Gums Flapping in West Virginny

Well, Bill Clinton has been on the stump in West Virginia complaining about calls for Hillary Clinton to pack it in since it is almost impossible for her to win the nomination at this point. According to His Former Highness, it is a good thing for both candidates to press on so that every primary will have two candidates to fight over. According to him, if this doesn’t happen, citizens will be disenfranchised. Of course, he’s wrong. He’s either wrong or lying, and I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, just like his wife and loved ones.

The former President clearly doesn’t understand that having a primary extends the franchise to no one. Not having one disenfranchises a population of zero. You see, extending the franchise means allowing someone to help choose who will fill a given office, not who will be the candidate for that office. Ex-cons are often denied the franchise, and if Bill Clinton is so worked up about who is disenfranchised and who isn’t, he can try speaking out on that or the new requirements for ID cards being pushed by the Republican Party.

Neither party is required in any way shape or form to hold primaries at all. Our current method of selecting presidential candidates only really goes back to 1972, a run during which the Democrats have won precisely 3 out of 9 contests. As a way to choose the best possible candidate, it frankly sucks. We could have done as well by sticking the prospective candidates in one of those money machines they have at failing car dealerships. Whoever comes out of the machine with the most dollar bills gets to run for President.

He also claims that Democrats should “just saddle up and have an argument.” The problem with that, of course, is that just standing around calling each other names isn’t having an argument in any intellectual sense. It is simple idiocy. And there is no argument to be had because they agree on almost every matter of substance. The only question that is left to be decided is this: Which one has the better chance of winning the election in November? And when one of the candidates has a negative approval rating of 48% while the other has negatives of 32%, I think that the answer is a no-brainer.

It’s time for Bill to shut his trap, but I have no hope that he will. That would take judgment and finesse, two qualities that he possesses not at all.

The New Black

In 2000 and 2004, the most worn-out phrase I heard (and occasionally muttered) was “If Bush wins, I’m moving to Canada.” Well, Bush won, and the population of Canada seems to have stayed relatively stable. It turned out, once January 20th, 2001, rolled around, that Canada was still cold and still way up there, and it was really too much of a bother to pack up everything and trundle it across a border to a place that might not even want us. You know how it is. People from the country to your southern border start showing up and taking your jobs and parking spaces. It’s an outrage. Eh?

Well, this year, there are two new phrases, one of them heard exclusively in Democratic precincts. The first, and most popular, is “If (fill in name of Democratic candidate) wins, I’ll vote Republican next fall.” This should be followed by “You just watch me! I really will! I’m not fooling!” When push comes to shove, however, and they find themselves in some school cafeteria and sliding the little card into the machine, chances are that a lifetime of voting for Democrats will not come to end. It’s all hyperbole, and really just about half a step away from threatening to hold one’s breath.

The other phrase is, “If (fill name of candidate from either party) wins, I’m not voting for anybody.” You heard a lot of this from Republicans before John McCain sewed up the nomination, and it is a refrain that one hears more and more from Democrats these days. I think it’s the one to take more seriously for the simple reason that it involves no effort. There’s nothing simpler and more satisfying than not doing something. It has the advantage of requiring no planning and making no arrangements. In fact, it actually frees up some of your time, which has gotten to be a very precious commodity these days.

Now, I’ve considered not voting, but not because of one candidate or another. Sometimes I find it hard to see the point in going through the ritual. I live in a state that has gotten redder and redder over the years while I have continued to vote blue, in the main. And with the Electoral College in place, my vote for President is essentially meaningless and something that I only do to get a sticker. The sad fact is that almost half the voters in most states could just not bother showing up without affecting the end result at all.

Of course, there’s that whole laziness angle, and you can’t underestimate (or misunderestimate, to use President Bush’s word) the power of that.

Time to Quit

Not me, no matter how hard you beg.

