Something Real

Woody Guthrie's home place (c) Libby Hicks

Or at least "real."  Voting is going to come.  In NC it has come, in its early voting phase.  We can all go and actually do something.  As opposed to talking about doing something I mean.  There's no doubt that we can still wonder about the illusion of democracy--the odd way computer voting machines sometimes function or malfunction, the curious coincidence of decrepit machines ending up in minority districts, or in districts where Democrats tend to win.  Hanging chads. Done deals.  And then we can wonder about how democracy actually relates to the fact that if you have enough money and can lie incessantly for a long enough period of time, many and possibly most people will end up believing the lie and acting, i.e., voting,  accordingly.  As Doghouse says this morning, it would do the Democratic Party some good to get a beat down next week, except for the fact that the Clown Car Party will then be in charge.  That's a hell of a choice.  And last weekend we, that is, the U.S. Government, was unable to communicate with one ninth of our ICBM fleet for unknown reasons.  Some kinda glitch.  Wires got "crossed."

Digby reports today that "we" are discussing with Russia about whether they might send a component of military into Afganistan.  We need more men with guns than we can provide ourselves.  And since Americans seem unable to remember much further back than a year--otherwise, why in the world is America according to most poling seriously considering putting the very same foxes back into the hen house after only two years sorta out back in the woods, where all they could do was to catch a distracted pullet now and then.  So sure--let's get "Ivan" to hep us out over there, since he shares a border with Afganistan, and used to be quite concerned over whether Afganistan might become so weird and radical as to upset the Soviet "natives" on the other side of the border.  Sure.  Let's get "Mikey" to give it a try.  How many people have died in pursuit of keeping Ivan out of Afganistan, a policy that started with Jimmy Carter fer gawd's sake?  Never mind.  That's ancien histoire, as Henry Kissinger would say in his seminar on politique real. 

Because we know that Afgans will never ever remember when they banded together and kicked Mikey right outa there back in the '80s.

I won't even speculate over whether that stern life the Afgans try to live--dust, rock, little electricity or video games or NFL or NASCAR or chocolate fruit loops or diabetes or heart disease or tv--has some how made their old memory pods stronger and more functional, for some reason.  Sure thing.  Mericans can't quite finish, bring in the Ruskies.  No dots will be connected.  Why?  BECAUSE WE NEVER EVER CONNECT THE GODDAM DOTS HERE.  Now do we?

I believe, ultimately, in the existential choice.  I will be at the polls next Tuesday.  I will vote for the Democrats.  Sometimes you have to opt for sawing off your arm to get out of the canyon, and with the sure and certain knowledge that you might indeed bleed to death before you make the rim and that cell phone you left in the Jeep before you decided to take a little afternoon hike to catch a few perfect photos of the sun dropping down below the rim.

Update.  My good old friend Malcolm Owen was here this week and we were talking about the ideas in this post.  He pointed out that if Jesus had wanted us to live in a democracy, He would have given us some candidates worthy of our vote. 

You Gotta Take Out A "Political Ad"?

number crunching

A man named Thomas Duane Poole, of Clayton, NC, took out a full page ad on the back page of the News and Observer, Raleigh's newspaper and the political paper of record in NC, last weekend.  Here's a link:
http://shopping.newsobserver.com/ROP/ads.aspx?advid=1381770&adid=10012

At the bottom it's described as a "political ad."  While the text presents a bit of history which has some political implications (one would hope), it's hardly an advertisment at all, but a history lesson mostly concerning Federal surplus and deficit since World War II.  Mr. Poole is rightly angry with the insistent dissembling which has become a daily feature of political conversation, particularly on the Right.  Like me, he has tired of hearing endless falsehoods, and of watching a living experiment in the Big Lie.  Except Mr. Poole went and did the actual research and offers, in his "ad," a history lesson.  Good for him.  There's an actual address on the bottom of the ad.  I plan to send him a note of thanks, as I hope others will as well.

A couple of days ago, Mr. Limbaugh, whom I sample for a few minutes during my lunch drive, said that this year's election was entirely about "ideas."  That was one remarkable statement.  What ideas?  I haven't noticed any at all.  On the Right we find nothing but mischaracterizations of the current administration.  On the Democratic Party's side, there is mainly a frightened effort to stress that each election is local and involves the particular candidates on the local ballot--not Mr. Obama. 

Big cudos to Mr. Poole, a fine North Carolina citizen.  Maybe the N&O ought to put him on the team.

West Virginia Hall of Fame

Tommy Thompson, Switzerland, 1977, (c) Mike Craver

From the Charleston Daily Mail, October 13, 2010:

Tommy Thompson of St. Albans. Born and raised in St. Albans, Thompson first heard many of the old jazz players and was introduced to Cajun music during a stint as a Coast Guard officer in New Orleans. He entered the graduate program in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963 where he divided his time between the five-string banjo and academia. In 1971, he took first place at the prestigious World Champion Old Time Banjo contest in Union Grove, NC. That same year, he co-founded the original Red Clay Ramblers, which he anchored for 22 years. Thompson died in 2003.

