About a year ago, I was spending lots of time in a room with a bunch of my closest friends, the negotiating team from Ginormous Defense and our counterparts across the room, the Teamsters local, who in some cases are people I regard as friends. Anyway, the union honcho and I were talking about politics, and he said something acidic about Twitsheet de la Dweeb and his cohorts. I didn't disagree; however, I said that I blamed Jimmy Hoffa I for the mess we've got. He stared at me -- he's at a level in the union where they probably have arcane initiation requirements involving tatoos of Hoffa in sensitive places, secret oaths, and something like the Skull and Bones initiation sequence from The Good Shepard. He asked me what I was talking about and I said, the Construction Workers were probably as much to blame. Now he was definitely curious, and asked for clarification. I smiled at him and said, "Who'd the Teamsters and the Union Movement REALLY support in 1968? 1972? 1980? By stiffing Humphrey over cultural conservatism as opposed to supporting the most vocal champion of labor in the history of the Senate, the whole thing started to come down..." He looked at me, shook his head and nodded.
If you live long enough, and 40 years isn't all that long, you can see the cows, ducks, horses, chickens and wolves return.Krugman has a great column this morning on this aspect of the Republicans and their southern strategy, pointing out that the government by the parochially loyal but incompetent was inevitable. However, I differ from Paul on one point -- Bush is EVERYBODY"S fault. EVERYBODY with a vote, a buck or two, a degree of awareness and perhaps some values, beliefs and attitudes that reach beyond the reptillian part of the brain that reacts and is driven primarily by fear of "the other" to cite my French Existentialist subconscious.
The "other" is a mass of things -- in 1972, it was people with long hair, girls without bras and "niggers riding in cadillacs..." It's new -- and old --ideas like the Constitution of the United States, economic justice, free love, drugs and open sexuality. Now, from that partial list, some ideas are good ideas, some are bad ideas and some are kind of neutral. But, fearing ideas is bloody stupid. Being afraid of the other just because they are others is equally absurd. If Bush actually read The Stranger, he would have encounted exactly what put him in power and the inevitable, albeit often long delayed result. Let's have some Dylan --Roxy Music Style.
If you live long enough, and 40 years isn't all that long, you can see the cows, ducks, horses, chickens and wolves return.Krugman has a great column this morning on this aspect of the Republicans and their southern strategy, pointing out that the government by the parochially loyal but incompetent was inevitable. However, I differ from Paul on one point -- Bush is EVERYBODY"S fault. EVERYBODY with a vote, a buck or two, a degree of awareness and perhaps some values, beliefs and attitudes that reach beyond the reptillian part of the brain that reacts and is driven primarily by fear of "the other" to cite my French Existentialist subconscious.
The "other" is a mass of things -- in 1972, it was people with long hair, girls without bras and "niggers riding in cadillacs..." It's new -- and old --ideas like the Constitution of the United States, economic justice, free love, drugs and open sexuality. Now, from that partial list, some ideas are good ideas, some are bad ideas and some are kind of neutral. But, fearing ideas is bloody stupid. Being afraid of the other just because they are others is equally absurd. If Bush actually read The Stranger, he would have encounted exactly what put him in power and the inevitable, albeit often long delayed result. Let's have some Dylan --Roxy Music Style.
Comments