masterpiece

teabaggers triumph in new york's 23rd district

Bill Owens is the first Democrat to win NY-23 since the first term of Ulysses S. Grant. I looked it up.

But it was a great triumph for the Jefferson Davis Cell of the Glenn Beck Brigade of the conservative wing of the Red-White-and-Blue branch of the Republican Party. For a candidate they apparently were forced to call on the kid who always ate lunch by himself, and also lost the district for the first time since Reconstruction, but at least in doing so they stuck their finger in Newt Gingrich's eye and sent a message to any other ideologically impure, unorthodox infidels who pissed them off this week.

political viagra

The lead commentary piece by Louis Menand in this week's New Yorker (Nov. 2) is about the White House's recent little kerfluffle with Fox News. From it I learned that Fox has the oldest demographic in the cable news business (half of its viewers are over 63), and that the majority of viewers for the big-shrill Fox offerings such as Beck, Hannity, and Bill-O, are men.

Menand also gets into the importance of niche marketing in today's news business. Watching the programming that comes sandwiched in between the commercials for denture adhesive, Centrum Silver, and topical hemorrhoid remedies you get a pretty good idea of the exact nature of the niche Fox has carved out for itself -- the delusional one-quarter.

It also gives me a better idea of why I generally don't get along with people my own age, particularly men. No wonder. Fox News is where all those pot-bellied old farts go to get their daily anti-Obama erection. Of course, it's not the real Obama they hate; that one's a timid, vacillating, unprincipled and somewhat ignorant opportunist who so far has been almost completely ineffective in his discharge of his duties. Rather, the Obama they hate is the one who lives inside their heads, a tyrranical and corrupt Marxist dictator who plans to install universal government-run health care in YOUR community, then set up death panels to kill us senior citizens so the government doesn't have to pay for our care.

I think about these things, and I wonder how it feels to be such a freak.

I keep telling these guys on the rare occasions I talk to them that it's not Obama and the Democrats they need to worry about, it's people like me. Of course, they have no clue what that means, which is probably just as well.

Now, today on Fox they're probably (I'm speculating here 'cause I don't have TV), probably gloating about the two big victories last night, one where a state involved in the recent rebellion reverted to Republicanism, and the other where an overweight drunk driver beat a corrupt and widely unpopular Democratic hack. But the more important race was the Republican loss in NY-23 where teabagger-anointed Doug Hoffman had shouldered out the GOP establishment candidate in order to run and lose. What's important about it is that it's the wave of the future The teabaggers are planning primary challenges against more than a dozen establishment GOP regulars next year. So that already-weak party is splitting in two.

But even with that, they've got not much to fear from their old enemy the Democrats, who are splitting into fragments themselves. Between the Blue Dogs and so-called moderates is a motley collection of party hacks, corporate whores, and slick operators like Emmanuel and Steny Hoyer, led by an ineffectual and inexperienced amateur who at this point seems paralyzed with fright.

There's a new party coming. It's gathering like the lava dome that formed in the St. Helen's crater 30 years ago. It's coming just like the Republican Party showed up on cue, right before the Civil War. And it's going to be fueled by the continued criminal behavior in the financial sector, who committed the frauds currently causing millions to be out of work and hundreds of thousands to lose their homes. Also it will be in response to the endless war which lurches on without purpose, demanded of us by the war state. And people are going to rise up and say, "No more of this." Look to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to produce the seed of the new party. That's the party the Fox newsies need to worry about.

sincerity

By now everyone knows the story of how rock 'n' roll grabbed the spotlight away from the pabulum-like "product" that passed for popular music during the fifties, eventually putting a merciful end to it altogether. What's less talked about is the fact that at the same time rock 'n' roll was capturing the hearts of teenagers and scandalizing adults all over the country, the modern form of country-western music was also taking shape, and providing another from-the-heart, sincerely felt and honestly-delivered alternative to the plastic nonsense cluttering the airwaves and television variety shows of the period.

The most celebrated of these early C&W pioneers, of course, is Hank Williams, who retains the aura of stardom in the public imagination even today, as much because of his romantic and tragic self-destruction at age 29 as for his musical contribution. In his short life Williams fathered an extensive repertoire of memorable songs, but for my money the best country-western tune of the era was performed by Ray Price and his band, the Cherokee Cowboys. This was a high-powered group of the mid-to-late fifties and very early sixties that at one time or another included Roger Miller, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Paycheck.

The Cowboys released Crazy Arms in 1956 and it went straight to the top of the country charts. To my ear, it seems the perfect country-western song: it's short, simple, direct, straight from the heart, and very cleanly executed. The instrumental accompaniment (pedal steel guitar, fiddle, and piano) is spare but inspired, and the tune is given its driving force by the incredibly tight two-part harmony on the chorus. I don't know who the second voice belongs to, but it sounds like Roger Miller to me.

