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Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Roll call

Bunning.  DeMint.  Coburn.  Martinez.  Burr.

Every one of them batshit insane.  Every one of them a United States Senator, as of 10:40 Eastern tonight.

No, folks, I’m not despairing.  The country is, and will always be, worth fighting for.  I’m not saying everything sucks, so why bother (as Mike suggested in a comment to the previous post). But we here in the reality-based community are constrained by empirical results, and we know now that we will have to deal with a Senate chock full of lunatics who spend 30 percent of their waking hours trying to figure out how to bring Christ to earth and the other 70 percent fantasizing about (and then, with a fervor commensurate with the intensity of the fantasy, decrying) man-on-dog sex.  Well, except for Bunning, who spends 40 percent of his waking hours trying to figure out what day it is.

It is still unclear what the executive branch will look like.  But I don’t see any landslide coming. . . 

Posted by Kurt on 11/02 at 04:44 PM
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I. Am. Serene.

Actually that’s not true.  On the contrary, I am unravelling in ways I cannot comprehend.  Partly it’s the fact that this fall, I have agreed to write no fewer than five hundred and twenty-eight letters of recommendation for students, colleagues, friends at other universities, and people I just met on the voting line this morning.  And the fact that I have no Penn State letterhead or envelopes left in my house and had to run into the department (45 minutes round trip even though I live less than a mile from the English department building) to grab a fresh stack, and then brought the whole stash back to my house in my laptop bag, which-- of course-- caught on the knob as I was entering the house through the back door, spilling a couple hundred envelopes and about a ream of letterhead all over the back steps.  Why did I leave the laptop bag unzipped?  Because it’s raining, that’s why!  Do not bother me with these petty questions!

But about this election, I Am Serene.  I Am At Peace.  Yes, I Have A Bizarre Compulsion To Capitalize Every Word, But I Am Breathing Slowly And Deeply.

And that’s because if we win, I will feel a profound sense of relief.  Not exultation:  there will be little about which we can exult when we realize what a terrible fiscal and political mess the Kerry Administration will have to clean up, never mind the longer-term prospect of mobilizing a grassroots progressive left to begin to roll back the scorched-earth policies of the Norquist-Rehnquist-Cheneyquist movement conservatives who’ve set the national agenda since 1980 (yes, even during the Clinton Administration, they set the parameters of the possible).  Just a sense of relief that we have pulled back from the abyss, stanching the very worst impulses in the national character and forestalling another round of Ashcrofts and Scalias and Enrons and Abu Ghraibs.

And if we lose, we lose.  In which case the Bush voters are responsible for everything:  they embrace and cheer their Ashcrofts and their Scalias and their Enrons and their Abu Ghraibs.  They inherit the Iraqi resistance and all its progeny.  They celebrate-- and deepen-- their massive trade and budget deficits.  They torch the Constitution, hoisting their pitchforks aloft as the flinty old document burns.  And the United States becomes their nation, and not mine; their responsibility, and not mine.

I’m still rooting for option (a).  But I am prepared to entertain option (b).

Posted by Kurt on 11/02 at 11:11 AM
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VNS OCD

The 2 pm returns are good--

AZ:  Bush 55, Kerry 45
CO:  Bush 51, Kerry 48
LA:  Bush 57, Kerry 42
PA:  Kerry 60, Bush 40
OH:  Kerry 52, Bush 48
FL:  Kerry 51, Bush 48
IA:  Kerry 49, Bush 49
MI:  Kerry 51, Bush 47
MN:  Kerry 58, Bush 40
NH:  Kerry 57, Bush 41
NM:  Kerry 50, Bush 48
WI:  Kerry 52, Bush 43

but I’m told that the election is not decided on the first exit poll.  What will really be important are the final exit polls, which-- especially in Florida and Ohio-- will be the standard of comparison against which we can gauge the Diebold result.

