Small Towns

Much was made of small towns at the Republican National Convention, so I’d like to offer you my thoughts as someone with expertise in both rural and urban areas of life. These are of course broad generalizations; your mileage may vary.

Small town folk are friendlier and more laid back. The almighty dollar is seldom the bottom line in small towns[1]. People wave to strangers. Doors are left unlocked and keys are left in cars. Small town folk are generally just simpler people. That strength is also their weakness, and so they are easily misled. They vote for the person who most resembles them, and not who is smarter or more qualified. They tend to be suspicious of anyone more educated than they are. They don’t take the time to learn more about the world because their environment does not require it.

Big city folk often don’t know their own neighbors. They seldom make eye contact. They are more private, but they are often more intelligent and observant. Without much complaint they tolerate entire ethnic neighborhoods of different cultures because they understand what it means to get along; peace requires quiet sacrifice. City folk endure a psychological battleground of high-stress jobs, gridlock traffic and public transit. They enjoy a wider understanding of history, socio-economics and politics because their environment presents it to them every day. The luxury of safe homogeneity is something they traded in for the excitement of living on the frontier of modernity.

I know New Yorkers and Bostonians who have moved to Arkansas for its slower pace and friendlier society. And I know Arkansans who have moved to New York for its faster pace and competitive job market. I often wonder if everyone in this country would be better served by moving out of their preferred environment for some length of time in order to better understand both sides. Maybe that’s what I’m doing here.

P.S. As a side note to all of America: voting for the candidate to whom you can most easily relate is what got us where we are these last 8 years.

1.) I say this because while Wal-Mart’s bottom line is saving you money, Hudson’s Supermarket’s bottom line is making you happy. You don’t find sackers who carry groceries to your car in cities anymore and this is a societal tragedy.

Presidentiality

I’m not sure which disconcerts me more: stadium politics or stunt veep-ing.

Moving the Democratic Convention to a stadium[1] seems to be the culmination of politics as entertainment form. It’s already the case that reporters largely view politicians as celebrities, and if you don’t believe it, read this, so this kind of clinches it. Super Bowl production values at a political convention? I mean, I guess that politics is something everyone should get excited about, but this wasn’t what I had in mind.

Selecting a young female governor as a running mate to grab a potential gender vote seems, at least for a Republican, marvelously shrewd. The Machiavelli in me is thoroughly impressed, which means that the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in me just passed out at the end of his filibuster.

1.) I’m still trying to find out if this was intended to be a surprise or not. It seems like it was presented as a surprise.

Happy Fourth

America’s birthday might be good time to take stock of the last few years, so here’s a little excerpt from Hunter S. Thompson’s ESPN column from September 12, 2001.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives … It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerrilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

Racketeering

Twice this week I’ve come across this quotation from Eric Hoffer[1]:

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

The more I think about this statement, the more I realize how much it applies to religion, politics, pop music…even websites and magazines. As soon as a great idea spreads, it gains followers, and as soon as something has followers, it tends to lose focus, gain weight, and die. If power corrupts, then apparently popularity kills.

Upon reading more on Hoffer, I came across this little gem:

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

This is a perfect distilling of what I have always suspected to be the case among people who are excessively prideful in their nationalism, religious fervor, or racial superiority. When you have nothing to call your own, when you have nothing about yourself to take pride in, you have no choice but to attach your identity to the various labels and teams assigned to you by fate.

1.) His Wikipedia entry screams conflict, as it appears that conservatives and liberals are fighting to prove their positions with his words.

To the Conservatives Who Hate Welfare

I once had some friends[1] who were your typical Rush Limbaugh-loving conservatives who loved to complain about welfare programs. CNBC offers a nice slide show on your tax dollars at work. It basically breaks down like this:

42% – Military
22% – Healthcare
10% – National Debt
8% – Anti-Poverty programs
4% – Education and social services
4% – Law enforcement
3% – HUD
3% – DOE, Environment, Science
1.5% – Agriculture

So let’s say welfare programs as we know them are split between social services and anti-poverty programs. Let’s be generous and say welfare programs take up 5% of your tax dollar. So if you gave the US $1,000 in taxes, that means you spent $50 on welfare programs. I realize $50 is a lot of money for something you hate, but when the money is pooled, can’t you just pretend you didn’t spend that $50 on welfare and that I gave $100 for it? Does it really matter that much to you?

1.) They are no longer my friends because when I repeatedly requested that they not send me pro-Bush, pro-Iraq War emails, they did not stop doing so. I told them I would block their email addresses if they continued, and they did, so I blocked them and have not spoken to them since 2004 or so. I wonder what they think of Bush, Saddam, WMDs, etc., now.

On the Presidency

The media seem legitimately surprised that Giuliani and Romney performed so poorly in the primaries that they dropped out. Am I the only person who knew neither of them had a chance? This country had a hard enough time electing a Catholic in the 60’s; it will be a long time to never before we elect a Mormon. And a New York City mayor? That might impress the East Coast, but that’s not going to impress the rest of America, especially given his checkered personal life as well as his consorting with thugs like Bernard Kerik (which you have to admit, is almost a pre-requisite for running New York City).

