Immigration: Something To Prove

Photographs by Augustus Sherman, Ellis Island Collection









Here are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter--the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last--the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh yes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

--E. B. White


What this country needs, has always needed,  is people who feel they have something to prove.
The boy who has grown up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, white, Christian, son of an Ivy Leaguer, bound in the same direction may, or may not have that need. If he does, you have to wonder why, what happened in his home.
The Jewish kid from Chevy Chase, that's a different story. The Black kid, even more.
Every human being has to have the world explained to him, and some do not like what they hear and try to shape it differently.
They, likely, are the people who make the most difference.
This is not a new observation. Literature, particularly cinematic literature, is full of characters who were strivers, from Michael Corleone to Rocky Balboa to Rhett Butler.

My recent favorite is Barack Obama.

The Phantom wonders whether or not the same thing applies to nations. Do we get flaccid if we get successful, when we get points for simply being WASPy?  Do we need that fire in the belly which can only come from people who were not born on third base?

Teddy Roosevelt had the fire, despite or because of his privileged background. But most of our leaders needed some experience with defeat to temper their steel.  
Is the same true for nations?  

Election Demographics: It's Not Your Father's Country Anymore: Never Was

Augustus Sherman, Photographer, Ellis Island. New Americans, getting off the boat.


When Republican analysts pronounced the reason for their convincing shellacking on November 6, it was not a failure of policy, or a problem with their own core values. What beat them, the pundits opined,  was not a better candidate, but a worse electorate, or, put in politically acceptable trope:  Demographics.  

Everyone from Mike Hukabee to Mitt Romney to Karl Rove, shook their heads and said dolefully, this country and its voters just ain't what they used to be, and that's a damn shame.

That white, male, Christian, Anglo Saxon stalwart of THE AMERICAN DREAM, was no longer in the voting majority. 

Instead, you got the working woman, single or divorced, who tended to vote Democratic. (Married women tended to vote Republican, for reasons we can only imagine.) Blacks, Hispanics voted overwhelmingly Democratic, despite their deeply conservative views on gay marriage, despite Hispanic Catholicism, which tends to impose a predilection toward authoritarianism. 

In fact there was  only dependable group for Mitt Romney:  the white male. This is supposed to be something we ought to all understand and accept as the world as it ought to be.  Mitt Romney, after all is white; if he were  any more white, he'd be transparent (to steal a line from The Wire) .

The white male, whether he was voting from the deepest, darkest reaches of those stinky swamps of ignorance--Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Florida--or from middle Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Montana or Idaho, the white male could be counted on to vote against the Black man. Which is as it ought to be, we are told.

Of course, Bill Clinton used to say, with a misty look in his eye,  and a dreamy smile on his face,   in our lifetime the country would become majority non white. In electoral politics, that may have already happened.

Somewhere in the badlands of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, there are, no doubt, white supremacists who are retreating to woodland redoubts, stockpiling AK 47's and grenade launchers, and maybe even tanks painted to look like Sheriff Joe Arpaio's tank, preparing for, anticipating with some glee,  the imminent racial Armageddon. 

But, the fact is, there are important, densely populated parts of America which always have been a chimera--where very different looking peoples from very different parts of the world with very different belief systems have always lived together, with greater or lesser success, but with remarkable harmony, or at least in a working relationship and with tolerance.  Images of Cossacks, Africans, little Dutch children coming off the boats at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th attest to this visible diversity. 

We are not the only nation in the world which has made this sort of flux and variety work, but we are probably the biggest. 

That much romanticized Ozzie and Harriett past the Huckabees and Roves dote on is delusion. The variety has always been there, or at least it's been there for the past 150 years; it was  just never promulgated. I well remember, in the 1960's, when people first started pointing out there were no Negroes on T.V., not even in advertisements, and certainly, beyond the exceptional character in Spanky and Our Gang, or the characateurs of Amos and Andy,  there were no real people of color on any of the three networks our country tuned into at night. It's not that colored world did not exist in this country; it's just that those people were invisible in polite company, and they could not vote and they could not work freely. 

