Librarian, Writer, Bon Vivant
Sunday Screed
A weekly essay on something wandering my mental halls.
Is 1994 coming back?
Aug 29th
Nate Silver’s 538 has moved house to the NYT and brought with him the gloomy picture for Democrats this November. The tanking economy, the lack of recovery, and every other problem under the sun is being blamed on those pesky democrats and their evil socialist agenda of evilness.
1994 deja vu? Thankfully, no.
In ’94 the ambulatory hair helmet Newt Gingrich was able to win back the congress. The vaunted “Contract with America” was little more than stagecraft to obscure the modern GOP slash and burn approach to government programs (wasteful things like the EPA and NIH) and general autocratic brutality that has come to define the party since, oh, about 1960 or so.
The modern GOP is not the party of ’94. For all their looming success, it is a desperate, 
wounded animal of a party. The Tea-Bag movement has reinvigorated the faithful while alienating moderates. There’s a game of “Who’s more arch-conservative?” going on, and everyone is going to be the loser there. Michael Steele is the head of the party in much the same way that Queen Elizabeth is head of state for the UK.
The hard right folks in the running, like Sharron Angle and Rand Paul, have some deeply bizarre views. Paul wants to undo the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (well, not really, but kind of, sort of, ok, yeah he does) and Sharron Angle has spent much of her campaign running away from her own hateful comments about the unemployed and “2nd Amendment Solutions” to congress.
If Silver’s math holds, the Senate will stay Democratic, though narrowly. Embolded, the GOP will make louder and louder louts of themselves. They’ve already spent the entirety of the Obama administration crossing their arms, holding their breath with intent of turning blue rather than getting down to the business of governing. Take for instance Louie Gohmert, the pride of the Lone Star state, screaming about “Terror babies” at Anderson Cooper. Texas has a 8.5% unemployment rate. It’s doubled in the past 2 years. But hey, hypothetical terror babies!
In some morbid way, I kind of hope the GOP takes the house and senate. Just for pure entertainment value, watching people like Paul and Ghomert come completely unglued on a national level would be deeply entertaining. Obama would be a lock for re-election, remember, Clinton stomped Dole by nearly 10 points in 1996. If anything it might refocus the administration, give them some much needed grit in their teeth. They’ve been trying to compromise with a rabble of right-wingers who are increasingly shrill and bizarre.
The GOP has no leading lights for 2012. Gingrich is putting himself out there, though when opens his head-hole to let noises escape he tends to humiliate himself. Sarah Palin would be funny. Joe Biden gave her the soft-touch in 2008, since he’s a polished statemen and she’s a rube. Obama would take her apart with surgical precision and make her look even more foolish. If that’s possible. And lord, is it ever.
Me? Oh, I’m a Greenie, dyed in the wool. Obama’s a fine guy, a true statesman, but he lacks the strength of his convictions. He walks a path of moderation, but even his moderation feels moderate. On the issues that matter to me (GLBTQ rights, ending the wars, humane foreign policy, investing in infrastructure/education) he’s been a meddling success. Again moderate moderation. A bit of a firebrand would be nice, especially on the left, where it seems we start out with the lowest bid and then negotiate downward. I vote my conscience, something we should all do as it’s the only way to get better choices.
Hope for Hitchens
Aug 15th
I disagree with Christopher Hitchens, but that is his own damn fault. 
It was just after 9/11, literally a matter of weeks if memory serves, when I first came across his book “Letters to a Young Contrarian” I remember distinctly buying it at the same Barnes and Noble that I had sought out on 9/11 as a refuge (since the library I was working at closed early) only to find a sign on the door that read “Due to the events in the world today we have closed for the day. We may open tomorrow based on developing news events.”
Ominous.
Hitchens is strong tea. He’s read a library and will gladly recite it to you to make his points. His viewpoints are wild, ranging from Marxist to psuedo-Imperialist and back to the front again. In some ways his evolution is that of his generation, from street-marching to boots on the ground in Baghdad. It’s not a clean and easy line, though he can draw one for you and make it sharp and neat. Hitchens disassembles God-botherers and has no patience for those who find refuge in the pseudo-intellectual, the half-measure. If Richard Dawkins is “Darwin’s Pitbull”, Hitch is the M1A1 of the Enlightenment.
He drinks and smokes, as all good Brits do, and makes no apologies for it, which too many Americans do. Speaking of his life he has said that he burned the candle at both ends and did find it ‘gave a lovely light.’