Everybody thought McCain was down for the count, now it’s him and…Huckabee? OK, Huck I seriously didn’t see coming, but it makes sense for the evangelical voters left in Romney’s vaccum. And Huckabee, interestingly enough, seems to have almost as much oratorial charisma as Obama.

If there’s one underlying lesson here, it’s that America loves a flyover land candidate. Clinton, Obama, Huckabee, and McCain are not east coasters. Clinton gets to have the best of both worlds in that she’s technically a Southerner and a New Yorker. Both George Bushes managed to have it both ways as well by fooling people into thinking they’re a Texas family, when in fact they were born, raised and schooled in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

So the formula for a presidential candidate is: flyover land + charisma = candidacy. It also helps to have a compelling narrative (McCain the war hero, Bill Clinton the poor boy done good), but that’s not a necessity. Lord knows it didn’t work for John Kerry. By the way, I think Hillary Clinton gets some narrative charisma by proxy from Bill.

The formula is so tried and true that it’s working for a woman and a black man. So far, it looks like Obama’s superior charisma may win him the Democratic nomination.

If nothing else, I’m excited that not one of the candidates appears to be a drooling moron who can’t so much as conjugate a verb without a script.

This Just In: Romney endorses McCain, because Romney sure ain’t gonna do Huckabee any favors.

Eerily Prescient

I just finished the aforementioned Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, and I’ve been meaning to pass along this bit of sad truth:

Textbooks’ failure to put Watergate into this perspective is part of their authors’ apparent program to whitewash the federal government so that schoolchildren will respect it. Since the structural problem in the government has not gone away, it is likely that students will again, in their adult lives, face an out-of-control federal executive pursuing criminal foreign and domestic policies. To the extent that their understanding of the government comes from their American history courses, students will be shocked by these events and unprepared to think about them.”

That was published in 1995.

Cintra Wilson Goes to Washington

The Queen of Literate Snark, Cintra Wilson, has a lengthy piece in Salon about her recent embed in the White House Press Corps. There are many fine quotations, but this was my favorite, attributed to an anonymous conservative reporter on the topic of slippery Press Secretary Scott McClellan:

“You get frustrated, and you think it’s like nailing mercury to a wall, and then you realize that it’s not because Scott is so masterfully evasive, but because the White House declines to provide any mercury, or a wall.”

I have to contrast this to another quotation, this one from Helen Thomas:

“The press has a duty to find out the truth…if we fall down on the job, the people suffer. [The Bush administration] doesn’t think the people have a right to know, but we know they do. You can’t have a democracy without an informed people.”

Given the characterization of McClellan from someone within his own party, I’d say democracy is either dead or just extremely sleepy.

Brief Thoughts on Iraq

Some things that have been running around in my head this week:

  • The map of Iraq was drawn by the British, who probably had no idea what they were doing in terms of the ethnic/religious population divisions of the region.
  • Often the only type of leader who can make a country like that work is either a strong, unifying leader (Marshal Tito of the former Yugoslavia) or a completely brutal dictator (Saddam Hussein).
  • Can democracy be brought to such an artificial state of warring religious factions? The only way democracy (or any style of government) works is if everyone agrees on it, and agrees to put aside their differences in the name of a common goal. Right now I don’t think the people of Iraq have a common goal. Otherwise there wouldn’t be people running around shooting ice salesmen because Mohammed didn’t have ice in his time.
  • Is it possible that people like Saddam Hussein and The Taliban are the only people who can successfully maintain order in such divided nations?

An old friend of mine from high school, Allen Harris, has been recently deployed to Iraq. Previously he was stationed in Alaska. He’s gone from frozen hell to burning hell. He writes:

It’s usually about 110 degrees by 1000 every morning, hitting a high of about 120 by afternoon. That doesn’t count the heat radiating back of the desert floor, making it feel like about 130-135. It sucks. I can’t say which is worse, they both suck about as equally, just on the opposite ends of the spectrum. You don’t want to be outside for very long at -60F, and you don’t want to be outside for very long at 120F. We try not to do much in the afternoon unless we have to. Where we are going next, further north, is about 5-7 degrees cooler, not as sandy and open, and hopefully starting to hit the cool months.

Note to self: No longer will I complain about the Arkansas weather.

Shedding the Unreality

In what will hopefully become a trend of unlikely, paradigm-shifting headlines, this article entitled US scales back expectations on gains during Iraq transition, is making its way around the news sites. It says, among other things:

”What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. ”We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”

The cracks are showing; the administration can’t keep up its sunny exterior much longer. Jon Stewart and The Daily Show have been keen to point out that the rhetoric from the administration is changing quietly from the “War on Terror” to the “Global Struggle Against Extremism.” Odd thing to see them employing the kind of euphemistic language that conservatives tend to rail against. He’s not “crippled,” he’s “differently abled” – this isn’t a war, it’s now a struggle. Perhaps as old soldiers don’t die, they just fade away, the Bush administration is hoping Iraq will fade from the public consciousness.

Here’s hoping we can instead continue in our struggle to shed the unreality.