No, what’s got me going this morning is the Democratic Presidential nomination campaign. On its face, I’m not opposed to the campaign dragging on up to the convention. If you have candidates who are talking about the issues and having a spirited debated about things that matter, it could be good. Attention could be focused on the Democrats, and John McCain would be relegated to the sidelines for months. That would make it difficult for him to hit the ground running once his coronation from the Republican party was complete, and he would be rusty at campaigning.

Unfortunately, the Democratic campaign has degenerated into a garden of pointed fingers and accusations of “He did it!/She did it!” I think the nadir for me came yesterday when I read the following headline: Clinton would have left Obama’s church. This is just total horse hockey and was a lame attempt by Sen. Clinton to divert attention from her statements about a long ago trip to Bosnia. Had she had any integrity, she would have pointed out that the statements attributed to Rev. Wright were taken out of context and that, if you watch the entire sermon, you’ll find that what he’s saying is neither racist nor anti-American. In other words, to paraphrase The Firesign Theatre, everything you know about the Rev. Wright is wrong!

But she didn’t. Instead, she made a feeble attempt to pour gasoline on a very small flame just so that she could put some distance between herself and this statement of hers:

I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

She claimed that she “misspoke,” however, there is no possible way that that was a misstatement. Just read it. As far as I can see, there are only two possibilities here. Either she was flat out lying or she is coming unhinged. And, in either case, that’s not the person I want answering the red phone at 3 a.m.

I think it’s time for the superdelegates to put this campaign out of its misery. More and more of them need to follow Bill Richardson’s example and just support Obama. If enough superdelegates came out in support of Obama–and that has been the trend–Hillary would have to shut down the screaming, vomiting monster that has become her campaign.

Please superdelegates, wherever you are. Kill the monster.

Campers! I Can’t Think of Anything to Say

The title of today’s nonsense is appropriated from the film A Thousand Clowns. (I was going to post a link to it on Amazon, but the damn thing isn’t out on DVD yet. VHS, yes, but who has VHS anymore?) If you have not seen this film, please do your best to do so. Most of the world needs to, although I suspect that the people who need it the most will just scoff and turn away. Nobody likes taking their medicine.

Here’s my favorite scene, in which Murray tells the history of his nephew, Nick:

The full version of that last line is: “Elaine communicates with my brother and myself almost entirely by rumor.” And if that’s not a great line, I don’t know what is.

The title of this little communique (which was chosen because I really do have very little to say right now) was taken from the following scene:

Or maybe I should have taken today off instead of posting this. For all I know it might jut be Irving R. Feldman’s Birthday.

Miscegenation and the Rebirth of a Nation

This is not a political blog. I’ve dwelt on politics in the past and found that it just makes me angry and cynical. Our election system is broken, our legislators are institutionally corrupt, our media are shallow and vindictive and childish, and most of the political discourse that one comes across these days has all the depth of an animation cell. To be caught up in current events is to be sad, and it is a sadness without recourse.

Unfortunately (a word I type with depressing frequency), recent events have gnawed at me, and a variety of thoughts I’ve had must find release.

The events I allude to concern the recent controversy involving 20 seconds of a sermon given by Barack Obama’s former minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Now, I’m not going to talk about the effect of this nonsense on the polls, because I know that whatever the polls say today, they will not say a week from now nor a month nor six months. In fact, it was probably to Sen. Obama’s long-term benefit that this arose now. Soon it will be old news and forgotten and irrelevant. In a society that is embroiled in an ever-evolving present the past has little permanent significance. Just check out the career of one Richard M. Nixon, if you don’t believe me. He shouldn’t have been able to get elected dog catcher, never mind President.

What I want to really talk about is the shadow of Jim Crow that looms across our nation. Sen. Obama is famously our first black candidate with a real shot at being President. However, let us think about that for a moment. Sen. Obama is just as white, by heritage, as he is black, and yet, the black 50% somehow outweighs the white 50% in the nation’s consciousness. Why is that? I would answer, Jim Crow.

