Romney-Rice vs Obama-Warner?
I have always been more than a little in love with America, and I suppose that the night hours are moments for wishful thinking. When I was a student, and to an extent as a tutor, I was defined by my interest in the United States. Not pretending to be excited by Canada and ignorant of Mexico and Cuba because of my languages, I was very taken by the history of that country, the elan of its intellectuals and the bravery I'd heard of.
So American elections and their endless sport are a kind of narcotic for me. I have been told off about this tendency to see the competition for the Presidency as some sort of game, and lectured on how it should properly be seen as a serious contest, but really, I have no more intention of offering anything more than lip service to that. This plural, fantasy country in all its catholic lunacy and logic and intensity and indulgence wouldn't let anyone of any sense do that without looking like a humourless twit anyway.
One of the great things about elections in America is that one gets to see broadly the same plays and candidates every time, just reformed and remixed. So some of Bobby Kennedy's iron determination and aggressive honesty occasionally appears in the mainstream, and occasionally a ron paul; a religion, or minority question gets reframed and attached to a juggernaut, and youth and experience are swapped and dance around. What Hunter S Thompson called 'the dark energies of the american election' often appear as comedy, and America connects with myth through characters who can't possibly bear the weight of the expectations placed on them.
This season is shaping up to be a real comeback from several awful elections. I think the last interesting season was 1996. Bob Dole, funny and broken and saved by small town donations in Kansas from the horrors of the Anzio campaigns, and Colin Powell, and Bill Clinton at his publicly competent best (personal life aside) at least provided Americans with candidates who were more than puppets. Now, I'm very taken with Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Bill Richardson and Ron Paul. They strike me as the sort one could imagine on a train in the afterlife listening to Al Smith sing the paternoster as he shaved with a cut-throat razor, like he did in 1928. one could gambol in Elysia on some timeless Nebraska day and see William Jennings Bryan slap on the rubbing alcohol he used rather than deodorant to make another vaguely antisemitic speech about the gold standard under heaven's prarie sun before God showed his Jewish sense of humour by having him kicked out. The candidates I like today are mostly funny and intelligent and in their different ways they say striking things about the republic.
Of course, class probably defines all and I don't know the people about whom I write personally. They are archetypes. I watch with interest the suspicion and dislike the media and the usual suspects have for all of them, and they attract me a little more. At least three of them have humour and they all have brains that seem to have some concept of shame or self-respect, so that's two up on the neocons.
Romney, for instance, is the product of a genuinely American religion which has bedded down in the space of thirty years.I used to teach undergraduates about the Mormon Wars of the 1850s, and familiarised myself with Mormon ideas. As readers of this blog may guess or know, I am a believing and quite happy Roman Catholic; perhaps that acclimatised me to the strangeness of Mormon symbolism and intellectual architecture. They struck me as a mixture of Islamic templates (perhaps their founders encountered some ottoman refugees before the civil war), millennial cults and really odd syncretistic beliefs that meshed with the needs of the west. I'd give them the title of genuine American religion over the Scientology cult, but the interesting thing to me is that even 120 years later, in the 1970s when I was growing up they were viewed as mad. now, they are treated as no less deserving than any other faith by all except the secular media, who are all in a tizz about some of their ideas. On top of all that, Romney seems a study in paradoxes wrapped up in an unbelievably preppy and wholesome Americanness that I bet could turn out to be quite hard. Would Romney see through the neocons or just be their puppet? They view themselves as such hard men I wonder.
And Obama; lanky and Kenyan and out of the land of Lincoln. I think that he is a stunningly able candidate. He misspoke only in his lack of artifice and his assumption that people wouldn't go hysterical over his comments about the criminal Bin laden hiding in pakistan, but I'm not inclined to hold that against him. Over the course of some five constitutions, the rule of people like Yahya Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, the creepy ISI intelligence group, and the betrayal by rich 'Democrats' of Pakistan's poor, pakistan's people have been so sold out that I'd understand if they welcomed somebody who just set out some rules. As opposed to say, a fictional set of reasons for wars entirely elsewhere that kill large parts of a million. I think he is winning the money primary and I wonder if he won't catch fire in the real primaries, barring some economic collapse.
Richardson and huckabee intrigue me too; apparently competent, funny, self-assured governors who just keep plugging away and speak to hispanic groups, southern baptists, and other working class people. I wish they would be on tickets to give weight to Romney and Obama in 2008, but I guess that they'll end up with some cabinet bones and people like Mark Warner or Condi Rice will be coopted on. That'll be deadening if it happened.
And Ron Paul...I really hope he makes it through at least one caucus or primary. he's been demonised as everything from a coughlin type to a grouch by every lazy journalist I've read. He says what he thinks though and he knows one reading of the constitution very well. I like that.
This is an utterly personal ramble. Such is the nature of blogs, of course, that I now know with certainty that I'll be proved completely wrong. Hillary and Rudy or somesuch will end up knocking pointless bits of masonry off of their totally similar managerial campaigns. The deficit will keep going up. America will face a world with 9 trillions of debt and other economic engines around, and not be able to rely on everyone just needing it. The infrastructure will keep crumbling. And I'll keep remembering summers long ago when I sat down with huge books on forgotten campaigns and fell in love with an America that belies the very dark side that runs through its history, as through all human beings.
