Though I don't always succeed, I was taught, and hold it as an ideal, that I shouldn't allow myself to display anger or indignation when I'm debating someone on issues.
I recall that Bush blustered and hurled accusations in his debates against Kerry. Is this the new Republican presidential deliberative style? I don't remember Reagan being irascible. Obama seemed a lot more like Reagan rhetorically to me: his calmly but firmly delivered line about the Ayers issue saying more about McCain's campaign than his own struck me as a Reaganesque "There you go again" gesture.
I don't think that Obama dominated, but I don't see how anyone could say that McCain won. It seemed like a close call, but I have to give it to the guy who was more steady and gentlemanly, because I value that demeanor over one marked by anger and indignation.
If you believe that Obama pals around with terrorists, or that he told baldfaced lies about McCain, or that he's going to sink the country with his policies, then I guess you might like to say McCain won by sticking it to him, that in the face of these outrages McCain's anger was justified and appropriate, and that McCain's plain, Lysian style was more rhetorically honest than the Eastern eloquence of Obama.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Tomorrowland
I've been mulling over a longish post about the economy, the political zeitgeist, and why wearing three piece suits in the early 80's during my teenage years didn't prepare me for adulthood. I'm sure I won't have time to finish it, so here are the scraps.
Seems the era of radically free markets is over. New regulations on financial institutions, and the changing business climate in general, will cause the income gap to narrow, while private health care will give way to a publicly financed system, and conservative remonstrations against "big government" will cease to motivate voters as a battery of new entitlements designed to benefit the suburban middle classes as much as the urban or rural underclasses is brought online.
In a few years the world will look much more like the world of my childhood, when public buildings were civically and architecturally significant, roads and public parks were well maintained, and common people had faith in government, science, and technology.
When I was a child business and government partnered together to accomplish big goals. Middle class Americans flocked to the World's Fair to see the General Electric Pavilion, and to Walt Disney World's Tomorrowland to see the Carousel of Progress. Do you remember when our heroes were architects and engineers, rather than real estate moguls and evangelical pastors?
Alex P. Keaton grew up and gave us a world where credit card companies target jobless teenagers and mortgage companies mail unsolicited checks to overleveraged homeowners. American industry, meanwhile, has become a joke.
I actually voted for W. in his first gubernatorial run in Texas (though I cast the rest of my votes on that ballot for Dems). At the time, W. seemed to be a lot like Clinton--a moderate southerner, young, energetic, in touch and able to convey a generosity and optimism bigger than the base of his party. Boy was I a sucker, but I learned. If you don't like the Gallic Socialism that's about to get squirted all over your Freedom Fries, then ask yourself why you voted for W., and voted for him again. And if you live in Texas....
The country is worn out. Millions have lost their homes. Everybody, Mom as well as Dad, works all the time to maintain a middle class lifestyle and no one gets ahead except with credit. People live in fear of sickness and medical bills. Of course W. and the Republicans shouldn't have to carry all of the blame for this, but that ship has sailed. Clinton's fault? Fannie & Freddie and liberal lending to blame? Big Government? High taxes?
The public isn't buying it.
But even if they no longer trust the Republicans to manage the economy, surely voters are gravely concerned by Obama's Chicago liberalism, his black militant pastor and spiritual advisor, his alleged ties to an early-70s leftist revolutionary "terrorist"?
Not so much. Look at the polls.
My 91 year old grandmother, who grew up on a farm in middle Tennessee, is voting for Obama. And so are her friends (the ones who are still around). Turns out she never really cared about neoconservatism or the Chicago school of economics anyway. Go figure.
So, goodbye capitalism as we know it (or have known it for the last three decades). Millions of voters fart in your general direction. Goodbye neocons--your leader was a hamster and your bloggers smelt of elderberries!