I still say Kerry 294-244 EV, 50.7 - 48.4 in the popular vote (even though I really do want 51.5 and more) with 0.9 to Nadernarik.  And I just want to remind you all that although I was terrible beyond measure at predicting the outcome of the Super Bowl, I did pretty damn well in New Hampshire nine months ago, and of course I had the good sense to admit-- before the ACLS began-- that Red Sox had better starting pitching than the Yankees, too.

And don’t forget to keep breathing!

Posted by Kurt on 11/02 at 09:00 AM
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At first I was afraid, I was petrified

At some point right around 5 pm last night, apparently, Karl Rove and his ghoulish minions decided to take down this once-humble-and-now-humbled blog.  We were just getting too powerful and too threatening!!!  Sneakily (for they know no other way), they did it in such a manner as to cause the server itself to suspend the domain.  Flummoxed and frantic, we appealed to a Higher Father, but He said, “are you kidding?  after that stuff you wrote about Me on Sunday?  bugger off-- I’m canvassing for Bush in suburban St. Louis.” Now, if you Google “Berube” (no accents) and “suspended,” you’ll find that former Philadelphia Flyer-Washington Capital-New York Islander-Calgary Flame enforcer Craig Berube was suspended many, many times in his career.  I have been suspended only once.

Anyway, my apologies to everyone for the untimely crash, and my thanks to the dozens of you who wrote to me directly to ask whether I had been sent to Gitmo.  But most of all, thanks to Kurt Nelson, who did a record-breaking site-salvage-and-switch in a matter of hours (while I frantically copied material off old Google caches just in case ten months of work had disappeared into the aether).

And now here’s today’s election news:  at 8 am in central Pennsylvania the voting lines were already around the corner.  I voted for me, by the way.  I really did.  Our Congressional representative, useless rural-Republican pud John Peterson, is running unopposed except by some Libertarian lunatic promoting the famous Randian “remove all the traffic lights and let the superintelligent live to reproduce” platform, so I said, ahhh, the hell with it, and wrote myself in.  Janet wrote me in too, so that’s two votes right there.  It doesn’t sound like much now, but it’s already one infinity percent more votes than I received in 2002, and if you’re reading this blog and voting in Pennsylvania’s fifth Congressional district, won’t you please consider casting your vote my way?  I’m sorry I only got around to campaigning on the afternoon of Election Day.  I was really busy in October.

I’ve posted my Election Day Exhortation over at The American Street, but now that I’m back in my own digs again I’ll reproduce it here too.  And after meeting so many of my neighbors in the voting line at 8 am this morning, I’m thinking that certain polls in certain urban areas are going to be backed up for hours and hours, right up to closing time.  So count every vote and make every vote count!

OK, here’s the official exhortation.

Aside from LBJ and FDR, no Democratic nominee for President has taken office with more than 51 percent of the popular vote since . . . when?

No, wrong.

Not even close!

C’mon, think back, think back, think hickory . . . yes, that’s right, it’s Andrew Jackson!

Unreal, no? But true. Clinton never cracked 51; neither did Carter, Kennedy, Truman, Wilson, or Cleveland, or of course Tilden, who didn’t take office for some reason. Pierce and Van Buren came close. To reprise:

Clinton 1996: 49.2
Clinton 1992: 42.9
Carter 1976: 50.1
Kennedy 1960: 49.7
Truman 1948: 49.7
Wilson 1916: 49.4
Wilson 1912: 41.9
Cleveland 1892: 46.1
Cleveland 1888: 48.8 (lost electoral vote)
Cleveland 1884: 48.5
Tilden 1876: 51.0 (lost electoral vote thanks to Katherine Harris)
Buchanan 1856: 45.3
Pierce 1852: 50.9
Polk 1844: 49.6
Van Buren 1836: 50.9
Jackson 1832: 55.0

The point should be clear: Kerry needs your vote, wherever you are. There are no safe states. Everything hinges on getting out every last damn vote in every last damn precinct in the land. We will take the Electoral College, folks, but we also need to do what no Democrat save for LBJ and FDR has done since the Democrats were the party of slavery.

Let’s get Kerry 51.5 or more.

Popular vote majority: it’s up to you!! 

