Summations Only

Man with a Hoe (Jean-Francois Millet) I grew up in a poor working family in the midwest. My father finished seven years of school, was abandoned to an orphanage, went to war in the South Pacific at 18 and returned broken by malaria and wounds, and then worked for 43 years at the same paper cutting plant before dying at 63 from "white lung".He was a remarkably intelligent man, with near-prodigy abilities at mental arithmetic and memory.Our neighborhood was the cesspit of the city, the southwest corner through which the river carried all the effluents and wastes of undesirable industries: stockyards and slaughterhouses, creosote mills, sanitation plant, city dump and incinerator... The waters we played in changed colors daily.Only the exceptionally gifted and/or extraordinarily fortunate escaped that life.I found my first understanding of an anger I had always felt when I read The Man With The Hoe (Edward Markham) at age 10. I remember the day and the hour, the place and the weather, even the smell of the air that day. I wept and shook as I read it again and again.I doubt Markham is taught much now; he's certainly not considered a major American poet. Here's opening and ending excerpts from the poem. It's readily found online.

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THE MAN WITH THE HOE
by Edwin Markham

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BOWED by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power.
To feel the passion of Eternity?

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O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?

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Over at Slate William Saletan writes to the same point.I particularly enjoyed his concluding paragraph:

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Cheer Up, Republicans
You’re going to have a moderate Republican president for the next four years: Barack Obama.

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Obama’s no right-winger. You might have serious issues with his Supreme Court justices or his moves on immigration or the Bush tax cuts. But you probably would have had similar issues with Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford. Obama’s in the same mold as those guys. So don’t despair. Your country didn’t vote for a socialist tonight. It voted for the candidate of traditional Republican moderation. What should gall you, haunt you, and goad you to think about the future of your party is that that candidate wasn’t yours.

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For me, one word sums of the importance of Obama's victory: SCOTUS.Had Romney won, and had the opportunity to appoint one or more justices, the most regressive, reactionary ideas we've seen in many decades would have been enshrined for at least a generation, and decades of progress would have been rolled back.I'd like to thank young voters in particular for saving their elders from their own worst impulses. So I will.Thanks, kids. You're alright.

Yes, I'm quoting and replying to myself. Get over it--I voted, we won, I get certain privileges.Anyway, it has been pointed out to me (but not by me) that I should similarly thank women, blacks and Latinos. Thank you, one and all.If I were onifre, I'd observe that a party full of black and Latino women is my kind of party. But I'm not, so I won't.That set me thinking, especially in light of Coyote's comments on our liberal bubble. So I did some poking around for election analyses + liberal bubbles and ended up, again, at Slate.A week prior to the election, Tom Socca offered a sharp (and hopeful) analysis of "identity politics" as disparaged by conservatives, while tackling the notion of Slate as a liberal bubble.He almost persuades me that the Southern Strategy has gasped its last breath somewhere in a Fox News studio. Why Do White People Think Mitt Romney Should Be President?

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This has been the foundation of Republican presidential politics for more than four decades, since Richard Nixon courted and won the votes of Southerners who'd turned against the Democratic Party because of integration and civil rights. The Party of Lincoln became the party of Lincoln's assassins, leveraging white anger into a regional advantage and eventually a regional monopoly. It's all very basic and old news, but it's still considered rude to say so, even as Republican strategists talk about winning the white voters and only the white voters.

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And he's real good on bubbles. It's worth a read.

Well, I can't believe I read the entire thing, but I did.You certainly have an enormous problem.One face of that problem is claiming that the "American left" (by which I understand anyone to the left of Genghis Khan) oppresses economic vitality with "confiscatory tax rates" when, in fact, taxes are at extraordinarily low levels, historically speaking, and we had greater wealth, growth and productivity under the higher Clinton-era tax rates.Another face of that problem is the attempt by philosophical conservatives to present themselves as champions of liberty when their standard bearers, the Taliban side of the GOP coalition, wants the government to intrude into the most intimate aspects of citizens' lives to impose matters of individual conscience with the fiat of law.The demonization of the Eurozone as a nest of socialist leeches is especially interesting, in light of the fact that Europe has grimly pursued the austerity measures advocated by American conservatives, while Obama's administration has pursued classic stimulative measures, albeit timid ones, given GOP obstruction.Yet the Eurozone is now facing 12% unemployment while the U.S. economy continues to improve by pretty much every measure. I am confident that conservatives recognize the strong possibility of another economic boom during Obama's second administration--a surging recovery that would have appeared in his first administration if the GOP hadn't put their party's interest ahead of the nation's.The GOP played a cut-throat game for all the marbles in the 2008-2012 term, and miscalculated badly.In short, the most enormous problem conservatism faces is that it is demonstrably wrong on pretty much every count. American voters haven't been seduced by ponies of dependency--they've (god stop this metaphor I can't) been repelled by the horses conservatism rode in on: oligarchical wealth and power, and theocratic control of private life.On a side note, the guy writes like a college freshman penning diatribes for underground newspapers back in the 60s. Only the villains have changed.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

