Showing posts with label 2008 presidential election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2008 presidential election. Show all posts

Friday, November 7, 2008

Wet Blanket
















All right, I apologize in advance for having written a post-election, wet-blanket poem.

But I know about and contribute modestly to this place called Nativity House in Tacoma. It's basically a place for homeless and otherwise impoverished, jobless people to go during the day--to get something warm to drink and something to eat, and to find something to do--like talk, play checkers, get a bus-pass, maybe get directed to a clinic or a job or whatever. Anyway, the place is always pretty busy, but in the last few months, the clientele has doubled: just one small measure in one medium-sized city of how the mischief of Bush II, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Wachovia, AIG, Exxon, et alia, "trickles" down, in the parlance of Reaganomics.



Now, About the Poor

After the spectacle, what about the poor?
After all that money spent per vote,
what about the poor? Hey,

I saw Cable News Network
create a hologram of a news-
correspondent, which talked
about how her hologram had been
made. Her hologram and how
it was made was news delivered
by the hologram. For Chrissakes,
this is insane. It's stupidity cubed.

I'd rather they'd interviewed
a real poor person for an hour,
with no commercial break--
someone working on the edge
of exhaustion and financial
collapse every day--that
would have been a bigger
surprise than a hologram,
especially if they'd helped
the person find a better job--
real news.

The poor have been trickled
on for a long time. Trickled
is a blend of tricked and tickled,
duplicity and petty cruelty.

Hey, what was that sound?
A kind of rumble, a sort of roar?
After the spectacle,
what about the poor?

Copyright Hans Ostrom 2008

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

To Where Do Conservatives Think of Exiling Themselves?












When Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II were elected, I often heard leftward-leaning folks threaten to leave the U.S. Usually this threat was expressed right before the election. "If Reagan gets reelected, I'm moving to Canada"--for example. I don't actually know anyone who ever exiled themselves thusly. I do know one fellow who has insured that he and his family now have dual citizenship in the U.S. and a European nation, just in case self-exile becomes an option.



Someone in class today raised the question of where rightward-leaning folk threaten to move to when elections disappoint them greatly. I owe this person a debt of gratitude because I had never thought about this question before.



As the person and others noted, Canada is probably out because many conservatives like to point to it and its healthcare system as embodying a cautionary tale. Is Dubai a possibility? I have no idea.


I've heard one can stash money in some place called the Cayman Islands, which I think are in the Caribbean, but I don't know if these islands are especially welcoming to conservative Americans.


I presume almost every nation in Europe would be unacceptable. Sweden has a shockingly effective combination of capitalism and socialism. The Swedes have universal healthcare, free college education, generous parental leave, and so on, but they also produce steel and cars, and they have a trade-surplus. They also talk very deliberately, and they listen during conversations, so Sweden is really not a comfortable place for most Americans, who like to talk first and listen later.



I think Swedes make their own jet-fighters, too, so they don't buy a lot of military equipment from us, and ever since the 18th century, they have become positively allergic to going to war--but we must remember that they did quite a lot of raiding for about 200 years way back when, circa 700-900 A.D.E. Maybe they got war out of their system, so to speak. Who knows? And there are only 8 million Swedes total, so with regard to possible invasions, the options are limited. They fought Norway a long time ago, and all the issues were settled. They don't like how Danes speak, but otherwise, I think they're okay with Denmark. They get along fine with Finns. They seem to pretend Russia doesn't exist, except for that terrible Chernobyl thing. They focus like a laser-beam on what to do during the summer. Is that a liberal or a conservative trait?



Conservatives seem to loathe France. Dennis Miller said that "France is dead to me" when the French leader balked at supporting the invasion of Iraq, for example. The French seem to have been unaffected by this announcement. How odd. One would think Dennis Miller's sentiments would hit France like an earthquake. :-)


Alaska is a possibility, I should think, because, well, look who's governor there--and you don't actually have to leave the nation. You just have to take a long flight, and in you're in a state governed by a person who galvanized the Republican base.



Numerous poetic possibilities exist, including "Sailing to Byzantium," in which Yeats dreams of "living" in a kind of permanent world of well wrought art, and Dickinson's poem about dwelling in possibility. Possibility is a very good town indeed.



Probably so-called conservatives and liberals have much in common, including the fact that neither actually exile themselves after a disappointing election, or at least very few of them do so. Also, for a long time, many people have argued that the Democratic and Republican parties are more similar than they pretend to be.



