Filed under: About Pigspittle, Life, in general, Politics | Tags: canvassing, David Plouffe, Obama, political campaigns
I’m plagued with ennui, I’ll admit it. Three weeks since the election and I still can’t focus on any single thing. In the past week, I’ve distracted myself with genealogy research, a friending frenzy on Facebook, and started reading yet another history book (in addition to The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492-1800 that I’ve been picking at for the past three months). Now I’m reading Night Comes to the Cumberlands by Harry Caudill, something I was supposed to read 25+ years ago in a sociology class but never quite got around to (raising the question once again, how did I manage to graduate?). I don’t know why I didn’t read it—it’s actually kind of interesting.
In the past three weeks I’ve cleaned the kitchen stove and cupboards, the washer and dryer, the floors, the bathroom. Helped rake semi-frozen, wet leaves. Counted the dead deer on my way to work each morning (four, and one appears to be headless). Celebrated Obama’s election a couple of times, most recently with beer. Removed the dry leaves, one at a time, off the bittersweet branches that are in two vases. Planted some mums. Felt slightly crafty but not enough to launch into a full-fledged project, such as sewing curtains.
Filed under: Politics, Pop Culture | Tags: Christmas, Oliver North, republicans, Sean Hannity
(Stolen from my friend Bob…)
Filed under: Humor, Politics, Pop Culture | Tags: Dick Cavett, Sarah Palin
Although I’m a week behind in nearly everything it seems (bills, reading, work), I can’t resist sharing this wonderfully biting blog post (not quite a week old) from Dick Cavett. Who knew Cavett was a blogger now? Not me. As a pre-teen, I watched Cavett’s talk show and even then knew that what I was watching was slightly left of center, slightly rebellious, just as the Smothers Brothers were. Cavett’s blog is no less entertaining. His latest post laments “The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla,” punctuated parenthetically with wry asides like this:
(In passing, has anyone observed that hunting animals with high-powered guns could only be defined as sport if both sides were equally armed?)
And this typically deadpan observation:
It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.
Contented sigh. My blogosphere is complete.
Filed under: About Pigspittle, Politics | Tags: 2008 presidential election, democrats, Obama, Ohio politics, republicans, working class voters
I stumbled across George Packer’s* Interesting Times blog today. I was vaguely aware that he was “slumming” in Ohio to report on the election. I scrolled down to a post he wrote a week ago about the white working class vote. In it, Packer relates his experience of interviewing voters from the Appalachian foothills, those southeastern Ohio counties—Athens, Meigs, Morgan, and Washington—that have suffered as much as any Rustbelt county and are more likely to resemble nearby West Virginia than Ohio’s capital city, Columbus, which is only an hour or so away. Packer recognized something those of us on the ground in Ohio recognized: the electorate is complex and this was no ordinary presidential election.
People can hold racist views and still vote against them, because they hold other views, too—they contain multitudes. And people can change. No one should imagine that the country has suddenly lurched in the direction of the Upper West Side. Residents of my neighborhood of Brooklyn have certain beliefs that are incompatible with those of residents of Glouster, Ohio. Obama will be wise to govern in ways that leave those unbridgeable differences alone, and instead direct the power of government to improving people’s lives in both places.
The identity of Pigspittle is similar to that of Meigs County. While some families have long roots in the ground, others were among the thousands of Appalachians who migrated North after the coal mines closed. They carried with them the same accents and idioms and holy-roller religion (though, to my knowledge, none of the famed Meigs County weed). They also carried a resentment on their backs that is still evident, though not nearly as violent as it was fifty years ago. (A black woman who grew up in Pigspittle told me stories of how she was treated in high school, how she endured razors thrown at her during drill team practice.) I confess that I find it nearly impossible to understand racism in Pigspittle. African Americans and Hispanics make up a minuscule proportion of the population here—no more than two percent. Yet, listening to some, you get the impression that the county is overrun with minorities who want to take their Pigspittlian jobs and run their Pigspittlian schools.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: Federal Reserve, financial crisis, Freedom of Information Act, Valerie Plame case, White House emails
Kudos to two organizations for pursuing that rabbit-hole of obfuscation otherwise known as the White House. First, to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) for winning the right to sue the Executive Office of the President (EOP), the Office of Administration (OA), and the Archivist, and force the OA to restore deleted White House emails from March 2003 to October 2005 before they are irretrievable. According to a press release on November 10 from CREW, “D.C. District Court Judge Henry Kennedy upheld lawsuits brought by [CREW] and the National Security Archive challenging the White House’s failure to properly store and recover millions of emails.” As reported on the Washington Post’s investigations blog, “The emails are thought to pertain to several controversial issues including the Iraq war, the Valerie Plame leak and the CIA’s destruction of interrogation tapes.”