Can you name one current confiscatory tax rate? Note you did not address the point of conservatives seeking to impose their moral views on others. So apparently you think freedom is only the power to impose your moral views on others. Yes: the part where conservative philosophy is supposedly better for the economic health of nations. Again, note that you made no attempt to address the abject failure of conservative-driven austerity measures in Europe vs. the success of economic stimulus in the U.S. So was he forcing legislation down the throat of a hapless America or failing to use his power? I have difficulty keeping these conservative arguments straight.We would have had a surging recovery because that is the typical pattern for the U.S. economy when braced with stimulative measures. Unfortunately, the GOP prevented a stimulus strong enough to result in quick recovery.The notion that Obama had a supermajority in the Senate for two years and could pass anything he wanted is simply wrong. There were never 60 Democratic senators during that time.Don't try to make up your own facts. The GOP, rather than attempting to protect the country's interests, were ready to destroy the creditworthiness of the U.S. with legislative intransigence during the debt ceiling debacle. Never before had a political party done this--they only blinked when financial markets began marking down U.S. ratings, and polls showed the public held the GOP responsible. In every standard of measure: the lack of success of their economic prescriptions in Europe, the disdain with which the U.S. electorate treated their candidate. See all the above. Ah the media. That's too empty-set to merit a response.Never mind the ponies--but how can you be unable to make sense of that phrase if you follow political events in the U.S.? You do read news from multiple sources, I trust? Ever heard of a false dilemma? It is astonishing how powerfully the media were able to fool so many people for so long, according to you. Of course, it could be that the smaller set of conservative ideologues were instead misled by their own media--you might have noticed some of the effects of that on election night at Fox. A college graduate often writes no better than a college freshman.Congratulations on debating rather than merely jeering. That's great.On the other hand, replies like "liberal media...marry your brother...smoke a joint...liberal media..." aren't really substantive--why do all that work to quote-box my points and your responses if they aren't really refutations at all? The one matter of evidence you sought to address was the make-up of the Senate 2008-2010, and you were wrong about that.Try picking my two or three main arguments. Refute them by establishing a common theme to my errors (thesis), write a few well-organized paragraphs of evidence, and then synthesize a summary conclusion. It's actually easier than all that typography.It's what the article's author failed to do. That's why I said he writes like a college freshman--sound, fury, stilted diction, circular logic, zero evidence... He had it all.

So, basically, you support liberty for everyone who agrees with your views on sex and drugs?

We Yanks did the right thing.As it turns out, that wasn't really a right or left thing--it was a centrist thing, fueled by independents turned off by the wackier excesses of the Tea Party-haunted GOP, by young people of all races both repulsed by the coded race-baiting of the GOP and the haughty contempt of the wealthy, and by women appalled at the casually expressed sexism and misogyny revealed by GOP candidates.The GOP held the house, but only due to the extreme gerrymandering that followed their 2010 reactionary surge: Democrat candidates for the House as a group "won" the popular vote nationally.It's apparent that GOP leadership have learned little to nothing from their defeat: at best, we hear, oh, let's just back off on immigration reform and that will appease the Hispanics, then we'll be fine. They won't be fine. The demographic history of voting patterns shows that political allegiances formed early in life are lasting ones, and GOP policies will continue pushing an increasingly secular and diverse young America into the Democratic camp. Any attempts to moderate GOP positions will founder on their red-meat base: live by the fanatic, die by the fanatic.Now the right thing is to prepare for 2014 while pushing Democrats away from the militarism ingrained in both parties. Dislodging the GOP from the House will be difficult, given the advantages of incumbency and 2010 gerrymandering, but I am confident we'll make at least some progress.The greatest obstacle will remain the GOP's intellectual bad faith: attack the legitimacy of global climate change science, then blame climate disasters on American sinners in the hands of a wrathful God; aggravate the racial fears of a relatively shrinking white population to attack a black president, then accuse him of being a divider; accuse Democrats of identity poliitics for building a diverse coaltion, then run a campaign explicity targeting only whites; typify Democratic cost savings measures in Medicare as "defunding" it, while seeking to destroy it altogether with vouchers worth less each year of the plan; try to cripple Social Security in the name of fiscal disciple and deficit while refusing to acknowledge it is self-funded and requires only minor tweaking...The bad news is that the list is as interminable as it is insidious; the good news is it didn't work.I know there will be setbacks, but for now, just for a while, I'm basking in the fact that the future is so bright I gotta wear shades. Edited by Omnivorous, : the usual suspects