nicely with the Bush-Cheney crowd. You know, the charlatans and frauds from which we all agree that we need change.

Obama deserves your vote not just because he would be our first African-American President, although that, in itself, is not a bad reason to vote for him. He deserves your vote not just because he’s an eloquent and passionate speaker, although, heaven knows, it’s about time we had a leader who can inspire, uplift, and encourage us to seek the better angels of our nature.

He deserves your vote simply because he’s an exceptional human being who has something in common with just about every American, regardless of race, religion, or socio-economic status. He deserves your vote because he radiates intelligence, compassion, and common sense.

Finally, he deserves your vote because he has the vision and the will necessary to revive America’s pride in itself and restore us to our accustomed place as the moral leader in the community of nations.

More than any candidate we’ve seen since John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama is the right man with the right stuff at the right place at the right time. We can only devoutly hope that America gives him the opportunity he deserves.

This post's got no title, just words and a tune ...

... with apologies to Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

Historically, I've been reluctant to publish the words of other writers, primarily because the conceptual basis of this blog from the beginning has been to compel me to push aside my slothful instincts and to write on a daily basis.

Like many, I'm my own worst critic, one capable of pole-vaulting from abject laziness all the way to compulsive rewriting. So far, I've been able to avoid the latter, although some days I still need a gentle shove to write when I'd rather be doing something else or simply don't have the time.

One way is to continue reading as much as possible. Doing so gives me ideas and makes me competitive: "Hey, I'm as good as he (or she) is. I can do that, too."

But ... there are times when the best strategy is to gracefully relent and become the editor of the anthology, pointing the way to those writers who are saying what I'd like to say, and doing so better than I've been capable of doing.

Thus far during the two-year presidential election cycle, I've been unable to consistently organize my thoughts as to why I believe Barack Obama to be the superior choice for the nation’s highest office -- given that I continue to find the American two-party system annoying.

Gazing upon the turgid streams of vitriol aimed at Obama, I've felt a renewed puzzlement. Has there been a time since the American Civil War when such a cultural gulf exists between people living across the road from one another, who profess to share a belief in the concept of America, but whose ideas about what that belief implies are so utterly divergent?

It does not make me happy to add that in this cultural fratricide, I find a certain amount of vindication. To borrow a description from Christopher Hitchens, who echoes my viewpoint of a lifetime, it’s quite plain that religion poisons everything.

Axiomatically, the people screaming anti-Obama epithets at Republican rallies identify themselves as religious people. They go to church. What’s more, it isn’t that they’re somehow guilty of incomprehension, or of misunderstanding the sermons they hear while awaiting the collection plate. In general terms, they’re grasping the point perfectly well: It’s us, and them. “They” must convert. “We” must proselytize. The message is clear. If you’re not one of them, you’re not really American.

And that’s bullshit. Always has been, and always will be.

I’m vilified locally as the resident municipal atheist, to be regarded with equal parts condescending pity and violent loathing, and most of the ones throwing stones in my direction believe in God – not that they’ve grasped the part about professing their strong convictions without the use of “anonymous” masks. But not once have I proselytized believers on behalf of atheism, and in fact, I’ve no intention of picketing their churches, knocking on their doors, or wasting my valuable time caring one way or another – just so long as they extend me the same courtesy and respect my principled unbelief.

To me, that’s what America is all about, all of which brings me back to Barack Obama.

From day one, what I’ve heard coming from Obama is a pervasive tone of respect for thinking, for thought, for ideas, and for the merits of educational attainment, the sort of achievement that has driven human history forward. He’s undoubtedly a believer when it comes to religion, but he’s not asking me to convert, simply to listen, to consider, and to reach a conclusion. That’s okay by me.

On the other side, the worst angels of our nature have been unleashed by angry people, practically all of whom believe themselves motivated by their possession of religious “truth” to the exclusion of anything else. That’s not okay by me, and it me, it’s contrary to the intellectual principles that prefaced the founding of this nation. I’ll continue to actively oppose the notion of America as “Christian.” During the Inquisition, in Iran and in Afghanistan, we’ve seen exactly what a theocracy is. We don’t need one here.

For the remaining three days prior to the election, I’ll be posting pieces written by others, some of local origin, other from elsewhere. The gist of each is why the author is voting for Barack Obama, and not merely against John McCain.

Thanks for reading.