THE GOP: FISHERS OF (WHITE) MEN
I recently had an illuminating conversation with my father. He was in management in the defense industry for years until he retired, causing him to hate Republicanism with a white hot passion. He can’t wait to pull the lever for Obama.
He had just returned from a Canadian fishing trip with five “Blue Collar American” types in their seventies. He told me he was worried about Barack Obama’s chances. “Some people are pretty racist,” he said.
I told him, “Think of it like sports. They said that Black men couldn’t be quarterbacks. Now it’s normal. Then they said Black men couldn’t be head coaches. They excelled. Then they said Black men couldn’t be owners…”
“But son,” he interrupted, “these guys don’t even like football! Get it?”
“What? Why not?”
“Too many Black people!”
I didn’t ask him why he had friends like that. If you grew up in Blue Collar America before the 1980s, the answer to that is self-evident: a person needs friends.
Anyway, having already exhausted “articulate”, “attractive”, “Muslim”, “naturally gifted”, “exotic” and the like, it is slowly dawning on the GOP’s that all of their “cleverness” might be accomplishing the opposite of what they intended: it may be inoculating people against code words. Now what?
I listened to Rush Limbaugh the other week, and he was laying out The Plan (beyond the one wherein we are winning the war). I hope you don’t have a full stomach and remember, I heard this with my own ears (though obviously I will be paraphrasing). Sigh. Here goes:
The Obama candidacy is part of a George Soros plot to rule the world. No surprise there. Then it gets ugly. Soros is so evil, so amoral and power hungry that he has trained a Black man to behave like a President! When the cameras aren’t rolling, when he doesn’t have a teleprompter to read someone else’s words, he isn’t so “articulate”. His speech is dull, slow and halting. In other words George Sauros has painstakingly trained Stepin Fetchit to ACT LIKE JFK!! WAKE UP AMERICA!
I shit you not, this is their plan (that and painting Michelle as a “ho”). Yep. Count on it. McCain will wag his finger and scold and denounce the offending miscreants, but he’ll have the smell of it all over him.
Back to Dad. “Well Dad,” I said, “these guys would never have voted for a Democrat anyway, no matter who it was.”
“Nah,” he laughed, “I don’t think that they ever vote at all.”
Picking a qualified and electable running mate will be a snap for John McCain after the woes he has encountered trying to find a suitable campaign theme song. In his struggle to employ a stirring but appropriate ditty, McCain has been more apt to incite the artists associated with the songs he favors to consider chopping off their own fingers or poking their own eyes out with their accursed, misunderstood pens. Until now McCain has hardly been able to settle on a song that didn’t call forth a barrage of Cease and Desist orders.
Part of the problem is that these wily musicians and their intentionally ambiguous lyrics are designed to engender a mass following (e. g., Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”) while obliquely projecting their political slants. McCain wanted John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Little Pink Houses,” with its familiar “Ain’t that America” refrain, to stoke patriotic fervor and unify the electorate around simple homespun values–but someone in McCain’s camp eventually figured out that this particular jam actually decries the empty lie that is the “American dream.” Plus, Mellencamp is all about the farmers, that tragic, oft-neglected group that might well unseat the oil dynasty if we would only let them grow the corn to fuel our cars, buses, jet liners and semis.
McCain also tried ABBA and, well, they are fricking foreigners, you daft geezer. Naturally all of their lyrics are flimsily coded anti-American messages. ABBA was able to re-unite on at least this issue; they had a collective hissy fit. Bush encountered similar resistance in 2004 when he tried to use the Orleans hit, “You’re Still the One.” Ah, but songwriter John Hall was an anti-nuke activist. So now McCain, figuring Chuck Berry has been fucked over in much worse ways and might indifferently abide this dubious but relatively innocuous misappropriation, has jacked “Johnny B. Goode.” Berry is a self-proclaimed Barack Obama man, but McCain says he will continue to use the song, penned over a half-century ago by the pedophilic pee fetishist, because the 81-year-old legend has been, “the only [artist who] hasn’t complained.”
Obama is currently going with U2 and “Beautiful Day,” playing to the optimistic hipster set with his whole rainbows and jellybeans appeal. You would like to believe he could have found one song by an American band that would bolster his image and rally the faithful. But then again, Bono is some kind of Christian, and even with their half-billion dollars and staff of thousands Obama & Co. wouldn’t have been able to find a Christian-American band that doesn’t induce spontaneous wide-spread vomiting.
This theme song business is some serious shit, though. Kosovo, the newest country in the world, has just chosen a national anthem. I caught a few bars of the grim ecclesiastical arrangement on the radio today and was quite underwhelmed. Things are so touchy in the tumultuous Balkan state that the song has no lyrics. A spokesman said that because of the broad array of ethnicities, historical volatility and the clashing factional interests, there likely exists no sequence of words that would not be a potential igniter of conflagration in the region that has for centuries been the embattled border land between the Muslim and Christian hemispheres.