I have always been more than a little in love with America, and I suppose that the night hours are moments for wishful thinking. When I was a student, and to an extent as a tutor, I was defined by my interest in the United States. Not pretending to be excited by Canada and ignorant of Mexico and Cuba because of my languages, I was very taken by the history of that country, the elan of its intellectuals and the bravery I'd heard of.
So American elections and their endless sport are a kind of narcotic for me. I have been told off about this tendency to see the competition for the Presidency as some sort of game, and lectured on how it should properly be seen as a serious contest, but really, I have no more intention of offering anything more than lip service to that. This plural, fantasy country in all its catholic lunacy and logic and intensity and indulgence wouldn't let anyone of any sense do that without looking like a humourless twit anyway.
One of the great things about elections in America is that one gets to see broadly the same plays and candidates every time, just reformed and remixed. So some of Bobby Kennedy's iron determination and aggressive honesty occasionally appears in the mainstream, and occasionally a ron paul; a religion, or minority question gets reframed and attached to a juggernaut, and youth and experience are swapped and dance around. What Hunter S Thompson called 'the dark energies of the american election' often appear as comedy, and America connects with myth through characters who can't possibly bear the weight of the expectations placed on them.
This season is shaping up to be a real comeback from several awful elections. I think the last interesting season was 1996. Bob Dole, funny and broken and saved by small town donations in Kansas from the horrors of the Anzio campaigns, and Colin Powell, and Bill Clinton at his publicly competent best (personal life aside) at least provided Americans with candidates who were more than puppets. Now, I'm very taken with Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Bill Richardson and Ron Paul. They strike me as the sort one could imagine on a train in the afterlife listening to Al Smith sing the paternoster as he shaved with a cut-throat razor, like he did in 1928. one could gambol in Elysia on some timeless Nebraska day and see William Jennings Bryan slap on the rubbing alcohol he used rather than deodorant to make another vaguely antisemitic speech about the gold standard under heaven's prarie sun before God showed his Jewish sense of humour by having him kicked out. The candidates I like today are mostly funny and intelligent and in their different ways they say striking things about the republic.
Of course, class probably defines all and I don't know the people about whom I write personally. They are archetypes. I watch with interest the suspicion and dislike the media and the usual suspects have for all of them, and they attract me a little more. At least three of them have humour and they all have brains that seem to have some concept of shame or self-respect, so that's two up on the neocons.
Romney, for instance, is the product of a genuinely American religion which has bedded down in the space of thirty years.I used to teach undergraduates about the Mormon Wars of the 1850s, and familiarised myself with Mormon ideas. As readers of this blog may guess or know, I am a believing and quite happy Roman Catholic; perhaps that acclimatised me to the strangeness of Mormon symbolism and intellectual architecture. They struck me as a mixture of Islamic templates (perhaps their founders encountered some ottoman refugees before the civil war), millennial cults and really odd syncretistic beliefs that meshed with the needs of the west. I'd give them the title of genuine American religion over the Scientology cult, but the interesting thing to me is that even 120 years later, in the 1970s when I was growing up they were viewed as mad. now, they are treated as no less deserving than any other faith by all except the secular media, who are all in a tizz about some of their ideas. On top of all that, Romney seems a study in paradoxes wrapped up in an unbelievably preppy and wholesome Americanness that I bet could turn out to be quite hard. Would Romney see through the neocons or just be their puppet? They view themselves as such hard men I wonder.
And Obama; lanky and Kenyan and out of the land of Lincoln. I think that he is a stunningly able candidate. He misspoke only in his lack of artifice and his assumption that people wouldn't go hysterical over his comments about the criminal Bin laden hiding in pakistan, but I'm not inclined to hold that against him. Over the course of some five constitutions, the rule of people like Yahya Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, the creepy ISI intelligence group, and the betrayal by rich 'Democrats' of Pakistan's poor, pakistan's people have been so sold out that I'd understand if they welcomed somebody who just set out some rules. As opposed to say, a fictional set of reasons for wars entirely elsewhere that kill large parts of a million. I think he is winning the money primary and I wonder if he won't catch fire in the real primaries, barring some economic collapse.
Richardson and huckabee intrigue me too; apparently competent, funny, self-assured governors who just keep plugging away and speak to hispanic groups, southern baptists, and other working class people. I wish they would be on tickets to give weight to Romney and Obama in 2008, but I guess that they'll end up with some cabinet bones and people like Mark Warner or Condi Rice will be coopted on. That'll be deadening if it happened.
And Ron Paul...I really hope he makes it through at least one caucus or primary. he's been demonised as everything from a coughlin type to a grouch by every lazy journalist I've read. He says what he thinks though and he knows one reading of the constitution very well. I like that.
This is an utterly personal ramble. Such is the nature of blogs, of course, that I now know with certainty that I'll be proved completely wrong. Hillary and Rudy or somesuch will end up knocking pointless bits of masonry off of their totally similar managerial campaigns. The deficit will keep going up. America will face a world with 9 trillions of debt and other economic engines around, and not be able to rely on everyone just needing it. The infrastructure will keep crumbling. And I'll keep remembering summers long ago when I sat down with huge books on forgotten campaigns and fell in love with an America that belies the very dark side that runs through its history, as through all human beings.
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