Jimmy and Me
Jimmy
Breslin's good company to be in. Jimmy and me are the kind of people that
*modern* people don't have much truck with. Newsflash: Jimmy & me don't
give a shit. Here's why. There's a grand tradition of the independent curmudgeon
in American thought, and it runs counter to stereotypes of acceptable discourse.
We mimic Socrates, such a royal pain in the ass that the Athenian oligarchs'
only solution was to poison him. Or Diogenes' unseemly performance art, wandering
around Athens, lantern in hand, searching for an honest man.
 
We curmudgeons are burdened by our obligation to remember. When you add cultural
memory to the many obligations of modern life, the going gets rough. Momentary
Culture is the order of any day. Momentary Culture is like a single one of the
thousands of two-dimensional images from an MRI scan – a paper-thin slice
of a human. Each slice no more represents the human than page 326 represents
an encyclopedia. But at any moment, the improbably attractive ex-class presidents
imitating journalists on cable news offer a two-dimensional representation of
a three-dimensional culture. Naturally, it's better for them if you don't remember
the slice they showed you last week, or month, or year.
Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought
over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.
— Jimmy
Breslin
We curmudgeons feel obliged to image the body of our culture in three dimensions.
It's what Jimmy Breslin did late last night, in a Newsday
column that he's been putting out for so many years but which, he says, he's
done with. He's going on to greener pastures, having called this election for
Kerry half a year ago and, it seems, uninterested in the hullabaloo over what
has seemed obvious
to him all this time:
One day last May, I assigned the election to John Kerry. I said it early,
and often. As I looked more, I saw that it shouldn't even be close. I said
that in this space more than once. Now I am so sure that I am not even going
to bother to watch the results tonight. I am going to bed early, for I must
rise in the darkness and pursue immediately an exciting, overdue project.
Besides, if I was up, so many people, upon seeing every word I said of
this election coming true on television in front of them, would be kissing
my hands and embarrassing me with outlandish praise. So I go to bed with total
confidence. I will get up and stroll to other meadows. I invented this column
form. I now leave, but will return here for cameo appearances. And I leave
today as the only one in America who from the start was sure John Kerry would
win by a wide margin.
Jimmy then goes on to explain his reasons. He cites the fact that Bush lost
to Gore by 500,000 votes, and 537 in Florida, where Nader had 125,000 votes.
He's got a lot of other technical reasons, like the youth vote and Cell Phone
Nation's unpolled proletariat. (check
'em out), but they add up to the same message. Bush is toast, put a fork
in him.
Not Quite the Only One in America...
All year, I've been telling
anyone who would listen that Bush would lose to whoever the Democrats put up
against him. My reasoning was that Bush wouldn't earn more votes than he got
last time and that his opposition is highly energized. Even Jimmy Breslin lists
the analytics supporting his reasoning, something he must do to fill his column
and support his position, but the conclusion has always seemed so obvious, I
just stuck with the basics:
+ Kerry: highly energized base
– Bush: about the same number of votes
= Game Over.
Now this is thematic analysis, which you'd expect from an English Literature
major. There are a few constant themes in life, and a uniquely American theme
is that our Presidents better be smart, articulate, courageous and accountable.
We Americans may form our impressions of those traits instinctively, not intellectually,
but we're clear about the requirements. Those requirements have driven lifelong
conservative voters
and newspapers
to endorse Kerry.
Another of those requirements is sportsmanlike conduct and an aversion to bullies
who'll do anything to win. Consider this: Everyone, on both sides, accepts unquestioningly
that the Rove/Ashcroft axis will punish people who speak out too stridently
against Bush. Ponder that for a moment. Our passive acceptance of that fact
is anathema to the American Experiment, right up there with the Alien
and Sedition Acts of 1798. We curmudgeons are obligated to remember things
like that.
Smokers at the Gate
There's a melancholy presence around most office building entrances: the smokers
shunned by their peers banding together based through their single common denominator,
a habit killing them faster than the rest of us.
The Director of Finance is out there chatting it up with a part-time stock
boy with whom she has nothing else in common, their mutual awkwardness palpable.
When you cling to an obsolescing fixation, you become, like politicians, strange
bedfellows with other obsessives.
This was how liberals have felt for the last several years (some say decades).
The ideologies of narrowly-educated suburbanites and plump retirees moved to
the right even as conservatives offered the most lively debates, precipitating
think tanks and a blizzard of white papers. Gradually shunted to the left of
the shifting mainstream, those who once called themselves liberals became progressives
and then, in 2002, became silent. Their notion that an energetic bureaucracy
and restrained military could solve our ills had been totally discredited and
its sizable base became political sleepwalkers.
