GinBaby

So, Yeah, I'm Angry Again

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:07:58 -0700

Big surprise. I know. Nobody makes you read my vitriol.

Anyway, so Barack said some stuff in front of a wealthy audience "behind closed doors" in San Francisco, and it's a pretty big deal. You know what I'm talking about, or else you live under a rock or possibly in the Southern Hemisphere.

Let me start by saying that I'm white, we are definitely working class (though I have a postgraduate degree *sniff*), we make *significantly* less than the median household income in this country, we are married with one kid and two dogs, and we live in a small, religious, Republican town. For my part, I have almost always lived in small towns, though never in Pennsylvania.

And the thing that makes me bitter is the way the media is talking about what Barack said. First and foremost is that the "guns, god, and xenophobia" part of it is really taken out of context. I didn't know that until Joan Walsh wrote a nice little blog entry about it. If you want to know more of what Obama said, go there. When you read the whole thing, it comes off *a bit* different, no?

Second, the vast majority of the talking/writing class who are accusing Obama of elitism and being disrespectful to the working class are NOT working class. So, you live in Manhattan and work for a major news network and have stylists do your hair everyday, and you want to tell ME how I think about what Obama said? You want to tell ME that I'm being disrespected? No thanks--I can read, and I can decide for myself if what he said is offensive, OK? I don't need you, some asshole pundit, to tell me what I think. Thanks. Slate ran, like, 4 or 5 pieces about it, all of them blasting Obama but in different ways, all of them assholish.

Third, are they deliberately misunderstanding what was said? They have to be deliberately misunderstanding this, just to make hay from it because that's what they do. For example:

To judge from Obama's several statements on the subject, he sincerely believes that working-class whites, lacking the self-awareness to recognize the actual economic origins of their distress, seek relief from their pain by praying in church, slaughtering deer, and making illegal immigrants and imports from foreign countries scapegoats for ills that have nothing to do with immigration or trade. They may not be racists, they may even be sympathetic victims, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests, which are chiefly economic, a fact that university-educated progressives in big cities and college towns can readily perceive. Source.

That is not what Obama said or even really implied. You, elitist bastard, are putting that whole "lacking the self-awareness" part in there yourself. The point was not that we quaint Li'l Abners don't know where our misery comes from--the point was that administration after administration, it just keeps getting worse, to the point that we don't believe any administration gives a shit about our situation (and we are *quite* aware that urban Democrats don't) or that we have any power to change the economic situation. Obama didn't say or imply that we're too stupid to figure out what's wrong in our towns. He said that when the economic situation is persistently dismal without real hope for a solution, well, people hold on to their traditions and culture more tightly than people whose economic prospects are good.

Obama furthermore did not state or imply that "Once the Pennsylvanians get some jobs back, they'll change and become as enlightened as Obama or the San Franciscans to whom he was talking" (Kausfiles). Say what? He didn't say this because he didn't say that they were unenlightened. He said they were "bitter" and by that he meant "angry" not "unenlightened." He meant they were angry about the severe economic screwing they've got in the past couple of decades. He has never said or implied that religion is backward or that hunting or other sporting uses of guns are backward or unenlightened. (And, fortunately for all of us who hate being pandered to, he has also not regaled us--all of a sudden!--with tales of how his grandfather took him behind the barn and taught him to shoot when he was just a little boy--oh, fuck off Hillary. Just fuck off.) He didn't say or imply that Pennsylvanians need enlightenment--he said they need jobs or reasonable hope of jobs and economic development in their towns, and he implied that once they have those things, perhaps they won't feel so angry and hopeless.

What are the real economic differences between the two parties, anyway? Both seem to support NAFTA, "free" trade, most elements of the Farm Bill, and so on down the line. Does either party have a plan for bringing decent jobs back to rural America? No. Rural people don't typically support welfare, mainly because they think that if jobs are available, it's better to work. But, it is no great comfort to be asked to give up a factory job that had benefits for a service job that pays half of what you were making and has no benefits, all in the name of the great economic theory people in Washington and the universities like to dream up.