What has happened over time is not some new invasion--people who are not from Britain, Ireland, France and Germany have been coming for generations; there have been Eastern Europeans, southern Mediterranean types, Northern Africans, Sub Saharan Africans, Asians, Pacific Islanders,-- but, finally, what is new is there is a recognition these people now count.

Class Warfare: E Pluribus Impera: Getting Your Ticket Punched

This Thanksgiving friends from New Mexico arrived and in their story the Phantom thinks there is a lesson, somewhere.

Every Sunday, for as long as the Phantom can remember, his parents read aloud from the Sunday New York Times wedding announcements.  One after another, the resumes of the newlyweds were spread out in the living room air, like banners of victorious legions, with the lineage dating back to the Mayflower, then the names of the schools, Harvard, Yale, Princeton during the 50's,  with Dartmouth, Stanford, Smith, Holyoke, Bryn Mahr, Wellesley, Swarthmore filtering in over the next decades.  And as the Phantom picked up the tradition in the 80's and 90's, as the Society pages changed, and the photos were no longer just the bride, and the brides no longer just white Anglo Saxon women, but Asian, and more recently Black, the announcements of arrival at the top echelon  of society changed, and now the pictures were of both bride and groom and even more recently of bride and bride and groom and groom.  

For my parents, who were born in America, where their parents were not, these pages from the newspapers helped them understand how this country worked. You are Christian, white, and preferably English, Irish or Scot or French or Scandinavian. That was enough in the 1930's and 1940's--America was less a meritocracy; people were born into privilege. But then meritocracy arrived as a tidal force, and you had to be not just white and WASPy but you had to work hard and get good grades and then you had to score high on the SATs.  And then you got into Yale, and your ticket was punched. You got that Harvard sheepskin and they gave you a job with a salary that put you into the top 10% of all earners. Your ticket was punched, and life was on Easy Street, with little effort required after that. 

At least that was the myth parents believed in.

Now, you see in the resumes the girl who from age 5 started on a road to concert violin, who became first  violin in the Shaker Heights youth orchestra, who was captain of her high school soccer team, who traveled to Kenya on her Spring vacation to work in a village teaching water purification, who relentlessly built her resume, got into Princeton, then on to Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons,  and even that wasn't enough, she got a Masters of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, then spent a year at Oxford getting a totally superfluous degree in narrative health care.  Finally, she did her orthopedics residency at The Hospital for Special Surgery, before taking a year off to found a non government organization for delivery of orthopedic services to underserved populations in Chevy Chase, Maryland and Gross Point, Michigan and Scarsdale, New York.  She is marrying a Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton/Harvard/Cambridge who works for Goldman Saks.  They will live happily ever after, raising blond, high scoring violinist varsity soccer players, and they will have homes on the Upper West Side and East Hampton. 

These are admirable people, with all the right stuff. At least, that's what the Phantom grew up believing.

Until his own children lived parts of those lives and the Phantom became acquainted with the real people behind those resumes. 

But now he spends time with his friends from New Mexico. The pater familias dropped out of college. He worked in a plant which built airplane engines and he did work which required astonishing skill and knowledge. If he did not do his job right, three hundred people fell out of the sky to earth in a calamity which would make Daedalus and Icarus look like a warm up act.

His son is an engineer. Applying from New Mexico, he was admitted to Princeton and MIT, but Drexel gave him a full ride for a combined program which graduated him with a BS and Masters and a guaranteed full time job with a large power company.  Those names "Princeton" and "MIT" would have got him into the pages of the New York Times, some day, but he did not need the Times.  He is an engineer and he will never have trouble getting a job or sustaining a career. As was true for his father, he will not have to worry about being unemployed. He will only have to think about which problems interest him most and which jobs excite him most. 