Last Minute Fix
As I predicted
again most recently, on September 30 (happily, just before the first
debate, in Kerry's darkest hour), many of the vested interests that profited
from toeing the Republican line have shaken off their self-interested narrowness
and now see our tiny, naked emperor for who he has always been, a small-minded
poster boy for arrested development:
It begins tonight: a growing consensus by the press that George W. Bush
doesn't deserve our support. Most people in the press are more sensible than
ideological, and a tight race is in the interest of the media. So the instinct
that caused them to remark on Dubya's "unexpectedly" good debate
performance 4 years ago inclines them to see a shift back toward John Kerry,
regardless of their true opinion. So that's what we'll see.
My other prediction is that few major newspapers will endorse Bush. Wherever
objective, informed people gather, it's hard for them to see the combination
of cosmetic security, management malpractice and fiscal impropriety as supportable.
During October, the press will "reluctantly" reconsider their
past support for the president and discover more promise in Kerry's record
than in a man who has shown his ineptitude in every endeavor he's attempted,
now including this one.
The endorsements by responsible papers, from the Albuquerque
Tribune to The "heavy-hearted" Economist,
paint a picture of thoughtful, reasonable and, often, reluctant editors endorsing
Kerry in October, often after carrying the Bush banner for four years. All
the Missouri papers have endorsed Kerry, prominent among the 43 papers who've
recanted their Bush endorsements in 2000. Hell, Kerry's the first Dem that the
Bangor Daily News has endorsed since the 1800s; for the Orlando Sentinel it's
been 40 years. At least they're braver than the deafening silence of rabidly
conservative papers: Bush is just the 3rd Republican in two centuries to not
win an endorsement from the Detroit News, and the Tampa Tribune's failure to
endorse is its first since 1952.
This is stirring stuff: any striking departure from well-worn patterns are
more indicative of honesty than any of us reinforcing our biases, backing and
filling as we seek to support old divinations with new tea leaves. We should
not be surprised. Like it or not, real conservatives are far more value-conscious
than average Democrats, IMHO. They see the Democrats as pandering to the masses
rather than sticking to the values that made this country great.
1980 wasn't like 1984
Election Night, 1980 seems like yesterday. I was a real estate developer in
Denver, wired into the booster club of developers, homebuilders, highway contractors
and our suppliers, all believers that we were hobbled by the regulations that
the city planners and environmentalists had thrown up to separate us from the
hugely prosperous lives we were leading. I went to a party at a highway contractor's
home, a fellow who prided himself that his bids "included doing the work."
We watched a country weary of the liberal rhetoric throw out Jimmy Carter and
throw in with Ronald Reagan hook, line & sinker (archaic term for, like,
a lot).
It was an amazing, dramatic, peaceful and gentlemanly shift of power. We remarked
how we lived in the only country that could shift governments and ideologies
so drastically and so civilly. Tuesday night will be the Republicans' chance
to see if they can as graciously cede the reins to the new order. Few are optimistic,
so most rational people are hoping for a lopsided victory. My guess all along
has been that they won't be disappointed, but I was surprised on Sunday morning
to hear Tucker Carlson agree, guessing that it will be a two-point victory–for
Kerry!
Losers
The big losers in this election will be both parties, for this is the sunset
of broadcast politics, expensive pollsters and the two parties as we know them.
Their unmitigated cynicism, reach, grasp and greed doom them and their most
extreme supporters to the margins of the political scene, like the smokers shivering
outside a New York club that once welcomed them.
I now can get back to my regular programming, which has to do with building
communities via web services. The web service that interests me most is the
one called Xpertweb, which had been my passion and avocation for over a decade.
That hobby was interrupted 18 months ago when I came across the NeoCon train
wreck that derailed our great nation, fueled by its passengers' fears that evil
non-Christians might strike again. I felt obligated to see if I might help.
The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man dies but once. Our
collective bravado-clad cowardice has caused us all a thousand deaths (over
1100 by the latest count), but history will prove again that you don't change
values in the middle of the stream, no matter how scared you are.
That's why Kerry is the true conservative, and not the Bushies, who are radical
by any measure. America's core values matter more than the the threat of random
violence to us or our peers, leveraged into corporate welfare by people who
don't know any better. I'd rather watch a 767 fly into my apartment window than
congeal my core values so I can die in an ICU with a tube down my throat.
2:03:54 PM 
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