Southerners, after the Civil War, instituted a series of laws to restrict the rights and liberties of recently freed blacks and coined the term “miscegenation” to denote the genetic mixing of white with black. Barack Obama, according to that terminology is a mulatto. Had it been only one of his grandparents who had been black, he would be a quadroon. As the percentage of black blood grows smaller, the terms change, and there were octroons and even quintroons for people who were a mere 1/16th black. It is significant that these terms were based on the percentage of black heritage that a person had, because that is what exposes the racist underpinnings of the terms. They are all based on what percentage of the allegedly (and I do not believe this for a moment) “inferior” blood coursed through that person’s veins. The whiter you were, the better you were, and this was a form of racism that pervaded both black and white cultures. (Spike Lee’s film School Daze discusses this phenomenon in African American culture.)

And so Barack Obama is held back not only by being black, but by not being white enough. Perhaps were he an octroon, he would be black, but acceptably so, and his race would not be an issue. Although, in the shadow of Jim Crow, any amount of black blood is too much, and the travails suffered by Barack Obama and Homer Plessy suddenly seem not remote, but related.

And yet this latest contretemps was occasioned not by Mr. Obama himself, but by statements made by his one-time pastor and the founder of the church he still attends, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. How, you might ask, does this fall under the shadow of Jim Crow? Well, the thought occurred to me this morning that the endless repeating of that snippet of sermon was, in its message, not unlike D.W. Griffith’s famous film, The Birth of a Nation. The Birth of a Nation presented blacks in the South during Reconstruction as being lazy, drunken, power hungry, and in search of white women to sully. This most popular film of the silent era defended racism through fear and raised the Ku Klux Klan to the status of heroes. In fact, the Klan made a comeback in the wake of the film (which was shown in the Wilson White House, much to the delight of the then-President and preeminent racist, Woodrow Wilson) and racial strife and lynchings soared in the years following its release.

And the image of the dangerous black foe is exactly what is presented in that clip of Rev. Wright. They take 20 seconds out of a 40-year public career and let it imply that this man is somehow out to get white America. The real fear that is being engendered is that Barack Obama is a black man–and you know how they are! It is absurd and foolish and something that we should have put behind us long ago.

Which brings me to Sen. Obama’s speech the other day. I’ve read a bit of comment on that speech, mostly good, occasionally bad, but I think that even the positive notices have failed to see what he was driving at. They were looking at that speech too much from the Shadow of Jim Crow to see where he was really going with it.

I think that Sen. Obama is trying to point us past the age of the hyphenated-American. He is trying to take us past the narrow identifications and concerns of fragments of the American Dream, and trying to lead us to an identification as Americans first, and everything else second. He has heard from a fellow politician from Illinois that “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” and he has taken that to heart. He has heard from a black preacher that a man should be judged “not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character,” and he has worn that on his sleeve.

He has an uphill battle in that, but it is a battle worth fighting. Humans are tribal by nature. We seeks groups with which to identify and to join. As societies have grown, so have the tribes, and in the polyglot nation of the United States, the tribes have grown to be large demographic groups. However, as Sen. Obama argues, this nation will never be able to reach its true potential until we can all reach an identification as members of the tribe American. Until we reject the politics of division, the politics of separation, the politics of alienation, our greatness, as a nation and as a people, will remain dimmed. However extraordinary the achievements of the American experiment may be, they will fall short of what might have been. Until we can come together as a people, a nation, American first and everything else after, we will fall short of what we can be, and the United States will never have truly become “the bright, shining city on the hill.”

Five Years On

Over the past couple of weeks, I have debated with myself as to whether I would write a post about the Iraq War today, the fifth anniversary of the invasion.  This conflict started a few weeks ago when my blog friend Kim at mouse medicine wrote about something called the Blogswarm and encouraged her blogging readers to join in.  The Blogswarm is basically an online protest of the invasion, which is an idea that I support.  However, I’m also not much of a joiner, so that sympathy quickly came in conflict with my natural aloofness, which can sometimes mimic a mass of cold Canadian air interacting with a muggy warm front from the Caribbean.  Or not.  It depends.