While the Phantom's parents, who were word people, verbal people, lived with the searing memory of the Depression, and the fear of being out of work, these numbers people, these technicians and engineers do not worry about unemployment, or the names of schools which certify them as geniuses. They do not worry at all. They simply think about the next job.

And the father changes his own brake pads, and drives a Jaguar, which he purchased new after retiring at age 54, after 32 years at the same company, with a good pension. He and his wife travel three months a year and they visit their sons, who have every prospect of lifelong employment in professions which continue to amuse them. The father, without ever having graduated from Harvard, retired 10 years earlier than his siblings, all of whom graduated from schools with cachet--Mount Holyoke, Berkeley. His siblings had their tickets punched, but talk to them about their careers in law, obstetrics and trade association work, careers filled with frustration and stress,albeit some satisfaction and financial reward.

The fact is,  prediction of future success is a dicey proposition. 

And when it comes to careers in technical areas, in science, medicine, engineering, the banners you see waved from the Society pages mean little.  Academic pedigrees ain't what they used to be, if they ever were.

Saving The School. Martin Brick. Educational Reform

Michael Brick, author of Saving the School: The True Story of  a Principal, a Teacher, a Coach, a Bunch of Kids and a Year in the Cross Hairs of Education Reform has an article in today's New York Times, in which he comes to the startling conclusion that various programs meant to address the perceived failings of public schools in economically deprived areas have themselves, as programs, failed to achieve the goal of transforming disadvantaged children into well educated citizens.

No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top were both well intentioned programs to raise the level of instruction in public schools which were said to be "failing" their children.

Apparently, judging from the title of his book, which I have not yet read, and judging from the text of his article, Mr. Brick spent at least a year in close observation of a school (in Austin, Texas), and was dismayed by what he learned.

The Phantom, followers of this blog will not be surprised to learn, asks, why would anyone need to do this when it has already been done by people who spent more than ten years making the same observations, but with more perspective, in Baltimore, and these observations were presented, movingly, convincingly and in great detail in the fourth season of The Wire?

What was apparent from the story presented from Ed Burns and David Simon was that the failure of the schools in Baltimore to transform lives was not the failure of the schools. The schools were only institution among many failing institutions in Baltimore, and the schools never had a chance to withstand the tidal surges every week unleashed at them by the Drug Trade, the disintegration of anything resembling a healthy family life, the dysfunctional police, government policies (like the awarding of money to schools for each student who showed up only one day a month in the school), the collapse of the inner city economy which meant parents worked two jobs and only rarely saw their children, and that was in the case of children who were lucky enough to be actually living in the same house with adults, the culture of resistance to adult authority among the children, the Black cultural mores which held that "talking all Condeleeza"  (speaking the Queens English as Condeleeza Rice does) meant you'd sold out to white society and knuckled under to "the Man." 

Under such circumstances holding the schools responsible for not succeeding in transforming lives is like placing the blame on the house builder the collapse of houses washed away when the dam breaks upriver.  It is blaming the Emergency Room doctor for the death of the child who arrives at the ER with a bullet through his heart.  

Nobody should be allowed to say a word about school reform in the inner city who has not been certified to have watched the fourth season of The Wire at least three times and who has not been examined as to his or her understanding of what is contained in that essential work.

Public policy is most often well meaning, the best of intentions, but it is often based on ignorance of reality, on a perception of reality which is shaped by the political implications of that reality.  It goes back to that Upton Sinclair comment, "It is difficult to bring a man to understanding, if his income depends on his not understanding."

When Life Begins. Scientific "Facts" Where Angels Fear To Tread

Mike Huckabee was on Jon Stewart tonight and the two engaged in a metaphysical and ultimately sophomoric debate about epistemology.

 Huckabee's began things with the assertion that "Life begins at conception. You cannot argue that scientific fact."  

Stewart apparently could not argue it, because he never replied. 