On Saturday night, I dreamed that I could see Saturn’s rings. Hard to tell where I was standing—on Saturn itself? on a nearby moon?— but the rings appeared as shimmering curtains, like the Aurora Borealis except in blues and purples and yellows. Last night, I dreamed that I was on some scientific adventure, driving with a crew in the back of a station wagon along a dusty road. I was handed a paper cup that contained a large insect, as tall as a praying mantis. It had buggy eyes and long brown wings. Someone broke off the legs and handed them to me. I put them in my mouth, started to chew, and when no one was looking, spit them out the station wagon’s back window onto the dusty road.
With a fresh pile of wood and plenty of kindling from the post-Ike wind storm, I’m ready for winter. According to AccuWeather.com, this season is likely to be bitterly cold for land east of the Great Plains.
Cold I can handle. Snow I can handle. Snow, cold, ice, and no power? Nyet. That was the combination we faced during the Christmas of 2004. I sat in front of this fireplace (why did they build it in the kitchen, for god’s sake?) for five days, in a sleeping bag, with a radio, a book, candles, ashtray, coffee (when we could get it), and cigarettes. I obsessively poked and stirred and grumbled. I felt myself morphing into Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Filed under: Politics, Pop Culture | Tags: Add new tag, bill o'reilly, campaign news
More studies to report from the Pew people. In a survey among Americans, Bill O’Reilly ranked first among most liked and disliked campaign reporters/commentators. Oh, to be so loved and despised simultaneously. More interesting to me is the fact that fully half of those surveyed didn’t have a dog in the race at all.
Not surprisingly, more than 80% are looking forward to campaign-free news. What? Tired of “thanks but no thanks”? You betcha, Charlie.
I just took the 2005 Political Typology test over at the Pew Research web site. OK, so it’s a little old. Still, I’m fascinated by the fact that even in 2005, liberals represented the fastest growing typology among nine categories. Also interesting is that the fissures among Republicans rest primarily in the role of government—swinging from 80% of “pro-government conservatives” who think more should be done to help the poor to 67% of “enterprisers” who believe the government can’t afford to do more. The study reported,
The 2005 study also buttresses the finding in 1999 that the Republican Party’s base is now divided into three core subgroups. In both 1987 and 1994 the predominant divisions on the right were between two ideological clusters, Enterprisers and Moralists, defined by the relative emphasis each placed on conservative economic and social values. The 1999 study found, and the 2005 analysis confirms, the development of a critical third element of the Republican base a group we refer to as Pro-Government Conservatives. While this group agrees fully with the religious values of Social Conservatives, and the assertive foreign stance of both of the other Republican groups, its members are predominantly lower income and struggling financially. Perhaps as a result, they favor greater government action in assisting the poor and in regulating business to improve the environment, as well as to protect morality.
I hope a new study is done after this election season. I want to know how these pro-government conservatives voted.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: democrats, karl rove, Lee Atwater, PBS, republicans, television
I have a backlog of PBS programs recorded on our DVR—American Experience, Nova, and the most recent edition of Frontline—but they’re gonna have to wait because tonight PBS is airing Frontline’s look at Lee Atwater, appropriately titled “Boogie Man.” Often cited as the evil genius behind today’s wedge politics and a mentor to Karl Rove, Atwater was the chair of the Republican National Party in 1989. He died two years later from a brain tumor. According to Frontline’s senior editor, Ken Dornstein, “…Atwater reportedly had a religious awakening and was terrified of going to hell for tactics like the ‘Willie Horton’ ad, which famously linked an African American convicted murderer to ‘88 presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis. But, as with many stories floated by Atwater over the years, producer [Stefan] Forbes finds that this one, too, wasn’t entirely what it seemed to be.”
I’ll be in political-geek heaven.
The 90-minute documentary airs tonight at 9PM EST on PBS (check your local listings).