The Republicans may have to work on redefining themselves, however, at least for the purposes of the political spectacle. For a long time, they were very effective at demonizing "liberals" and thereby defining themselves by defining the "Other." They also once at least pretended to stand for fiscal restraint, but Reagan and Bush II pretty much ruined that with massive deficit spending. Ironically, Clinton seemed more economically prudent than they. Also, the Republicans wedded themselves to a particular strain of American Christianity--a mixture of wealth, interest in politics, and fundamentalism, best embodied, arguably, by Pat Robertson, who rails against a women's right to choose abortion, against homosexuality, against liberals, and against feminism, but who has accumulated a great deal of financial wealth (no camel-through-the-eye-of-the-needle stuff for him) and even ran for president once.




I wonder if they could go back to their not-so-distant roots and become Eisenhower Republicans. Eisenhower golfed a lot a balanced the budget, didn't he? Also, he didn't like Nixon. I think Eisenhower would find people like Rove, Gingrich, the writers at The Nation, the people on Fox News, et al., as just too petty and mean--and wound up a bit too tightly. I think that after you've directed a war against Hitler, you get some perspective.


The Democrats, of course, will have to learn how to handle success. They tend not to handle it well. (Nor do the Republicans.) If the Democrats were crafty, they would pursue some items on the Libertarian agenda, especially those connected with restoring civil liberties.

I really like discussing politics and occasionally blogging about politics because I know almost nothing about the subject, so I'm unencumbered by knowledge and experience. I especially like talking politics in the presence of one friend, in particular, who possesses a wealth of theoretical, social-scientific, and practical knowledge of politics. I suspect he simply hums songs in his head while I'm talking, and when I stop opining, he says something like, "That's interesting."



I'm not quite through gas-bagging, unfortunately, although undoubtedly you've stopped reading by now. So I'll just add that it is a well known fact that the Democratic Congress did the Democratic President Carter no favors, and I do wonder if the same will happen with Obama. I also wonder if right-wing radio will lower the temperature of their remarks; it's a genre that seems almost addicted to borderline hate-speech. I'd rather listen to a conservative countepart of the more-or-less liberal Thom Hartman, who engages in calm debates with conservatives. It's conversation-radio.



And who shall run for president in four years? Palin? Gingrich? Romney? I do hope Ron Paul runs again. I liked hearing him bring up going back to the gold standard. No one ever seemed to want to engage him on the issue. Go figure.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

November 8, 2008




Politics is a cynical, spectacle-driven, money-saturated, grinding business, but sometimes its results transcend its nature.

I think of the resilience of African Americans over 389 years, all the degradation suffered, now at least symbolically overcome.

I think of the strange turns of fate--that Obama's father is African, not African American; that if Gore or Kerry were to have won, Obama may not be the president-elect; that so many women I know gracefully shifted support from Clinton to Obama.

I think of writers whom I never knew (although I got to shake Baldwin's hand and speak with him) but whose words have always drawn me to their spirit and views: Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Jessie Redmon Fauset, James Baldwin, so many more.

I think of certain colleagues, friends, current and former students.

I think, finally, of my friend from high school, with whom I still keep in touch--Ronn English.

I think of President Obama. Keep him safe.

Monday, November 3, 2008

New Diggers









I almost feel as if a Kantian categorical imperative obliges me to say something about tomorrow's election, which is obviously crucial in many ways but also surrounded by hyperbole. It certainly is a distinctive new moment in American and African American history, but the meaning of the moment is of course yet to unfold, let alone be interpreted.





I've been teaching at the same college for over two decades, and the students are obviously more tuned into, informed about, engaged with, and anxious concerning this election--by far--than any election previously. Many of them, of course, are voting in a presidential election for the first time, and they certainly are voting in interesting times.





The disinterested political scientist whom I trust the most predicts that Obama/Biden will "win" 310 electoral votes.





I don't think this poem has much if anything to do with the election, and that is just as well.





New Diggers
*
*
In the near future, people will mine dumps
and landfills for sustenance if not profit. That
stuff we've been tossing out for centuries
gets more valuable every day. Burrowers
will try to borrow it back from the past
we thought we were throwing it into.
Places of refuse live in the future like
bank-vaults. Toward the end of this
profligate era, we'll want to accept much
of what we refused in the way of pulp,
plastic, and metal. Every civilization
needs its diggers. Our civilization
has dumped and buried useful stuff
maniacally and so will soon employ
exhumers to resurrect what once was
waste from out of tombs.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom


Of course, in almost every nation, in different degrees, people already pick through "garbage" to find valuable or edible things, and a "dust-heap" is central to Dickens' immense, marvelous novel, Our Mutual Friend, which in some ways prefigures our ultra-profligate era. But I have to imagine that some landfills in the U.S. and elsewhere will begin to look like wealth-laden mines at some point, although I'm most willing to be corrected on this most wild guess.