But the Phantom, having gone to college once, rose to his feet and shouted at the screen:  "Science has nothing to say about that 'fact!'"  

Apparently, neither Huckabee nor Stewart know enough about science or theology to know where the two separate.  

Science has to do with a method, the scientific method, whereby a hypothesis is proposed, tested, accepted or rejected until more evidence appears. But science never has and never can define the moment at which life begins. 

In fact, science is hard put to define "life" at all, although it has working diagnoses of "life." But the hard truth is, if the church or the state says life begins when the child draws it's first breath, then the doctor waits, observes and when that happens, he says, "it's alive."  If theology says, life begins at quickening (when the baby first moves in the womb)  then the doctor says, "Oh, it's alive," when the mother reports it or the doctor palpates it. If theology says, life begins when the sperm penetrates the egg, so be it. If theology says, life begins when the DNA strands from the sperm unfurl and wrap around the DNA strands of the egg and amino acids get replicated, well then, that is when life begins.

Point is, it's the theologian, not the scientist who defines when life begins. There is no
"scientific fact" of life.

The second point was about global warming, which Stewart indicated is a scientific fact.  While it may be true there is convincing evidence for global warming, it is not a scientific fact. It may be a convincing argument, but science does not deal in the immutable.  

The phantom has been quoted as saying "Ninety percent of what they taught us in medical school as 'facts' turned out to be wrong," which is a bit of hyperbole, but not much of an exaggeration. 

Forty years ago they were teaching the heart pumps blood to the brain, the pituitary tells the thyroid gland to make thyroid hormone and a handful of other things which seem to be pretty unassailable even today, because you can actually see the heart pump blood when you open the chest and you can measure thyroid hormones, but a great deal of what was taught then, is no longer "fact" today. 

The same may be true for global warming. There are those ice cores from the Arctic, containing carbon dioxide bubbles encased in the Jurassic period and other evidence suggesting true, geologic shifts, but these are only evidence, not irrefutable "truth."

So here we have two men, who may be intelligent in some ways straying into territory where angels fear to tread and nobody on screen to pull them back and slap their faces.

Such is discourse for the masses in America today.

Thank Heaven for the blogosphere.

Broadwell. All In. Older Men, Younger Women: the American Reaction

The Phantom is not getting any younger.  When he listens to the outrage over David Petraeus it is not enough (by a long shot) to make him wish America was more like France, but at least it makes the Phantom realize, we might learn something from the French.

The general impression is that the French are more blase about marital infidelity--older men falling into bed with younger women, c'est la vie.  Easy enough to understand--the older man wants to be reassured he is still young, attractive and in the game; the psychology of the younger woman is generally assumed to be the attraction to power. 

Intriguingly, when you hear American men sounding all sophisticated and liberated about this, if you ask, well, how would you feel about your wife having an affair with a younger man? You see the man swallow hard and there is at least a beat of pause there.

Yes, there is the whole notion of "vows" but really, that promise is a fantasy, and don't we all know it? 

No, the real offense is the harm done the long term wife.  

Presumably, no man enters into this sort of affair without saying to himself, "She'll never know. What she doesn't know, won't hurt her."

The offense, is he was willing to take the chance.

The women I've heard inveigh against Patraeus have no sympathy for him.  I do. I find it curious the same women who have no sympathy for the general have great sympathy for the drug addict, the alcoholic, other self destructive people, for the violent criminal even, who was abused as a child and is a child himself. But for this man who has risen to the heights of power, no sympathy.

This is a psychology, the psychology of the woman without sympathy, which is fascinating and should be explored. Of course, the obvious explanation--these women  see this sort of behavior by any man as a threat to the hold they have on their own security--may pertain. But, I suspect, there is more to it. Post menopausal women sometimes simply have given up on their own bodies, on sex and they see their men have not, and they see the wealth, the home life, the family they've built over the years in peril.

