Month: November 2004

A friend of mine sent me this:

Pretty accurate description, I’d say…

* I’m listening to NPR this morning, and they’re talking to people about how they voted and why. One guy said “I voted for Bush because he’s made a big mess and I think he needs to clean up his own mess,” or something to that effect. AARRRGGGHHH!!!

* I don’t know if this really was “the most important election in our lifetimes,” as it was advertised. Maybe, maybe not, I guess we have to see what happens. Or maybe I’m saying this because I don’t want this to be that important of an election…

* Bush says he wants to “reach out” to people who voted for Kerry. Yeah, right. He wants to “reach out” to them so he and his black-booted thugs can get our fingerprints and mugshots into a “bad citizen” database or something….

* When you factor in the “no gay marriage” amendments that passed everywhere with the Bush/Chenney “be afraid” campaign, I think what you get is a country that hateful and scarred, and increasingly retreating into its own and away from the rest of the world. A number of years ago, right wing nut job Pat Buchanan got into trouble for proposing a “fortress America” strategy with foreign policy. That seems to be about where we’re at.

* I have been reading the Daily Kos site a lot lately, and I liked this post quite a bit. I really hope that the democrats do take a time to seriously look at themselves, and I also hope that what they decide is that they too need to appeal to their base and that they try to revive the idea of liberalism in this country. But if this election pushes the part to appeal even more to the middle, then I’m changing my voter registration status.

* On the bright side of things:

–The state in which I live and most of the states I identify with (because I’m from there, I have lots of relatives and/or friends there, I have lived there, etc.) are blue. Well, except for Virginia, where I lived for five years, and also for Ohio, though that was while in Bowling Green and I never really “identified” with them. And it looks like Iowa still hasn’t decided things.

— Nader was a non-factor. Of course, if the dems try to become “Republican light” in 2008, I suspect Nader will be a factor again, and he might even get my vote.

— In Washtenaw county, 60 or 65% of folks voted “no” to proposal 2.

— Will’s elementary school voted for Kerry, so maybe there is hope for the future.

Oddly enough, less than 12 hours after the 2004 presidential election has more or less been settled, the “terror alert” level has gone from yellow in most of the country but orange in DC and NYC to yellow everywhere. Look at Bert in the lower right side of this blog. Coincidence? Nah….

This will probably be the last (quasi)political rant I’ll post here for a while, though that won’t stop me from posting about politics on my unofficial and life blog. But the disappointing (apparent) results of election got me to thinking this morning about the word that Kerry and every other Democrat ran away from, and the word that Bush and every other Republican (or so it seemed) wanted to hang on the Democratic opponent: liberal.

As in “he’s too liberal for America,” or “the most liberal member of congress,” or “he’s liberal and out of touch.”

How did that word become like that?

So one of the things I was thinking about while getting ready to get the election behind me and get on with my day is what is out there on the web? Is there a “liberal advocate” page of some sort? Well, consider this:

* I just did a google search for liberal; what I got was links to various “Liberal Parties” in the UK, Canada, and Australia; some links about the book What Liberal Media?; and a link to a web site called Liberal Slant, a kind of amateurish-looking site that complains about corporate-owned media but which also begins, with absolutely no sense of irony, with a place to shop at the Liberal Slant Online store.

* If you go to http://www.liberal.org, you get a message indicating that the domain name is for sale. (The person who owns this domain obviously is not aware that liberals don’t have the kind of money this person probably wants for the name.) If you go to www.liberal.com or www.liberal.net, you get web sites that have one thing or another to do with Liberal, Kansas.

* I did come across a page called Turn Left, but that page hasn’t been updated since 2001 or so.

I don’t have the answer to all of this fear with the word “liberal,” but clearly, what has happened here is that “Liberals” (like me, I might add) have somehow let this term be captured by conservatives. In the process of doing so, what used to be thought of as merely “liberal” now is more or less “right of center,” and what people think of now as “conservative” would have been described as “reactionary” just a few years ago.