And now he’s dying. Cancer, the same kind that took his father, aggressive. Seen in that video he is balding from treatment, thinning. I was uneasy seeing the same cast to his skin that my Mother had during her cancer treatment. The look of pain held back by medication. Knowledge and suffering in the eyes.
He speaks so eloquently, so beautifully, on topics that others (the grunting know-nothings of the right and left) would reduce to mere trivia. He is suffused with knowledge and shares with style.
But I disagree with him. I’m a Unitarian Universalist, I believe in God (though I’m loathe to define or explain and would never think to proselytize) and my opposition to the war in Iraq and much of the “War on Terror” has been bedrock since that perfect blue September morning when the world fell in.
There are nonsense people out there praying for, and worse, against Mr. Hitchens. They pray to save his soul, they pray for his damnation or comeuppance or other wishlist foolishness.
I don’t pray for the man. I hope he has fine doctors. I hope he has friends and loved ones close. I hope he has good books to read and articles to write and the energy to do both. I hope he recovers, and if not that he is as free from pain as humanly possible. If there is some light beyond this life, I wish him fine drinking in good company in the great hereafter. If not, I hope he is remembered.
I hope this is a very preemptive bit of eulogizing. My maudlin Irish sentimentality can get the better of me.
I suppose I was moved to write this bcause when Hunter Thompson took his life a few years back, it deeply affected me. As a teen, he wrote back on a fan letter I had sent him. I had read his fantastic piece “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” and was inspired by it. He encouraged me to continue writing and “never be a bastard”.
This is my little fan letter to Mr. Hitchens, who I hope is too busy living to read it. A man who has made being a bastard, for the right reasons, such good fun.
Xenophobia is the new black
Jul 25th
David Mitchell, of “Peep Show” and “That Mitchell and Webb Look” has a brilliant bit in the Guardian UK about burqa bans. 
The point he makes, towards the end, is that in a free society women being forced to dress in this fashion can come to question it. If you ban the burqa you further alienate their culture, making it that much harder for them to reach out to the wider world.
These bans smack of racial panic and immigrant fear-mongering. It’s easy for hate-mongers, usually with an agenda to push, to pick on “the other” because who is going to stand up for them? You’re many times more likely to be killed by lightning strike than by “Islamo-Fascists”, but lets demonize whole segments of the population all the same. Nonsense.
Most of my friends in college were Muslim (I was an history major with a focus in Islamic history) and many women I knew wore hijab. A good number of them drank, or ate the occasional bit of bacon. The concept of Muslims as this monolithic block of crazed radicals who are all out to re-establish the Kaliphate at 10 Downing St. or the White House is pure xenophobic fiction. It’s like equating your local Unitarian Church with Fred Phelps.
Speaking of xenophobia (I love the word, but hate the concept) let’s talk about the Cordoba House mosque and community center, shall we?
Oh, I’m sorry, I mean the “Flag-burning, baby eating, Sharia-establishing, jihadist loving freedom-fry hating tyranny center being built out of the bones of 9/11 victims and painted with the blood of American soldiers.”
Yes folks, it’s that bad. Worse even. They, you know, THEM, want to build a MOSQUE a few blocks from GROUND ZERO.
Are Muslims even allowed near Ground Zero? Don’t they like, burst into flames?
It’s sad that channeling Jonathan Swift (poorly) with my hyperbole above I am just barely more nonsensical than some of the doofuses out there who oppose Cordoba House. Why, Sarah Palin had to make up all new dumb words just to express her endless supply of homespun bile.
Listen, nine years ago a group of lunatics did something awful in the name of their religion. Though, actually, it had a lot more to do with international politics and religion was less a motive than a means. So these lunatics did something awful, terrible, nightmarish. 19 out of a 1,00,000,000 or so Muslims in the world. Nineteen guys who were, from some accounts, not even very devout or pious Muslims. For that, all Muslims, especially “Arab” Muslims must now be viewed with suspicion for, what, ever? Again, nonsense.
It is an election year (oh that it were not) and the Right has decided to further a sort of 50 state southern strategy. Playing on fears about mosques, “illegals” crossing the border, and just this week the ugly mess that was the resignation of Shirley Sherrod. The idea here is to scare older, white voters in much the same way they did in 2006 with immigration and in 2008 with Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers and so on. One hopes they are just as successful at they were in those election cycles.