So I wasn’t certain that I was going to blog about the war today at all.  It would have been just as easy to blog about St. Joseph’s Day (a Catholic feast day celebrated by Italians in a kind of marinara-tinged response to St. Patrick’s Day)  or that time that something happened to me and I felt either good, bad, or indifferent about it.  The Iraq War was certain to get loads of attention from all quarters of the political spectrum on this day, and my tiny little voice would neither add nor detract from the din in any noticeable way.  But then someone forced my hand, and it was, of course, George W. Bush.

 Mr. Bush gave a speech yesterday about the conflict that seemed to be riddled with lies and exaggerations.  What mostly caught my eye was the claim that the infamous Surge of recent months has been a success.  Now, I understand how this claim is justified.  The idea is that violent attacks have been less frequent in these months and that this reduction in violence is attributable to the Surge.

And that is probably true.  There have been fewer attacks because of the increase in American troops.  However, the question becomes, is this true success?  Of course, that depends on the measure that one takes for success.  And I would say this:  The Surge cannot be deemed a success until it is no longer necessary.  As long as large numbers of American troops are needed to keep the levels of violence down to only the murderous minimum–and still functioning at a level of horror most of us can only conjecture at–there can be no talk of success.   As long as the Iraqi government continues to misfire and sputter like an ill-tuned engine, there can be no success.  As long as the innocent continue to die, as long as the people are forced to live without clean water, as long as a civil society is notable only by its absence, we will have no success.

The Surge is buying Mr. Bush time, time to skate through the remaining months of his term.  He will leave office with hands soggy with the blood of others.  He will leave office having given the Iraqi people the gifts of chaos and suffering and will refuse to understand that there is no freedom in a life drenched in hunger and fear.  He will leave office smug and self-satisfied, and the people of Iraq will continue to suffer.

Today is a solemn day and not a time for boasting of success.  It is a time to for contemplation and examination.  It is a day on which all responsible people need to ask themselves, “How can we best make of the debacle in Iraq a success?”

Scattershot

Just a few things that have crossed my mind in the last 24 or so hours:

First, my post yesterday about being Irish is a great example of how this blog functions as a writing journal for me. It’s not really a well-written piece, but it could be with some work. It is, at best, a draft, something to be worked out and smoothed over. As it stands, it has a herky-jerky quality about it. Ideas pop in and out of it like Major Nelson in a second-rate episode of I Dream of Jeannie, and it hops and skips from thought to thought. However, that’s how journals work. You get down the kernel of the idea so that you can flesh it out later. And maybe I will. I think there’s the basis for a decent essay to submit somewhere for next St. Patrick’s Day.

Second, just a quick comment on the folderol surrounding the seating of delegates from Florida and Michigan in the Democratic Convention. The basic point comes down to this: The legislatures of these two states knew what the consequences were when they moved their primary dates in the first place. If the voters in these states have been disenfranchised–and I don’t think that’s a forgone conclusion–they were disenfranchised by their state legislators, not by the Democratic Party. Everybody can just stop their boohooing and accept the consequences of their actions. And, were I a voter in either of those states, I would certainly do my part in voting the idiots in the state legislature out of office based on how they voted on the original matter. Those are the bad guys in this matter, and more fingers need to be pointed in their direction.

Stanley Fish has posted another great load of twaddle that I couldn’t even be bothered to finish. He’s taken his “I must support Hilary by all means of illogic and obfuscation” to a new level of bloated self-importance by addressing the idea that the so-called superdelegates to the Democratic convention need not support the candidate preferred by the People. As usual, he takes dump trucks full of words and tries to bury a rational argument with them. I did not comment on it, although I was tempted to. What I would have said would have been something along the lines of “If you want to know how the superdelegates will perform their function, start by observing the movements of large flocks of sheep or geese or schools of minnows. We can count on them to blow with the prevailing wind, and , like bolts of lightning, to cut their way from the heavens to the earth along the path of least resistance. To think anything more of them is absurd and without example in nature.”