On the other hand, I've been trying to warn my similarly well-educated liberal-ish friends for a long time that the rhetoric coming from the left was severely and possibly permanently alienating a core set of voters that basically agree with them but get turned off by being called names. Seriously, check these quotes out:

"This quote and the resulting feeding frenzy are a huge opportunity for Obama to get the attention of low-information small-town voters who are skeptical of him and convince some of them to vote their pocketbooks instead of their culture." (ah, okayyyyyy...we're "low-information?" Really? I consider myself pretty high information, too high most of the time. And you will probably never convince most of us to vote our pocketbooks over our culture--sorry, but some of us actually care about our culture.)

"Obama spoke artlessly, forgetting that the first law of American politics is: Flatter the rubes." (And that is from Todd Gitlin, Ph.D. in dumbassery. Yes, we're rubes, and low-information rubes. The only thing we can understand is flattery and pandering, which is why NONE OF US are completely irked at Hillary's recent embrace of her gun-related past. That NONE OF US there is totally sarcasm. You didn't know rubes could be sarcastic, did you?)

In an essay titled "The Urban Archipelago" a few years ago, the editors of Seattle's alt-weekly the Stranger wrote: "It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion -- New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on ... And we are the real Americans. They -- rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs -- are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers ... We can secede emotionally ... by turning our backs on the heartland ... We're everywhere any sane person wants to be. Let them have the shitholes, the Oklahomas, Wyomings, and Alabamas. We'll take Manhattan." (OK. Deal. You take Manhattan, and you go ahead and secede. I will remind you that, while much food is eaten in Manhattan, none of it is grown there. Perhaps you can import it from the Republic of California, but only if we let you transport it through our territory. What is this "real Americans" bullshit anyway? Sanity? What? From what I hear y'all have high violent-crime rates, a great deal of poverty and racism of your own, and insane amounts of traffic--that's "sanity" and "real America?" OK, man, if that's what you want. Fortunately for us, this deal also means we get virtually all the National Parks and Forests, most of the bizarre roadside attractions that make American roads so great, and all the corn we can eat. Sweet. Keep your Manhattan and your Los Angeles--they don't have anything we want anyway. Also, St. Louis? Really?)

Yeah, and I haven't even started on the specific comments in which liberals take on gun owners (my penis is so small, in fact, that it does not even exist--and that is exactly why I own guns! Facile Freud, at your service), trucks (ditto! god forbid we should find either trucks or guns to be useful tools), child-rearing (I'm going to spank my kid just to spite you!), and, well, it just goes on and on. Liberals constantly say they are the party of the working class, the party of compassion. But where is this evident? Hillary, who once did genuinely show compassion, has become such a cynical tool that she apparently cannot see why someone would care about the sniper fire thing or the Mark Penn thing or that whatever fond memories she has of shooting with her grandpa she consistently votes for gun control, and it is not clear where she draws the line of Enough Gun Control. For all we can tell of her, she will pry the gun from Charlton Heston's cold, dead hands.

So, I ask again, where is the compassion, enlightenment, and care for the working class evident? When was the last time the Democratic party had a really good idea for how to help small-town, working-class people? ...I'm waiting... It does not follow that simply because you oppose tradition that you are enlightened, either, so don't tell me that because you support gay marriage, you get an automatic enlightenment badge. Yeah, yeah, "universal health care," SCHIP, blah blah. Any rural person will tell you that it's not about welfare systems--people want jobs, they want to keep their farms, they want their downtowns to start looking alive again. A lot of small towns in the West are organizing community stores as a way to begin the revitalization of the downtown--we're starting one here, for example. Not that the typical Democrat knows or cares. And neither Hillary nor Barack is currently offering a health care plan that actually insures everyone, at least not without forcing them to buy insurance that they may or may not be able to afford. I tell you, we can barely afford ours, and it's cheap from what I can tell (my husband's employer is one of the last great manufacturing employers, I am convinced--seriously, he has all kinds of benefits, they pay well for this area, they are very ethical and organized in all their dealings with their employees. So I guess what I'm saying is eat more instant potatoes, because that's what they make, and they treat their employees remarkably well, and we are very fortunate. Eat at KFC because then you're eating my husband's potatoes. Wow. That sounds kind of nasty. Anyway...).

Yeah, I don't know, but I don't think Obama is the one disrespecting rural voters. He perhaps did not say it in the most elegant way possible, but at least he has a grip on what the problem is. It's too bad the media and most other Democrats don't.

