With a couple of weeks left till election, this will likely be my last political post till after it’s over. I have never been so anxious about an election. Annoyed, irritated, amused, baffled, angered…but not anxious. I thought the election of George W. Bush was a tragic misstep. I thought he was ill-equipped for the job and as it turned out he was. It was too much for him, even with perhaps the best of intentions. His first major mistake was the tax cut. He inherited a surplus. Say what you will about Clinton, he left us in better fiscal shape that any president since Eisenhower.…
Category: current affairs
Attention! Um….attention?
This weekend past I attended our local science fiction convention, Archon. I was on a number of panels and something of a theme started to emerge. More than one, actually. A couple of times the discussion came around to our lack of attention. And I coined a phrase.
We live in a Fractured Attention Ecology.
I’m keeping that. It was off-the-cuff, but the more I think about it, I think it’s something worth exploring. I’m not equipped to do that, not clinically. I’m a writer. But I realized that we keep trying to label the chronic short attention span that seems to plague contemporary life, to fit it into a manageable file to be dealt with by the appropriate expert.…
Tomorrow Denied
In retrospect, the situation we face in the country today is born of factors that have been present all along, but were buried under a common optimism about the future which used to define us, at least in our public discourse. Looking to the future has defined this country in one way or another since its inception, but very aggressively since the mid-20th Century. Once we had the technological capacity to build a common infrastructure, the Future became a destination for more people than ever before.
So what happened?
Because that is what we find ourselves on the verge of losing.…
Policy Points
My previous post was an emotional tirade in behalf of Kamala Harris and in opposition to the Other One. It is fair to say that too often we see and hear jeremiads against politicians that are little more than pure spleen, with almost no substance to back them up. We’ve grown used to people on the Right slamming liberals with claims that we will destroy the country, and then, when pressed for details, crickets.
So allow me a little space here for a few details.
What do I have against DJT?
Aside from his demeanor, which is that of an aging frat boy who never learned that No means No, he comes from a career of shysterism quite common in American culture.…
Just To Be Clear…
Just to be clear…
I will be voting for Kamala Harris in November. Nothing radical or shocking in that, I intended to vote for anyone who had a chance of winning who is not Donald J. Trump. It helps this time that the candidate I’m voting for has some policy positions I can support unreservedly.
We like to dismiss political ignorance in this country by attempting a blasé pose that “really, there’s not much difference between the two parties.” There may actually have been a time when that was largely true, but we have been watching a divergence of positions of tectonic proportions for the last 40 years.…
Single Cat Ladies
Single cat ladies…
Cats, it seems, have been politically representative for a long time. I suppose one could argue that from when the Egyptians deified cats, they have played a part in defining certain cultural affiliations. The association between cats and women who drew the disapproval of surrounding communities can be dated to when witchcraft dominated the fears of European populations.
Absurd, of course, but not the first absurdity to come with dire consequences for marginalized people.
Of course, this is part and parcel of the Right’s urgent attempt to return women to what might be termed the Domestic Sphere. Globally, there are a number of governments currently quite concerned about population growth.…
Harris
It has now been a couple of weeks. We were on vacation and pointedly ignored newscasts, so when we returned on that Sunday it was to the announcement (just made; I suppose they were waiting for us) that President Biden is stepping aside and passing the torch.
Politics as usual was never much of a thing, only to those who pay too little attention to what actually goes on and respond only to the surface, but this is one for the history books. Biden won all his primaries, so everyone assumed it was a done deal (forgetting of course that primaries and caucuses are not part of the Constitution, were in fact Party devices that were not formally adopted at a national level until after the 1968 election season, and then only as an attempt to avoid the kind of messy floor fights that were hallmarks at the national conventions.…
Root Division
In all the debate and analysis and angst over what those behind Project 2025 are doing and why, it is easy to get lost in the bog of details and motivations. A better question is why do so many people who would suffer under these proposals support them. When you look at the list of things they want to end, it boggles the mind that anyone who has to work for a living, who is dependent on a weekly paycheck, many whose expenses outstrip their income, and those who otherwise would wish to give their children an edge for the future would want any of this.…
Take A Breath
The Debate. Capital D. Everyone is undergoing meltdowns about it. Too many people are reacting as if this is the death knell of, well, Everything.
Chill. Firstly, read the transcripts. Right here. Then, for one interpretation, here’s an analysis from The Hill. And just to round out some of this, here’s some Fact Checking from AP.
(Back in the 1960 presidential campaign—some of you may remember this—Nixon and Kennedy had a debate. At that time, a large segment of the population got most of their information from the radio, but this was the dawn of television, so the debate was both broadcast and televised.…
Freedom and Its Contingencies, Part Two: Liberty
Abraham Lincoln pointed out in a speech that we have never had a good definition of Liberty. That most people used the word to mean different things. At base, we can perhaps agree that two meanings offering potential conflict are (1) Liberty from and (2) Liberty to. The war of independence was a major demonstration of the driving force of the first—separation from England—while once established the subsequent political struggle from then till now has been of the latter. Because we use the terms alternately—Freedom and Liberty—here perhaps more intently, it behooves us to come to grips with what they mean.…