It is possible that the outcome of this historic U.S. election will be determined by whichever candidate picks the catchier tune, and clearly McCain is at a distinct disadvantage in this realm, judging from the apparent rage inspired in popular musicians by anyone associated with the Bush administration or even the Republican Party. It would be commercial suicide for any contemporary mainstream rocker to align themselves with, or even to allow any of their “art” to be used for the advancement of the conservative agenda, especially if they were a closet neo-con. So, taking for granted the fact that leftist posturing might for some musicians be simply the pragmatic option, let’s not lose sight of the more compelling issue at hand here: this presidential election is our first one out of fifty-six, dating back to 1789, in which we are free to choose a presidential candidate by basing our votes on the singular criterion of the candidate’s race. Now if that ain’t democracy then Chuck Berry ain’t a freak.
I’ve been away for several weeks driving around America in a gasoline powered ve-hicle. I’ve seen things.
This I know: While nobody knows how this presidential campaign will play out it is an absolute certainty that like in 1968, the Empire will be shaken to its core.
W. and crew have taken the GOP so far out on a dead limb that they’ve nominated a candidate who they despise. Hillary, having given the okeydoke to “blue collar America” has smashed the LBJ coalition.
Meanwhile that unsinkable ship, the “USS Sole Superpower,” has sunk. A shocked and addled populace drifts on the waves, clinging to its habits and prejudices while sharks circle the wreckage. They face a stark choice: they can swim towards the small island on the horizon (which may not even have any food or water) called “Obama,” or they can stay put and hope to be rescued before the sharks decide to strike.
(Metaphor switch!) Obama, the Mohammed Ali of politics (see? Americans can embrace a Muslim champ) has, against all odds, defeated the hardest hitter around to take the Democratic Title. The Clintons, like George Foreman, foresaw an early knockout, but Obama employed a “rope-a-dope” strategy. He’s taken some thundering shots to the head and body, which is worrisome, and the tireless GOP waits in the wings like Joe Frazier. The ensuing fight won’t be pretty. Furthermore, unlike Ali, Obama didn’t get a knockout. He won on points in a controversial split decision.
Obama will not use the rope-a-dope on McCain. He’ll float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, stick and jab. To win he must fight his fight and bring it.
The greatest obstacle to this would be a Hillary vice-presidency. The Republicans have a warehouse full of ammunition on the Clintons, sitting unused. Obama would be caught flat footed, spending the entire campaign explaining what the Clintons really meant by this or that. You know the drill.
I know for a fact that Republicans are desperately praying (literally) for an Obama-Clinton ticket. For all of their bluster, GOPs know this: Their candidate might win out only if Obama picks Hillary. They know that McCain is no Joe Frazier. No, he is a Scott LeDeaux, a paper tiger with a glass jaw. A Great White Hope, if you will, though even a LeDeaux could land a lucky punch if he catches the Champ flat footed.
So will “blue collar America” ever vote for Obama? (Metaphor switching back!) As we bob on the ocean, surrounded by sharks, something new develops. Amongst the run-of-the-mill sharks, up swims a ravenous 40-foot Great White named “War on Iran!” Maybe, just maybe, America will decide to swim for that island.
These are the (legal) things Marion Kind has done for money: cabbage picker, office clerk, landscaper, ice cream man, injection molder, forklift driver, film and stage actor, drycleaner, comic book artist, truck driver, dishwasher, fanzine putter-outer, bartender, housepainter, singer, UAW shop steward, warehouse and packaging person, courier, waiter, guinea pig, illustrator, poet, writer, fashion model, five instrument recording artist, assembler, construction, cabbie. Not saying he did them well, only that he got paid.
Pass the White-Out
Two nights ago, on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, I was walking home in South Philly, grumbling to myself about SUVs blocking narrow one-way streets because their owners abandoned them for quick sandwiches. Then I look to my right and see Bill Clinton sitting down with Chelsea and getting grubby with a cheese steak, right on the sidewalk–to very little fanfare. People were excited, taking cell phone snap shots and calling their moms, and Bill was letting anybody come right up and paw at him and shake the hand he was trying to eat with. The thing that struck me was that as small a gathering as it was–25 well-scattered people at its peak–they all really responded to the dude, and the dude to them. There was a Hispanic family, an Asian family, a twenty-something black couple, and random pedestrians of every variety–and there was no “Oh my God it’s the President!.” Instead it was a giddy “Oh my God, it’s Bill.” They just go to him like they know him.
Here in Philadelphia, I have enjoyed the option of squandering several opportunities in recent weeks to see either of the democratic candidates in person, and within easy walking distance. For years we have heard how presidential campaigns are completely controlled by the media, and determined by the TV strategies of campaign eggheads. Elections are long. The family of one candidate is working the street late at night, for the primaries. A big part of these things is decided on the ground, as they say.