Of course, the secret story in this whole superdelegate thing is that Obama has been creeping up bit-by-bit. Sen. Clinton’s lead in this category has dipped from more than 100 in February to fewer than 40 today. And, I believe, that trend will continue. The Clintons are counting on being carried to the nomination by old-school party hacks, however, unfortunately for them, those old-school party hacks are growing increasingly tired of the Clintons and their presumption of dynasty. Hilary has waged a tasteless and Rove-inspired campaign that has turned off party stalwarts. She’s not keeping it in the family, which is bad politics. And they know that McCain would clean her clock in November. Also, there is a bubbling undercurrent in the country that is looking for change from politics as usual, and Hilary has shown herself incapable of understanding that.

Finally, could we somehow get past the fiction that McCain wouldn’t trounce Hilary in November? The Republicans (who have started turning out in great numbers–over 100,000 each in Texas and Ohio–to vote for Hilary in the primaries) know that. Hilary energizes their legendary “base.” They can run not only against her, but against Bill as well. (Despite some people’s delusions that Bill was one of the great Presidents, he was, at best, a mediocrity.) Also, everything that she has run on so far, McCain can claim to have more of, such as experience and foreign policy backbone. They will paint her as being “the most liberal member of Congress” and wishy-washy on Iraq. And, with her running against him, McCain can claim the “I’m a Maverick” ground that he loves so. Don’t believe the Clinton propaganda that she has a better chance in a national race against McCain. It just ain’t so. And if you don’t believe me, just ask Rush Limbaugh.

Update:   I was so pleased with the projected comment for Stanly Fish’s blog that I copied it and posted it.  It is comment #493.

Also, I had meant to post a link to  a piece by The Firesign Theatre that came up on the old iPod this morning.  It originally appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered on Labor Day, 2002.  If you have an extra 8 minutes, take a listen.

I Called It Before Krugman

And I have proof. On August 10, 2007, I submitted a comment for response to one of his op-ed pieces. (This was before he moved to true blogging as a way of interacting with readers.) Here’s the exchange:

Len Cassamas, Atlanta: Given the weak dollar and the huge amount of debt the nation has accumulated, I have two questions. First, is there really any difference between a T-bill and a junk bond? Second, is this, in economic terms, the perfect storm brewing? In other words, in your view, how bad could this get?

Paul Krugman: Oh, yes, there’s a huge difference. For all that Bush has done, the US government still has vast potential revenue compared with its debts. Also, T-bills are the safest asset even if you’re worried — what are you gonna hold instead, canned food in the basement.

I don’t think this is the perfect storm — there’s only one crisis, which is largely driven by housing. Now, if we add in something crazy — like, say, Dick Cheney bombing Iran — then you’ve got your perfect storm.

Now, here’s what he had to say about T-bills on his blog today (March 17, 2008), some seven months later:

But right now we’re in a situation in which Treasury bills yield considerably less than the Fed funds rate; to at least some extent this may reflect banks’ nervousness about lending to each other, even in the overnight market. And to the extent that’s true, Treasuries — not Fed funds — are the interest rates to look at.

As of 10:38 this morning, the one-month Treasury rate was 0.57; the three-month rate was 0.825.

And here’s what he said about the economy: “[T]his is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression[.]“

In other words, the nearly perfect storm.

I guess I wasn’t so far off after all.

