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Home is the sailor (sigh)

By Michael J. Smith on Saturday September 27, 2008 11:20 AM

I feel like a combination of the Ancient Mariner and Rip van Winkle. Spent most of the last three weeks inching a small sailboat from Maine to New York against adverse winds and the odd hurricane. But it was a great deal of fun, all in all, and, better yet, I missed a big chunk of the Presidential campaign, certainly an undiluted blessing.

Unfortunately I was unable to miss the "debate" last night. A sad spectacle.

The personal contrast between the two candidates couldn't be sharper, of course. The plodding, incoherent, dully perseverative McCain, and the quick, articulate, obviously intelligent Obama -- day and night, right?

Wrong. The trouble is that smart though Obama may be, he's imprisoned himself in the same mental Gulag as his dimwit opponent. McCain is stupid by nature, but Obama is stupid by choice.

So the two of them tangoed tediously round all the tired talking points of the last thirty years -- tax cuts, "earmarks", waste, supporting the troops, where exactly the war-du-jour should take place, the dire Iranian threat, and the dire Russian threat -- re-heating for the seventh or eighth time the rancid intellectual leftovers of the Reagan days.

* * *

I was talking the other day with a born-and-bred New York liberal friend of mine -- call him Benedick. Benedick knows my views on the presidential shell game, but our conversation naturally turned to it anyway, and Benedick finally burst out: "But won't you be glad to see the last of these... these... hicks? These moose-skinners, these gun nuts, these NASCAR idiots, with their dumb pseudo-cowboy talk and their beer cans and their offroad buggies tearing up the land? I know, I know, Obama's a warmonger and an imperialist and a tool of Wall Street and all that, but shit, at least he's a person like us!"

It got me thinking. I'm not all that crazy about hicks. I grew up in a hick town, and left as soon as I could. I don't have any romantic illusions about the world of daytime television and Budweiser.

But maybe because I know that world so well, I also don't have any particular fear of it. To Benedick hicks are scary dangerous alien people, and Obama at least looks to him like somebody who wouldn't do or say anything creepy and embarrassing if you asked him to dinner. And for Benedick, though he understands Obama's limitations quite well intellectually, that is reason enough to prefer him: he's People Like Us, or PLU for short.

Benedick, in other words, is doing precisely what the rest of the electorate does in our content-free political process: he is going with the person he identifies with. He will cast his vote in November for a man he knows will hand out boundless largesse to busted Wall Street speculators; who will jump through any hoop the Israel lobby holds up for him; who will continue to wage war in Iraq and wage more war in Afghanistan and probably Pakistan, too; who will continue to provoke and goad Russia and try to regain dominance over Iran; who will solve the health care mess by making people buy private insurance. And Benedick will sign off on all this because Obama is -- as FDR said about the elder Somaza -- a son of a bitch; but he's our son of a bitch.

Comments (12)

I'm sorry, but is "hick" anything other than a racial slur? As one from a redneck small town in Nevada now living in NYC, in addition to living in UK for 4 years, I've come to the conclusion that people are the same shitheads everywhere you go. Being liberal is more about affecting the right manners than anything else far as I can tell.

I was out with a friend conducting vox-pop interviews in Union Sq on Tuesday asking about the looming depression and one of our subjects, an NYU prof, stated that New Yorkers have a "more sophisticated" understanding of the economy than people other places. I can't say I've detected this myself--people are subject to at least the same, if not more, delusions about enterprise and the freemarket here as anywhere I've ever been (in the UK people are a bit more realistic, to be fair). At least in Nevada people know enough not to trust the government.

Indecently, New York ranks very low nation-wide in terms of distribution of wealth and pay with respect to productivity, i.e., the workforce receives low compensation but yield high output (I am in fact preparing to take action against my employer for discriminatory pay practice.)

In summary, I can name a-hundred-and-one things, from police racism to real estate broker parasites, that liberal New Yorkers ain't doing jack shit about.

Seems you missed MJS's point, Pete. He wasn't defending liberals, New Yorkers, or liberal New Yorkers. Quite the opposite.

And, yes, "hick" IS something more than a racial slur, though, again, MJS wasn't exactly using it without qualification, either.

And if you Brits are so different, why the participation in Iraq, even to this day?

Nationalism is no substitute for thinking.

mjosef:

Welcome back. We on our desert isles were bereft and wondering if you had, as one sage put it, gone "Into the Wild." I agree with much of what you say, except for the basic fact that I'm with Benedick. Sorry. Of course all of this is malevolently futile, but McCain after Bush? More Regent University and intentionally tortured syntax? However bad our supersystem functions, it is the only one we have, it has enormous consequences, and a "dime's worth of difference" attitude is abject petulance. If we are going to have our jailers, at least make them nicer torturers.

As they say in Chiapas, "Hope belongs to the resistance."

Michael Hureaux:

Nicer torturers? Is that like bamboo shoots under the finger nails as opposed to water boarding? People who engage in conversation about the family between rounds of cattle prodding? I guess I'm still trying to figure out why we allow the state any right to torture at all.

Son of Uncle Sam:

Even sadists need to eat Mike, they don't mind the work at all in fact it may make them happy and feel rewarded. "Interrogators" and Chaplains alike as an MOS constantly have openings proving it's hard to find good help these days no matter what sector you work in. In a free economy it only makes sense to give people the jobs they want. If the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator said you'd be a wonderful dancer, put on your tutu and be proud! It's sort of cheap, un-American and beneath you to ridicule an entire craft. Like any job it's tough work and at the end of the day like police and fire fighters and doctors, they're saving lives.

peter:

Interesting. Here we have a large voting bloc placing cultural preferences over the issues they claim to hold dear. For 100 points, name that party.

paine:

i take
---as i suspect most of u do---
the choice between one new emperor
and another
as a highly constained choice
for anti empirists

a choice
where rationality can't effectively calculate
the lesser evil

if
"vote greater evil now"
means history accelerates towards its
next cataract
which then
is
indeed the lesser evil

i guess it depends
on whether or not you believe we're on a time trip some where

to a place called
social progress

mjosef:

I don't think we "allow" anybody the right to torture us, be it human, state, or family, but let's take a look at the state of power: them, untold; us, infinitesimal. I give nobody that right, but boy, does torture happen, over and over again, and it will continue, in the dark or in the hinterlands, as long as we refuse, on all sides, to see how decrepit our supersystem is. Without serious regulation, the police will torture, the military will torture. Again, crippling lack of realism (CLR) is the sainted left's largest intellectual failure, and one we better start seeking therapy for.

Wow, Smiff. Given the events of the past month or so, I'm surprised you don't feel more like a combination of the Ancient Mariner and Charlton Heston at the end of Planet Of The Apes:

"GOD DAMN YOU!
GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL...!"

bk:

mjosef: Is not faith in "serious regulation" in itself an example of "critical lack of realism"? As long as there is centralized power, there will be abusive torture, regulations be damned.

op:

" 'Interrogators' and Chaplains alike "
as means of subsistence
both these vocations
like all regulatory professions
lack
equity participation

espirit de corps
even
when laced with free swim sadism
is hardly
a substitute
for a real piece of the higher action

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