Perhaps though what we need is a movement by Liberals to reclaim the term. The analogy I’m thinking of here is with the word “queer,” a term that was (and I suppose in many circles still is) a derogatory term that was recaptured as a term of empowerment, as in “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” and the academic field/discipline/study of “Queer Theory.”

This analogy might not work entirely, especially considering the fact that amendments and other measures to ban gay marriage passed in every state where they were advanced, including Michigan. But my point is the same. Liberals and other left-leaning people have allowed conservatives define them; I think Liberals need to re-embrace the term and define what it means once again.

* See this very interesting map at C-SPAN. As far as I can tell, it’s the best one out there.

* As I write this, there’s good reasons to believe that Ohio really is still too close to call, despite the fact that all the media outlets (including NPR!) are making it sound like it’s over. I just saw some reporter on CNN talking about how there were ballots in Ohio coming in from individual voting precincts as late as 4 am. And yet, there are lots of media outlets other than Fox talking about how Bush has it won. Rowe and Card want to declare victory, and thankfully, Kerry’s people are saying “not yet, pal.” Remember Florida my friends, remember Florida….

* If Kerry wins, it would mean he would win with less than a majority of the popular vote, which, if we were writing a Greek tragedy, would be completely appropriate. Obviously, I am a fan of Greek tragedy.

* If Bush wins, I think it means some pretty scary shit is going to hit the fan in the next few years. I heard some commentators last night talking about how Bush will have to make some concessions to the Democrats, that he will govern in the next four years from the middle, that he will appoint some Democrats to cabinet positions. Don’t bet on it, especially with the dem losses in congress. I think a more likely scenerio is an increase presence of the police state, more tax cuts for the wealthy, more sanctioned displays of Christianity, a stacked Supreme Court set to overturn things like Roe v. Wade, more war, more war, and more war.

Like I said a few days ago, my only hope is that things get so bad that there’s a swing the other way in 2008.

* The Democrats are stupid. I didn’t want to see them lose as much as they did in congress, but frankly, I’m glad Dashell lost. Stupid idiot. His “leadership” of the Senate in 2002 is what set up the Bushies in the war and for Republican gains that year. He set this whole thing up.

And what happens next, assuming Kerry loses or even if Kerry wins? The Dems are lacking for a leader, and my guess is that their initial reactions are to become more like Republicans, which I am completely convinced would be stupid stupid stupid. Making the party look like “Republican light” isn’t going to win votes; making the party look like something different, maybe even re-invoking the “L” word, would represent a choice. And look: if the party is going to go down in flames, I’d personally rather see it go down for the right causes.

* Americans are stupid. Supposedly, people voted for Bush because of the “war” on terror, because of Iraq, because of his morality. We are prosecuting the “war” on terror by holding people without representation in Cuba, by snooping into what they check out of the public library, by forgetting about Osma. We’ve gotten into a war in Iraq based on bald-faced lies– lies, I want to point out, that not one Democrat (including Kerry) was willing to actually call “lies.” We’re in a war that is looking more unwinnable, that has already killed around 10,000 Iraqis (never mind the Americans killed and injured that we already know about), and that has pissed off the rest of the world.

And Bush is seen as the “moral” candidate. Here’s a guy who has made more people poor, who sees the rich as his “base,” who made the world more unsafe, who has lied to the world in a variety of different ways, who supports the death penalty, who believes he is infallible, and who carries around a Bible. It has never been more clear to me that “morality” and “religion” are two entirely different things, and here we are, a country at war against “terror” (which seems to basically mean “Islam”), a country that is the only true super-power, here we are, supposedly the “land of the free” and all of that, and we as a people are more or less voting for a theocracy.

* Oh yeah, in Michigan (and everywhere else where it was on the ballot) gay marriage and/or civil unions are a big no-no. Great, just great…

* Maybe we can move to Canada and commute to Ypsilanti from there….

