A place for my stuff

Some thoughts on the single most surreal election victory in US history:

1. I’ve been saying for years that the further away you go from urban areas, the further back in time you go. For example, in Harrison there are still sack boys who bag your groceries and carry them to your car for you. This just isn’t done anymore in big cities. Also, Harrison is a haven for white power organizations which are getting harder to find these days. For better or worse, rural = past, and urban = future and somewhere in between is the present day. While watching the election results last night, I was struck by the fact that nearly all urban areas tended to vote Democrat and nearly all rural areas vote Republican. Now, I don’t want to sound elitist, and it should be noted that I come from a very small town, but the division of stupidity in this country clearly weighs heavily on the side of rural. To make a broad generalization (but one that I would wager is demographically sound), the Republican Party is the party of the rural and the rich, and that’s a powerful combination because the latter can so easily manipulate the former. Factor in the “don’t switch horses in midstream” school of foreign policy, and there’s your Bush win.

2. The Electoral College is still a sham. People who live in a state surrounded by people who disagree with them are essentially wasting their vote. Whether you are a liberal in Arkansas or a conservative in New York, you are disenfranchised by the Electoral College.

3. This nonsense about waiting for Ohio’s provisional votes is ludicrous. Oh how I prayed that Kerry would win the electoral vote and not the popular vote, just so I could watch everyone who trumpeted the virtues of the Electoral College four years ago change their tune.

4. H.L. Mencken said “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard.”

5. I don’t know if I can take four more years of angst, anti-science, environmental rape, no-bid contracts, lowered standards, higher body counts, cynical manipulation of facts, shouting smug punditry, neoconservative empire-building.

6. As usual, Mark Morford says it better than I.

Heath tipped me off to William Gibson’s blog which had this quotation from Ron Suskind’s article, “Without a Doubt“, in New York Times Magazine:

“In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were in what we call the ‘reality-based community’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’; I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

Dear God, I think I am now more afraid about the state of the world than I have been since 9/11. Probably more because if this sentiment is true, and if it does in fact define the thought processes of the Bush Administration at large, then the real threat is within us.

OK this is pretty sick:

Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner of the largest chain of television stations in the nation, plans to air a documentary that accuses Sen. John Kerry of betraying American prisoners during the Vietnam War, a newspaper reported Monday.

The network has ordered all 62 of its stations to air “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal” without commercials in prime-time next week, the Washington Post said, just two weeks before the Nov. 2 election.

More on the liberal media here.

Now, I’m all for equal time for candidates and an informed electorate, but the only way to balance this thing out would be for them to run leftist propaganda like Fahrenheit 9/11. Either way, it would seem illegal that the head of the chain can just order network affiliates to run programming whenever he wants. These are network affiliates who have agreements with their networks and their own local programming already scheduled months in advance. Now they’re being forced to air something because their whack-job top brass gets a wild hair and decides they want to air something? This is a gross abuse of power.

In other news, Jacques Derrida and Superman died over the weekend. So without the Nietzschean über-mensch and the father of Deconstructionism, what ever will modern philosophy do?