Pennsylvania voters stuck to the script Tuesday and Hillary got her win. Obama, not terribly demoralized by the inevitable results, had–even as Hillary’s familial tentacles were glad handing working class Philly–already pulled out of the state to attend to more practical markets. The only thing the Clinton victory may have possibly accomplished was to bolster her latest strategy of hammering it into the Democratic party’s collective psyche that Obama would, as the Democratic nominee, have a daunting task ahead trying to wrest the coveted white, working class votes from a guy that reminds every hillbilly of their loopy estranged grandfather.
Nora Ephron (find her on IMDb before you Google her) is positively distraught that, as she estimates, this entire historical presidential election process will, ironically, come down to which candidate white male voters choose from the options of either-a-woman-or-a-black-guy, or an old white man who favors the illegal torture of illegally detained “enemy” combatants.
There are plenty of reasons not to vote and a variety of rationales that indicate that the outcome is a foregone conclusion, but Jesus lady, it is only April. Let the kids have a little fun.
Ephron is saying that even though voters from other demographic groups will each make educated, rational and color-and-gender blind decisions as to who should lead the free world, a bunch of misogynistic, xenophobic, anger management-challenged honkies will cast the votes that tip the scales.
Man, fuck that. Get off your sorry emo butts and go out and kick some metal head ass. Keep us honky motherfuckers from going to the polls. What do I care, I wouldn’t dignify that charade with my participation if they were giving out Xanax martinis to everybody as they came out of the voting booths.
Prior to the age of terror-alert-level color codes as a major campaign issue diversion, the women’s vote was divided and neutralized, and its electoral leverage had, for years, been gutted by one issue: abortion. Candidates felt little pressure in regards to how they were viewed in the light of any other issue, in the eyes of women, because once a candidate’s stance on abortion had been determined, the vote of nearly every woman was dictated by that. Women debated scores of other issues, but pro-choicers have not voted for fascist, right-to-life zealots, nor, conversely, have right-to-lifers voted for commie, pinko baby-killers.
Generally it has not mattered because these issues come in pre-packaged bundles. There aren’t many candidates running on a “Universal Health Care/Overturn Roe v. Wade” platform, and now, with John McCain pitted against Democratic candidate _____, it does seem time to unify the female vote. No politician really wants the hassle of overturning Roe, and McCain, crazy as he may be, isn’t a likely threat to focus his lunacy on taking on a nation of furious women. Iran maybe, but not politically active lefty women.
So to prevent us crackers (who Ephron assures you can in no way be trusted in this case) from queering the pitch when the curtains close, let’s go over a couple of strategies that will keep whitey from having his say on election day:
-Tell the white guys in your life that you truly believe they have a real chance at this Velvet Revolver lead singer gig and they shouldn’t spare a minute for anything that doesn’t involve preparing for their web-cam video audition.
-On election day: Free access to IShotMyself.com (NSFW)
-Schedule a Super Bowl with a Pamela Anderson-Condoleezza Rice mud-wrestling bout half-time show.
-Squidbillies marathon.
-Free Xanax martinis for anybody who knows most of the words to “Highway to Hell.”
All right, this ain’t a top ten list but you get the idea of how little effort is required to divert the abominable white man from his simple task of deciding the fate of the world, and you can use this as a guide to ensure that you will take back the night, fight the power, and stick it to the man.
Just remember though, a honky on a Xanax martini hangover can be a mother, brothers and sisters.
Long has written about sports, news, music and travel under various names and for various publications, including the Buffalo News, The Beast, Blue Dog Press, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the New York Sports Express, among others. He served a short stint as the guitar player in the Philadelphia metal-hop band, Incognegro. He also played guitar and sang on recordings of the Laughing Hyenas and The Unsane. He has dabbled in documentary and music video. He is a veteran of the US Navy and a graduate of the University of Houston. He lives in Philadelphia. You can google the rest.
It should come as no surprise that a potential First Daughter circa 2008 has a blog. The fly-on-the-wall view of life tagging along with her dad, John McCain, on his tour bus is chronicled at mccainblogette.com. Meghan McCain, a blonde Columbia grad with stints at Newsweek and “SNL” under her belt, seems aware of the scrutiny she’d be under were she to become a First Daughter.
McCain’s blog ranges from confessional, to amusing, to tell-all (she confides that her mother was named “rodeo queen” in high school). The blog appears somewhat unedited, but does have a producer and a professional photographer. She includes her iPod playlists that feature tracks by The Dead Milkmen, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Elastica and Bad Brains. She admits to an obsession of making playlists, comparing herself to John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity with the caveat that “I will never be as cool as John Cusack.” Other blog features include posts of supporter-made YouTube videos (someone covering “It’s Raining Men” as “It’s Raining McCain” that includes a surreal ending of floating McCain heads), and a post reflecting her strong stance on American culture’s unhealthy obsession with female body image (”…someone handed me a business card for a plastic surgeon and suggested I needed liposuction. I am proud of my curves and have always loved my fuller figure, as should every woman who is not a size 0.”).