* Something else I just thought about: I was just looking at the map, the one I linked to at the top of this page, and it reminds me of something: the Civil War. Seriously, look at it. It really is damn close in terms of “borders” between the way things were in the middle of the 19th century. Are we a country moving to another “war” between the states? Probably not war in the sense of shooting at each other, but perhaps an internal “cold” war of sorts?

I don’t generally talk about my politics here– certainly not as much as I do here— but I thought, given the day and all, I’d comment briefly.

First, go out and vote, no matter who you are going to vote for. That’s obvious. But still, you should show up to class. I had one student ask if I would cancel class for election day, and while I did think about it for a moment, that seemed to be going too far to me. Besides, the polls are open in Michigan from 7 am to 8 pm, so presumably, everyone ought to be able to find some time in there to get to their polling station.

Second, it all seemed very orderly to me this morning, not at all like the sort of “chaos” reports that I’ve seen on TV as of late. There were extra volunteers at the polls (including a guy who used to work at EMU who teaches out at Henry Ford CC– hi Matt!), everything was very organized, and despite the big crowd at the off-time of 9:30 am, I was in and out of there in 10 minutes. So don’t let the lines scare you.

Third, I voted for Kerry. I don’t try to wear my politics on my sleave in my teaching or in my writing here, but it probably also isn’t surprising that an English professor interested in things like technology and post-structualist theories of reading and writing is a “liberal.” Actually, I’m much more liberal than Kerry, but given the two party system and the alternative, it’s a pretty clear choice for me. But just to “spice things up” a bit, I voted for the Green Party candidates who were running for the board of regents at Michigan State, Wayne State, and the University of Michigan. What I should have done for the Wayne State post is written in Jeff Rice….

Fourth, it is very clear to me that anyone at this point who thinks they know how this thing is going to turn out this year is either crazy, self-deluded, or both. I’ve seen on TV and heard on the radio smart people making smart predictions one way or the other, and while I’m hoping for the best, I’m prepared for the worse, too. I did enjoy this story on NPR’s “Morning Edition” about weird things that predict the outcome of the election. Nickelodeon fans picked Kerry, and that’s good enough for me, I guess.

Via Collin’s blog this morning, I learned about Convergences 2004, which is basically a small conference/symposium feature 19 comp/rhet and technology-type folks meeting in Raleigh, NC at NC State this coming weekend. From the names on the program that I recognize, it’s a younger and “up and coming” crowd who all know each other in one way or another and who will probably discuss cool and groovy and hip topics. Rock on.

Actually, I think that very small conferences/symposium like this have a lot of value and are a lot of fun, but the cost of travel and lack of funding from places like EMU make events like this a luxury I can’t afford. Unless something like this could be held in Michigan, which, given the number of comp/rhet/tech kinda folk around, could probably be arranged….

Anyway, have fun, gang.

I came across this duct tape messenger bag this morning, and I have to say, that looks pretty cool. There’s at least one site out there about other duct tape projects. I think I could use a new wallet, so maybe I’ll pick up some duct tape so I have something to do while watching the election returns tonight…

Two quick thoughts this morning as I listen to the news:

* Bush on the stump sort of sounds like a guy who hasn’t been president for four years. He’s saying stuff like “give us a chance to get in there and win the war on terrorism.” And what’s annoying is after getting his loyalty-oath signing audience to lap this up, he’s likely to convince a few people out there that we should give this Bush guy a chance. What do they say about the definition of stupidity or insanity? Doing the same thing and expecting a different result?

* I’m bracing myself for four more years of the Bush regime, and I’m clinging to the silver-lining that W. will screw stuff up so bad that the next time around, we can have someone who is acutally a “liberal” run for president and win. But I’m also trying to keep cautiously optomistic about this election. I keep hearing polls that say it’s too close to call, and when undecided voters go to the polls, they typically vote for change. Which, given my previous thought, makes some sense.

Keeping various things crossed….