Then there is the case of the old goat DSK, the French former head of the World Bank, who apparently attacked a chamber maid in his hotel, and cavorted with twenty somethings, or maybe teen age girls at parties in hotel rooms in France. Somehow, the images attached to all this fall into the category of "I don't even want to imagine that scene."  What drives men over sixty toward these young women? Intimations of mortality?  The sense of time travel--I'm back with young women, I must still be young, or at least not about to die?

Fran Townsend, on CNN, a fetching forty herself, a former Bush White House security adviser, said, "If you're in the CIA and you haven't had an affair, you're not in the CIA."

Somewhere between Fran and the thunder from the pulpits is a zone of understanding.

What is a Patriot?

When Henry David Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience , he was reacting to something. That something was the pressure for conformity as it existed in his time.

One of the things he focused on, was the most extreme example of conformity in human behavior, the rituals of the military.  What is more extreme in enforced conformity than close order drill of soldiers marching, or, in our times, folding a flag removed from a coffin at a burial ceremony, where they attempt to look like robots.? No dance floor robots are more stylized than these performing soldiers.

So when he spoke of the ideal of patriotism, he said the real patriot was not the man who seeks to become a "wooden soldier"  but the man who serves his country by thinking for himself.  He was thinking at the time of the war against Mexico, which he thought was an outrage.  He was saying before you turn yourself into some sort of robot, marching off to war, think first: Is this war something our nation ought to be doing?

This is a heavy burden, much more difficult than simply echoing--you have to hear both sides, weigh the arguments and then judge.  

In our past election, it was clear many voters heard only Rush Limbaugh, but never tuned into Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. Many, but fortunately, not most. 

They are listening still to only one side and not thinking.  And when enough people do this, everyone stops thinking, eventually.

It is fashionable to say, well, but both liberals and conservatives do this, stop listening. This is why PBS and the News Hour try to have a David Brooks and a Mark Shields exchanging views, but they stopped really examining long ago--they simply exchange pithy quips.

That is what blogs might do. Certainly not twitter. Real discussion requires length, duration and time.

Republican Party Intransigence. Shaky Citizens: The Unpatriotic Right

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=W-A09a_gHJc

Mitch McConnell  stood on the Senate floor answering a question about his resistance to The American Jobs Act.  "Why would I vote for that? It might help re elect the President. And my first priority is making sure the President is not re elected."  

Here you have a United States Senator, the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate, saying he would rather see the country flounder than see Mr. Obama re elected. Put another way, he would burn the house down, if it meant Mr. Obama would burn with it.

And, at the time, he saw nothing wrong with that sentiment. Had you asked Mitch McConnell,  just then, if he considered himself a patriot, he would have looked at you bewildered.  

He could see nothing unpatriotic about wishing the nation ill. He would have likely said, "Well, short term pain for long term gain." 

But we all know what he meant, when he said it the first time. He was so focused on getting one man, he did not care about collateral damage. 

Thoreau made the important point: a man serves his country best with his mind. The man who is willing to serve in Congress or to serve as a "wooden soldier, " marching to the orders of others is not a good citizen or a patriot.   Democracy demands thought and critical thinking. The citizen who simply echos catchy one liners, like,  "He's had his chance: Next man up," is not thinking. He's emoting.  A patriot has to stop and analyze what is contained in that sentence. To extend the football analogy contained in that phrase, you have a quarterback who is brought in during the 4th quarter, with his team behind 63 to 0, and he manages to bring his team back to tie the game. You say, "But that is only recovery, not winning.  He's not a winner. Next man up."  

It doesn't take 4 years of college, or even high school, to see the flaw in that analysis. And yet, many people who claimed to be patriots could not think that through. 

Fortunately, just enough people could do it. We had 3 million more patriots, 3 million more solid citizens than the 50 million who were not.