(oh, right, I know, our culture is mere nostalgia for a "past that never really existed" and we have no right or justification to want to hold onto it and anyway all country music is shit now. right. got it. blah blah blah. watch as the democrats shake their heads in confusion after they lose to McCain...just go ahead and secede)

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Frustration of Presidential Proportions

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 02:43:30 -0800

So, I just took this quiz to see which presidential candidate I am most closely aligned with, and it proclaimed me to have an 86% similarity with Mike Gravel.

And I'm thinking, Mike Gravel? That dude from Alaska? Is he running for President?

I know who he is, but I had no idea he was running for President. Or, I think I had a vague notion that he was running for President but I guess I didn't realize he still is running. You know, it's possible I would have realized he was running for President if he was ever mentioned as a presidential candidate in any of the media I read. I get most of my coverage online, of course, like any modern girl, and I had no idea dude was running. Everything is Hillary this and Obama that, which both Richardson and Edwards noted and had noted on their behalf. But who has any love for Gravel?

Anyway, I was also 84% similar to Edwards. I knew it!

My similarities to the two pet candidates of the liberal mass media (hee hee!) were very close to each other but a full 10 points below my similarities to Gravel and Edwards. And let's face it, the health care plans of both Clinton and Obama have a lot to do with the plan Edwards came up with (although all of them are very meh and uninspiring and even kind of not good, but, hey, this is America, and we're not a bunch of damned socialists!).

So, media: Why no love for the white boys this year? Me, I don't care about the gender or color of the person who will put an end to this senseless and wasteful war or who will wangle a way to make health care affordable or who will fix the No Child Left Behind mess. I don't see color or gender as particularly germane to those issues.

Obama is very cute, though. Maybe we could talk more about that and just forget about that pesky war. Gee, you think he wears boxers or briefs?

I almost linked the "boxers or briefs" bit to this, referring to Bill Clinton being asked that, but when I noticed that the blogmeister refers to the life of Hunter S. Thompson as a "67-year-long episode of Jackass" I'm afraid I just couldn't deal. Because, yeah, Thompson was so totally all about stuffing foreign objects up his ass for the comedic value. Curse you, MTV, for soiling the universe.

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Well, Hell

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:51:26 -0800

So, I guess old Edwards has left the race. We're down to Clinton v Obama on one side and McCain v Romney on the other. I am becoming less optimistic by the second.

Last night I had a long, animated discussion about this with my mom and stepdad (then my uncle called and the first thing he shouted into the phone when my mom said hello was, "What is the deal with the Florida delegates? What kind of stupid decision was it to not have the delegates count?" or something like that. You get the idea. We're all obsessed with politics in my family.

Something in this did make me laugh today, though. A writer on Slate said that working class and rural people were Hillary's natural constituency, and so Hillary might have a chance at some of the people who would have voted for Edwards. Maybe he's got access to some polling data that I don't, but it made me laugh. From what I know of rural folk--my family back in Arkansas, the good if somewhat militant people in Reserve, NM (pop. c. 300), this little enclave where I currently live--I think no way in hell is Hillary the candidate of the rural people. The last time people in this particular area were polled the leading Democrat was Obama followed by Edwards with Hillary in a distant third (although everyone knows this area wants Romney so bad it keeps them up at night. I don't really get it. Do they think that just because he's Mormon, he'll take office and suddenly impose mandatory polygamy and maybe take us back to Prohibition? I mean, he's still got a Congress to deal with and all that. Anyway, how they can trust a big-business type is way beyond my comprehension). So, perhaps if it's Obama, all is not lost, though I have already spoken to some independents who favored Richardson and Edwards and now, faced with Hillary and Obama, are already talking up McCain.

*sigh*

This primary system is completely fucked. That is my humble, amateurish opinion. Just fucked. Thanks Iowa and New Hampshire! Once again, thank you! Of course, it's not the fault of the good people of those states--it's the fault of the parties for working their primary system this way and the media for playing it the way they do.

It is also, somehow, the fault of Canada. I haven't worked out just how yet, but I'm in a blaming mood today, so I'll get there.

(sorry, Greenhows! sorry, Greg! really I'm just jealous of you people up there.)

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