Posted by Kurt on 11/02 at 05:49 AM
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Monday, November 01, 2004

Culture beat

As a gesture of thanks to the 119,797 people who stopped by this once-humble-but-now-overbearing blog in October-- and especially to those of you whose comments have reduced me to helpless teary laughter time and again (this truculent blog prides itself on having some of the wittiest readers in the English-speaking world)-- I’m offering a new pre-election feature today: ridiculously belated movie reviews in capsule form! 

Here are the first three:

Fahrenheit 9/11

Janet and I were the very last American progressives to see this film.  I was holding out all summer, along with anarcho-syndicalist and Murray Bookchin fan Melvin J. Furd of Brattleboro, Vermont, but when Mr. Furd finally caved in late September, I grabbed Janet and promptly drove over to the Second-Run Theater in downtown State College, where I was entertained by roughly two-thirds of the Movie that Drove Conservatives into Sheer Barking Lunacy.

The opening twenty minutes or so on the 2000 election are galvanizing.  In fact, we should put them on a tape loop for the next 28 hours, just so we can remind ourselves of the hideous, sickening spectacle of Al Gore presiding over the Congressional Black Caucus’s failure to get a single Senator to support their challenge to the installation of George Bush.  The 40-50 minutes on the Carlyle Group, the Bush-bin Laden connection, Afghanistan and Unocal, etc. are maddeningly incoherent.  Yep, the global financial elite all know each other.  Surprise!  And then the final 45 minutes or so on Iraq-- plus the Moorean street theater of renting a truck to read the Patriot Act over a loudspeaker, asking members of Congress to volunteer their children for service in the armed forces, following around the Marine recruiters in Flint-- are pretty damn good. 

The Day After Tomorrow

I can’t believe Moveon.org actually tried to promote this film as some kind of political statement, but what the hell.  The important thing filmmakers need to understand is that in movies like this, nobody cares about the damn plot.  We just want to see those cool tornadoes in Los Angeles and that tsunami in the streets of New York.  Trust me on this.  Especially if you’re going to try to suggest that Dennis Quaid’s character needs to atone for neglecting his son . . . because he did all that nasty doctoral research far away from home in extreme climates!  Well, yeah, he did become one of the world’s leading experts on climate change, but he didn’t see his kid grow up!  One expected the film’s climactic rescue scene to feature a shivering Jake Gyllenhaal being embraced by Quaid to the stirring tune of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.” And don’t get me started on the gratuitous-kid-with-cancer bit.  Wasn’t that kid also in The Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, and Airport ‘77?

Beyond that, the movie suffers structurally from what I call the Searching for Bobby Fischer problem.  Namely, how do you make chess look dramatic on screen?  Why, by filming people playing lightning-chess in public parks in the driving rain!  Now that’s dramatic!  Likewise, global climate change would be really cool if it happened in seven to ten days instead of five to ten thousand years.  Now that would rock!  It would be like Weather Channel porn, only even better!

Every SF film ever made

Janet and I were watching the great opening minutes of Blade Runner for no good reason the other day, when suddenly she said, “this is Los Angeles in 2019?  What bullshit!” And I said, “is this about the flying cars?  it better not be about the flying cars, because I really do not want to hear any complaining about the goddamn flying cars.” To which she replied, “no, it’s not about the flying cars.  It’s about the fact that this is supposed to be the year 2019, but nowhere in the film are there hordes of crazed Islamist and Christian jihadists killing each other.”

“Good point,” I admitted.  “But what about the Nexus-6 androids and that cool ceiling fan in the first interrogation scene?  Won’t we have Nexus-6 androids and ceiling fans, in some weird kind of postmodern pastiche where cybernetic simulacra meet Sidney Greenstreet?” “No,” Janet said.  “It’s just going to be hordes of crazed Islamist and Christian jihadists killing each other.”

She’s right, you know.  And just imagine what would happen if those people got a hold of the flying cars!

OK, that’s today’s Culture Beat.  Next:  election day special!

Posted by Michael on 11/01 at 08:23 AM
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