Don't get me wrong. I'm not unreservedly happy about all of this. First, it's time for nuclear power, nationwide, and I doubt that's going to happen under Obama. In Tomorrowland it would have happened already. Second it's time for policies that recognize that we cannot afford to lose the ability to manufacture hard, heavy, real industrial things. National security depends upon that ability and those infrastructures; so do good jobs.
My sister who lives in suburban Michigan can't buy a Japanese car for fear that her neighbors will consider her a traitor. It's shameful that Michiganders, who used to design and manufacture the best cars in the world, are now acting like Amway in-laws who force crappy products on each other as a matter of loyalty.
The southern states, with their "right to work" laws, are producing higher quality automobiles than their northern peers, albeit mostly on the behalf of foreign manufacturers. There is no easy answer here. GM and the UAW are equally to blame for making crappy cars. Obama won't sort any of this out. In Tomorrowland GM would never have killed the electric car the first time around, and the Volt would already be a mature line.
In any case, it's been a good run for laissez-faire conservatives. Hope you enjoyed it. It's tough to see an ideology come to an end.
Family Ties, if you'll recall, ended with Alex graduating from (fictional) Leland College in 1989 and taking a job on Wall Street. Today, he'd be 43 years old, and presumably still working on Wall Street.
A reunion show might go something like this:
With the collapse of Lehman Brothers Alex is between jobs and has decided to take some time off from his career to reflect on his life. He has returned to his childhood home in Columbus, Ohio, where he hopes that the SEC and FBI will leave him alone for a few days.
We find that his mother Elyse, an architect in the original series, is now designing green housing, while his father Steven, once the manager of a local public television station, runs a successful Web design firm catering to non-profit businesses. The Keatons could retire if they wanted to, but they still have much to contribute to the environment and the community.
Alex spends several days recalling formative moments from his childhood (imagine one of those low-budget reunion shows where the editors string together old footage into memory sequences). Alex's epiphany that the only thing that matters in life is family, however, is interrupted by his parents' confession that Alex's oldest sister, Mallory, now a single, uninsured mother with chronic health problems, living on the other side of town with her two children, has just lost her job and her home, and will be moving back in with Elyse and Steven for the foreseeable future.
Though Alex has been offered a job at a hedge fund back in the city, in the final scene he tells his parents that he plans to stay close to Columbus, at least temporaily, by returning to teach economics as an adjunct professor at his alma mater, Leland College (in the original series, Alex gave up the opportunity to attend Princeton to care for an emotionally-distraught Mallory).
So my fantasy reunion show ends not unlike many of the episodes in the original series, where Alex P. Keaton carries his heart in his invisible hand. We remember him fondly, because as Americans we're big saps. We can't help ourselves--we've never had the steeliness to see a Big Theory through to the end.
Seems the era of radically free markets is over. New regulations on financial institutions, and the changing business climate in general, will cause the income gap to narrow, while private health care will give way to a publicly financed system, and conservative remonstrations against "big government" will cease to motivate voters as a battery of new entitlements designed to benefit the suburban middle classes as much as the urban or rural underclasses is brought online.
In a few years the world will look much more like the world of my childhood, when public buildings were civically and architecturally significant, roads and public parks were well maintained, and common people had faith in government, science, and technology.
When I was a child business and government partnered together to accomplish big goals. Middle class Americans flocked to the World's Fair to see the General Electric Pavilion, and to Walt Disney World's Tomorrowland to see the Carousel of Progress. Do you remember when our heroes were architects and engineers, rather than real estate moguls and evangelical pastors?
Alex P. Keaton grew up and gave us a world where credit card companies target jobless teenagers and mortgage companies mail unsolicited checks to overleveraged homeowners. American industry, meanwhile, has become a joke.
I actually voted for W. in his first gubernatorial run in Texas (though I cast the rest of my votes on that ballot for Dems). At the time, W. seemed to be a lot like Clinton--a moderate southerner, young, energetic, in touch and able to convey a generosity and optimism bigger than the base of his party. Boy was I a sucker, but I learned. If you don't like the Gallic Socialism that's about to get squirted all over your Freedom Fries, then ask yourself why you voted for W., and voted for him again. And if you live in Texas....