Price later moved on from his roots, and by 1970 with the release of his biggest hit, For the Good Times, had transformed himself into a lounge act with country origins. And like rock 'n' roll, country-western has pretty much passed from the current scene, leaving a residue of Las-Vegasfied Nashville acts that might best be described as rock 'n' roll for old people. The golden age of the genre was early on, and featured such outstanding performers as Williams, Price, and Patsy Cline, with Willie Nelson presiding over the later manifestation of the form.

It's time for country to take its rightful place alongside rock 'n' roll as an expression of artistic democracy. And lest we forget, there were performers in that long-ago time who incorporated elements of both forms, "rockabillies" such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly. Together, rock and country were embraced by a public which, however willing to swallow junk politics it may be, was unwilling to accept the dreadful and odious cacaphony of ugly sounds Madison Avenue tried to palm off on them as music. The American public may not know much, but it knows what it likes.

the radicals

I decided not to post this on the Where do Moderates Belong? thread currently running, because that one is founded on the assumption that radicalism is a bad thing.

Sometimes that's true, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes radicalism is the only thing that makes sense.

I'm reading Fawn M. Brodie's biography of Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania Congressman who led the radical wing of the Republican Party during and after the Civil War, was single-handedly responsible for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and was the force behind the impeachment of Johnson.

Brodie says he was "undoubtedly" a radical, and that "(R)adicalism is a state of mind which in the generic sense represents the desire to 'root out' or get to the root of a social problem, often by way of revolution rather than evolution. The compulsion to overthrow something is the important ingredient in the radical state of mind."

In Stevens's case, what he wanted to overthrow was slavery, and to follow up by punishing those who had practiced it for the crimes they had committed.

Where is moderation possible when it comes to an issue like slavery? On the one hand, before the Civil War there were the few people like Stevens who hated Slavery so much they became obsessed with wiping it out along with the people who perpetrated it. On the other hand were the slave-owners and slave-traders, criminals who had convinced themselves they were living in a world that contained no boundaries of human behavior or human decency. They even pretended that owning slaves was compatible with Christianity!

There were also a lot of moderates in the two parties of the time, Democratic and Whig, who just wished these problems would go away. Sort of like today's moderates.

The fact is, between slavery and anti-slavery there is no moderate position. Either we allow it or we don't. You can't have just a little bit and pretend that's OK. So if history shows us one thing, it's that Stevens, the radical leader of a tiny radical minority, was right. The rest of the country was wrong, so wrong in fact that they figured out a way to circumvent Stevens's race laws after they were added to the Constitution. It took the rest of the country 100 years to catch up to Thad Stevens. Except for the black part, of course.

I could draw parallels between the events and political configurations of that time and this one, but I'm not going to. I'll just say that the Republican Party was mostly a place for moderates until it got hijacked by Confederate pukes and primitive Christ cultists, leading to the question, Where can moderates go?

In this world, I'd suggest there's no place for you. Either you're on board with the overthrow and cremation of the tyranny of Goldman Sachs and the Pentagon, or you're not. And yes, Michael Moore is a radical. You say that like it was a bad thing.

The late Mrs. Brodie, incidentally, was something of a radical herself. Originally from Utah and with family connections at the very top of the Mormon Church, her first biography was an expose of the career of Mormon founder Joseph Smith for which she is reviled and considered a traitor in SLC to this day. She also wrote one of the earliest revelations of the sex life of T. Jefferson.

race and politics

Nationwide and generally speaking, white men are not very progressive.

Here's a map that proves my point.

Take a good look at Alabama and Mississippi.

Now take a look at Oregon and Washington, which are geographically, economically, and ideologically as far away from Alabama and Mississippi as you can get and still be on the continental map.

See also the House of Representatives Progressive Caucus, which is disproportionately black, Hispanic, and female, containing few white men compared to their numbers in the population at large.

What does all this tell you about the future of this country? What does it tell you about the past?

I live in Washington State, by the way.

Dave B
Proud Progressive

holiday

The "holiday season" begins here, appropriately, for Hallowe'en was originally observed by the ancient Celts as the dividing point between those days in which light predominated and the darker half of the year. Their name for it, "Samhain," roughly means "summer's end."

After the one God had killed all the old gods or driven them underground, the pagan ambience of the holiday persisted in its designation as All Saint's Day. Even to this day, those who fear paganism also fear that this prominent day in the ancient lunar calendars provides an opportunity for "unclean" spirits, never entirely banished from either the European imagination or the Christian religion, to enter our lives and make mischief. The Wikipedia article on Halloween tells us that The ancient Celts believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both harmless and harmful) to pass through. The family's ancestors were honoured and invited home whilst harmful spirits were warded off. It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks.

The Celtic honoring of ancestors foreshadows some modern uses of this time of year. Because Hallowe'en marks the advent of the "darker half" of the year, it has acquired aspects of a festival of the dead, and is so celebrated in many Latin American countries on the first or second of November.

But in English-speaking North America, where a secularized, hedonistic population avoids disturbing or spiritually ambiguous subjects, the holiday has been rendered harmless and relegated to the status of a children's dress-up day and neighborhood lark. This is merely another sign that we are afraid of our own shadows -- and for good reason.