First of all, let me congratulate Tommy's extended family for this well-deserved honor, and I'm sorry Tommy didn't receive it while he still breathed.  "Give me the roses while I live" is a dictum up there with "living well is the best revenge," if not a Carter family paraphrase.  (Bloomsbury, meet A.P.; A.P., Mrs. Woolf.)  And then I'd remark that it is indeed true that Tommy Thompson co-founded the original Red Clay Ramblers, along with Jim Watson, Mike Craver, and myself.  Jim, Mike and moi will be playing at Mountain Empire Community College, Big Stone Gap, Va, this coming weekend. Joe Newberry will ably fill the "Thompson Banjo Chair."   Y'all come out and give a listen if you're in the general area.  There will be no trumpets in attendance, and hopefully no snow cones.

For more about Tommy see my link, Early Blurs, and
http://www.mikecraver.com/tttributes.html

Update.  The whirlwind weekend gig was a complete success.  The good people of Big Stone Gap treated us with wonderful professionalism; there were no sno-cones, which suggests to me that our acceptance of the critique of the sno-cone, even so much later down this road of tears, was acknowleged and accepted with forgiveness by our true and best audience. (One wonders if the Incorporated fared as well up in Asheville.)  The Powell valley is a beautiful place, and Mountain Empire Community College a beautiful facility.  One glimpses but briefly the great economic engine nestled behind the wooded ridges that line US 23 as it wends it's way to Norton and Alt 58--a quick and vanished view of more distant hills now eroded and flattened by coal removal, and then, at the bottom of a confluence of ridges, a gigantic processing facility, which appears to be in the process of expanding via the use of big red cranes.  (Wish I'd had my cam, darn it.)  I'll go to work in an hour and possibly watch at some point this week some 80 coal cars full of the black rocks that burn, rumbling past to our own electric plant down in the SE corner of Chatham, augmenting our own Nuclear Plant over in New Hill.  My computer works; the fridge mutters; the ball games were on as usual on a beautiful fall Sunday.  For another week we're safe from the true climate, which also required yesterday the first fire of the season here in our little redoubt--for some reason I was quite chilled and though it was warm outside, the house had gotten cool over the weekend.  There's plenty of wood till January at least, but it's time to get to cuttin'.  Good thing I have a full can of gas and a nice Echo at hand, keeping winter at bay.  My little forest is bought and paid for; that 'lectricity comes with a bill.  And dressing in the dark this morning, my bare little toe found that one chunk of oak I didn't put into the hopper last night--another proof of the season, less visual but more vivid than the maple on the hill. 

And discussing colors and such as we were just now, I agree with the suggestion by Charles Pierce that Ole Miss should be called "The Faulkners."  And why not the Tennessee Maples, I ask you?  They have the colors just exactly right out there in Knoxville. 

Short Stuff

Driftglass, this morning, said (or quoted) the following remarkable lines:

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

 I would presume that this nicely explains why there is a "Tea Party," as opposed to simply the Republican Opposition.

Update to the "Oregon's Entry" post:  Remarkably, some right side commenters actually think Mr. Robinson bested Ms Maddow in the interview.  It's true that he managed to talk over her questions repeatedly, and to accuse her of "sarcasm" a number of times.  He also was able to ignore the fact that she was quoting his own statements and asking for clarification of them.  If this is "besting," then the parallel universes become that much more perfectly parallel I guess.  Robinson did little more that sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "la-la-la-la."  Ms Maddow didn't "make" him answer her questions.  But the underlying presumption here--on the part of the right wing analysis--is that in such a conversation, it's all about a triumph of the will (to coin a phrase).  And this is perhaps because that view--that "it's all about a triumph of the will"--is the basic view out of which the right operates, day in and day out.  Well, ok.  But I would point out that such a point of view is the end of conversation, and a way universalizing the dictum that military action is diplomacy by other means.  Or as Mussolini put it, when queried about his program if elected: "My first act as head of state will be to kill you."

Such a world is wonderland.  The experiment has been executed by a number of totalitarian states, notably the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, China, and Japan, during our bloody century past.  You tell me.  Is it reasonable to ask a candidate if they still believe that AIDs doesn't exist when they've so stated that opinion,  or what the meaning might be of their maintaining in print a book arguing that black people as a race are intellectually inferior, or if they really believe that the theory of human assisted climate change is a "hoax."  Seems to me that these are fair and reasonable questions to ask of a candidate for public office (particularly the US Congress).  Seems to me that a candidate who just goes "la-la-la-la" as a response hasn't actually "won" the field.  I don't think that's just my arbitrary point of view either, to be "balanced" by some erstwhile Mussolini who disagrees.  But this is the place the great conversation has come, it would seem.