Here is a citizen from Colorado, who saw the problem clearly:

During the campaign, Romney has accused Obama of being responsible for partisan gridlock in Washington. However, in 2010, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell stated: “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.” Not create jobs. Not balance the budget. Not end the wars. But to make Obama a one-term president.

And Congressional Republicans have been extremely unified in this endeavor.

Take, for instance, the American Jobs Act that President Obama proposed. A majority of the law is tax cuts and support for small business, issues that Republicans normally would strongly support.

But Republicans in both houses filibustered it. They didn’t allow the bill to even come up for debate, let alone come up for a vote.

Even when Obama split the bill into 16 parts, giving Republicans the opportunity to vote for favorable parts and stop parts that were only tax cuts, they still refused to allow a conversation on the bill, passing only the part to help veterans.

Obama urged the Republicans to allow a discussion over “genuine ideas and policies,” convinced that eventually “we will have a vote to decide the issue.” However, the Republicans didn’t allow a debate or a vote on the bill. Even during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Republicans have not been willing to put country over party...

Bill Johnson,

Fort Collins

When the Numbers Lied. Or Was it the Analysis?

The phantom considers himself a man of science. Observe, measure, run the R correlation coefficient, analyze. 

On the other hand, dealing with an election, the phantom lapsed.

the phantom knows that correlation is not causality, but when you look at the "Redskin Rule" which says if the Washington Redskins football team loses its home game immediately before election Tuesday, the incumbent President loses the election in every one of 18 elections since 1937, the phantom says, "There cannot be a causal connection, but there are few things in life with such a straight line correlation: It must mean something."

A statistician would say, presumably, not enough measurements. A study which is "insufficiently powered." 

A rational person would say, "There cannot be a connection between the actions of two teams of football players and the decisions of 200 million voters. You cannot imagine a connection, therefore, there cannot be one."

On the other hand, one can imagine a connection: Since football is avidly followed by large percentage of the population, it is possible a significant number of "swing voters" may be subtly influenced by the perception of the effectiveness of the prototypical "establishment" institution, the home team of Washington, DC. So if "Washington" is seen to be dysfunctional, ineffective and the incumbent is running on the claim Washington is effective and a winner, seeing the government surrogate lose may cause vast numbers of people to perceive the federal government as being ineffectual. After all, citizens are polled all the time with nebulous questions like, "Is the country headed in the right direction?"  which is supposed to provide a measurement of whether people perceive the "captain of the ship" to be directing the course of the ship of state effectively.

So, if the Redskins lose, it's well, they can't do anything right in Washington. Bunch of losers, vote them out.

If, on the other hand, the Redskins win, well, Washington is run by competent people, people who can order the SEALS to find and kill Osama Bin Laden.

All of this, of course, would operate subliminally. But if the subconscious of the American electorate were not thought to be important, there would be a lot of advertising shops out of business during election seasons.

The more plausible explanation, however, is this remarkable streak is simply a coincidence and if we had 100 games before 100 elections, we would see there is no correlation.

As Patty McKenzie, the intrepid organizer of the effort to win the election for Obama in the town of Hampton, New Hampshire, told the phantom:  There are data which correlate with the likely outcome of the election, based on actual research and the correlations are easy to understand.  If you walk up to a voter's door ten times before the election, and you confront him with a human being (as opposed to a TV spot) and you say, look, you say you are leaning toward Mr. Obama, are you voting for him or not? And if he says, yes, I guess I am. Then you pin him down to what time of the day on election day he intends to vote, then you get him thinking, picturing his day, he is more likely to follow through. That's a cause and effect correlation you can easily see.

And if you focus your efforts in areas which are closely contested, and ignore the states which are already safely in your column (NY, MD, RI) then you maximize the punch per energy spent, and you win the election.

Of course, if you look at the nitty gritty about what actually happens on that voter's front porch, you might not believe the visit was effective, but that's another story. At least the approach McKenzie suggests is understandable. The fate of an election based on the performance of a football team, no matter how the numbers cannot lie, they do.