The country is worn out. Millions have lost their homes. Everybody, Mom as well as Dad, works all the time to maintain a middle class lifestyle and no one gets ahead except with credit. People live in fear of sickness and medical bills. Of course W. and the Republicans shouldn't have to carry all of the blame for this, but that ship has sailed. Clinton's fault? Fannie & Freddie and liberal lending to blame? Big Government? High taxes?
The public isn't buying it.
But even if they no longer trust the Republicans to manage the economy, surely voters are gravely concerned by Obama's Chicago liberalism, his black militant pastor and spiritual advisor, his alleged ties to an early-70s leftist revolutionary "terrorist"?
Not so much. Look at the polls.
My 91 year old grandmother, who grew up on a farm in middle Tennessee, is voting for Obama. And so are her friends (the ones who are still around). Turns out she never really cared about neoconservatism or the Chicago school of economics anyway. Go figure.
So, goodbye capitalism as we know it (or have known it for the last three decades). Millions of voters fart in your general direction. Goodbye neocons--your leader was a hamster and your bloggers smelt of elderberries!
Don't get me wrong. I'm not unreservedly happy about all of this. First, it's time for nuclear power, nationwide, and I doubt that's going to happen under Obama. In Tomorrowland it would have happened already. Second it's time for policies that recognize that we cannot afford to lose the ability to manufacture hard, heavy, real industrial things. National security depends upon that ability and those infrastructures; so do good jobs.
My sister who lives in suburban Michigan can't buy a Japanese car for fear that her neighbors will consider her a traitor. It's shameful that Michiganders, who used to design and manufacture the best cars in the world, are now acting like Amway in-laws who force crappy products on each other as a matter of loyalty.
The southern states, with their "right to work" laws, are producing higher quality automobiles than their northern peers, albeit mostly on the behalf of foreign manufacturers. There is no easy answer here. GM and the UAW are equally to blame for making crappy cars. Obama won't sort any of this out. In Tomorrowland GM would never have killed the electric car the first time around, and the Volt would already be a mature line.
In any case, it's been a good run for laissez-faire conservatives. Hope you enjoyed it. It's tough to see an ideology come to an end.
Family Ties, if you'll recall, ended with Alex graduating from (fictional) Leland College in 1989 and taking a job on Wall Street. Today, he'd be 43 years old, and presumably still working on Wall Street.
A reunion show might go something like this:
With the collapse of Lehman Brothers Alex is between jobs and has decided to take some time off from his career to reflect on his life. He has returned to his childhood home in Columbus, Ohio, where he hopes that the SEC and FBI will leave him alone for a few days.
We find that his mother Elyse, an architect in the original series, is now designing green housing, while his father Steven, once the manager of a local public television station, runs a successful Web design firm catering to non-profit businesses. The Keatons could retire if they wanted to, but they still have much to contribute to the environment and the community.
Alex spends several days recalling formative moments from his childhood (imagine one of those low-budget reunion shows where the editors string together old footage into memory sequences). Alex's epiphany that the only thing that matters in life is family, however, is interrupted by his parents' confession that Alex's oldest sister, Mallory, now a single, uninsured mother with chronic health problems, living on the other side of town with her two children, has just lost her job and her home, and will be moving back in with Elyse and Steven for the foreseeable future.
Though Alex has been offered a job at a hedge fund back in the city, in the final scene he tells his parents that he plans to stay close to Columbus, at least temporaily, by returning to teach economics as an adjunct professor at his alma mater, Leland College (in the original series, Alex gave up the opportunity to attend Princeton to care for an emotionally-distraught Mallory).
So my fantasy reunion show ends not unlike many of the episodes in the original series, where Alex P. Keaton carries his heart in his invisible hand. We remember him fondly, because as Americans we're big saps. We can't help ourselves--we've never had the steeliness to see a Big Theory through to the end.
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