The Irish in America

I am, for all intents and purposes, half Irish. (There is a well-worn legend in my family that my great-grandmother used to say, “I have some English blood in me, and if I knew which vein it was in, I’d open it up and let it out.”) Every St. Patrick’s Day, I tend to meditate on that part of my heritage. I’m sure that this is due, mostly, to the aura of publicity that surrounds St. Patrick’s Day. St. Joseph’s Day comes around on March 19th, and I never spend any time on that day considering the implications of being part Italian. And I don’t even know what day you’re supposed to think about being of French Canadian descent. And what would you do anyway? Eat crepes and sing “Frere Jacques”?

But back to being Irish. Or, rather, half Irish. Or, rather, being descended from a bunch of people who were born in Ireland back in the 19th Century or before. For that is the point here. I am not Irish. I am an American who happens to be related to people who live in Ireland, people I have never met because they would be descendants of my grandfather’s cousins at closest. On my grandmother’s side, I’ve discovered that her Irish forebears came to the United States in the 1840s via Nova Scotia. (I have no idea why Nova Scotia. I guess it was a shorter swim from the Old Sod.)

Part of the allure of my Irish heritage comes from the romance of it. Being Irish, in America, is somewhat akin to being a fan of the Red Sox or Cubs. The emphasis that Irish-Americans tend to make is with struggle and oppression, and the Irish as a people are cast as the endless underdog, a nation of Davids just waiting for the chance to slay a Goliath or two. The trouble with this identification is that it flies in the face of reality.

Although oppressed by the Brits and discriminated against by WASPish America in the past, the Irish are currently one of the great success stories of European culture. The Republic has grown prosperous enough to have its own housing bubble. Irish-Americans have done rather well for themselves over the years. According to Wikipedia, “After 1945, the Catholic Irish consistently ranked toward the top of the social hierarchy, thanks especially to their high rate of college attendance.” Even Northern Ireland, long embattled and worn down from strife, has seen a rise in high tech manufacturing as The Troubles have subsided.

The Irish in America have a complicated relationship with the mother country. Identification with one’s Irish heritage is often passionate and fierce, even though Irish-Americans tend to shy away from public physical displays of affection and tend to bottle up as many emotions other than anger, derision, and humor that they can. The modern IRA was dependent on Irish-Americans to fund and arm it, enablers in a dysfunctional relationship. My parents used to occasionally lunch at an Irish pub in North Kingstown, RI, where patrons would, from time-to-time, rise, place their hands over their hearts, and sing “A United Ireland Again.” (The character of Paul’s Grandfather sings a snippet of it in the film A Hard Day’s Night.) I’ve known people who belonged to an organization called Ireland’s 32 and whose cars bore bumper stickers that read, “26+6=1.” (There are traditionally 32 counties in Ireland, 26 in the Republic and 6 in Northern Ireland.)

I think that fewer Irish-Americans go in for that these days, although, since I now live in the deep South rather than in Rhode Island (the most Irish state in the Union), I have less exposure to that crowd. Still, the IRA has been largely eclipsed by Sinn Fein, and I’m sure more people are singing and clapping along to “The Wild Rover” than “A United Ireland Again.” Irish literature has become a big business in academic circles and James Joyce and W.B. Yeats have been installed as titans of 20th Century literature, although I suspect that there are more people who are familiar with Riverdance than riverrun.

Still, today is the day on which I’m am supposed to celebrate my Irishness, so I guess I will do my part. I’m wearing green, which is a fairly recent innovation on my part. I used to just, when asked, point at the veins on my wrist and say “It’s in there.” I must be mellowing with old age. I will, however, pick up a bottle of whiskey on the way home and perhaps run through a chorus of “The Wild Rover” on the guitar before bed.

And it’s no–nay–never
(clap-clap-clap-clap)
No, nay, never, no more
Will I play The Wild Rover
No, never, no more.

Sláinte!

Len in Hats

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my belief that more American men should wear hats more often. An astute and knowledgeable reader–presumably Aaron of Aaron’s Hats in North Conway, New Hampshire–challenged me to post a photo of myself wearing a hat.  Well, here it is.  Happy?  Are you happy now?  Happy?

.