The Idea of Civil Discourse

We are told things have reached a low point in political discourse in this country, to the state where the government has become dysfunctional. 

In order to sound fair minded, people will say, "Well, it's the fault of both parties... Let's give someone new a chance to straighten things out."

This is, of course, the position of the intellectual slacker.  

It is tough work reviewing the history of things said and done,  and not done to figure out who might be more at fault. Easier to say, well, they are both fighting, so we'll just indict both of them.

But, of course, this is exactly what the bully wants to accomplish. If you can tie up the functioning of government, of a committee, you can sour the citizenry on the whole idea of government, or, better yet, you can hope they'll say, well the crew in power isn't getting anything done.  If this quarterback can't get the team moving down the field, let's replace him with the next quarterback.  Takes too much time to analyze whether or not the offensive line is doing its job, or the receivers are getting open. Just move on to the next quarterback.

That's all you need if you are the crew not in power.

So when the leader of the minority party of the United States Senate stares right into the camera and says, "I will not vote for anything which might improve the economy because that might help re elect Barack Obama," he can do it without blushing, because he can have faith that few Americans will even remember he said it, will keep anything in mind for more than a millisecond. But if you can drill into their heads with repeated TV spots (paid for by the billionaires who own the Republican party) that this government in power is not succeeding--let's throw the ineffective bums out, well, you've won the game.

Now, of course, you will say, but then, when you are in power you have to govern, and then the other side will do the same thing to you.

This would pose a problem, if you cared about governing. But if you actually do not like the idea of government, well then, you are really in a nice place. You can eat the government up from the inside, like the spider wasp.

The spider wasp is a scary little bug.  Its mother implants it as an egg into the belly of a  spider, and as it develops, it eats the spider alive, from inside out, finally emerging to fly away, leaving behind the empty husk which was once the spider. 

Pretty hideous, unless you don't like spiders to begin with.

And that is today's Republican party. The spider wasp party.  

Life Is Not Fair Department

Today I met a man who told me he had just got a new job at a factory which is opening up in Rochester, New Hampshire. They will make carbon composite blades for jet engines which bend and flex when birds fly into the engine.  They threw the frozen turkeys through and the engines do not fail. They have to be repaired, but the plane does not crash, or wind up in the Hudson River.

The factory will hire 400 workers and the economy of this part of New Hampshire will grow.  If Mitt Romney gets elected, he and his "theory" of laissez faire will get the credit for the growth in the economy which is already in the pipeline. As he said during the same session he made the 47% remark, he will likely not have to do anything to improve the economy. His explanation was that business would be so happy to have him as President, they'll start hiring. 

Fact is, they are already doing that before his election.

Hope and Change

It is not likely Virginia, North Carolina or Florida will vote for President Obama. They did last time, only because even these Confederates had become fed up with the incompetence of George W. Bush and all who traveled with him.
Or at least that was my take.
If you really want to fantasize, or if you are into denial, you can think, well maybe, things in the South really have changed.
The Phantom has taken grief about his habit of relating everything in life to The Wire, but there is one scene which is just too perfect and relevant to not mention:  McNulty and his partner, Kima, who is a Black/Asian woman, trail a case to a small town in southern Virginia, where they require the help of the town sheriff. McNulty tells Kima, to wait outside, while he goes in to deal with the sheriff. McNulty, knowing he is dealing with a small town, white, Southern male, attempts to establish rapport by complaining about how the Blacks have taken over Baltimore, when the sheriff's wife, who is Black, comes into the room, kisses him on the head and leaves McNulty trying to regroup.  He has made assumptions about what a white male in the South would believe, but the South has changed. People have changed. The white sheriff draws Kima aside and says, "Your partner...a bit of an asshole." She says, "You think?"

So, if The Wire got it right, maybe there's been enough change in the South that enough white males will vote for Mr. Obama, despite the fact he looks Black.

We can always hope there has been a change.