The Corrections

Now Juan Cole is a smart guy, but he may want to stick to what he knows rather than venting sanctimonious outrage at Sarah Palin who, though generally out of her depth in her coming-out party, managed to say at least one true thing as regards foreign policy. Cole:

The scariest thing in the [interview] was this exchange:

'When Gibson said if under the NATO treaty, the United States would have to go to war if Russia again invaded Georgia,

Palin responded: "Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

[...]

But look at the video below. It is the alacrity with which she says "perhaps so" that is so alarming. He asked her specifically about having to go to war with Russia over Georgia and she said, "perhaps so!" As though a war with a nuclear power was just the most natural and expected thing in the world.

Okay. Dude. Article 5 of The North American Treaty:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

So in other words, if Georgia were to become a signatory to the North Atlantic Treaty, and Russia again invaded, the question of whether or not we'd go to war with Russia is best answered thusly: "Perhaps so."

Of course, that very answer is why Georgia will never be part of NATO, no matter what Dick Cheney, John McCain, and Jesus Christ arisen himself have to say about it.

Sonnets to Fail

Now not having any time to fail
in the most expansive definition of
that term of art, by which I mean derail
career and social set and hope for love
and sense of life, with all our hours wail-
ing past like cop cars dopplering above
all commuting traffic in which stale
and air-conditioned plastic air we shove
an ever-answered phone to ear and thus
succeed succeed succeed succeed succeed,
we start the deal, negotiate, re-read,
renege, return, re-run, cajole and cuss,
make up, make out, and make a goddamn fuss.
But I prefer a couch, TV, and weed.

Suffah

And Sarah Palin is the distilled essence of wingnut. She has it all. She is dishonest. She is a religious nut. She is incurious. She is anti-science. She is inexperienced. She abuses her authority. She hides behind executive privilege. She is a big spender. She works from the gut and places a greater value on instinct than knowledge.

-John Cole

Does this seem to you to be the distilled essence of a "wingnut," or, rather, does it seem to you to be the description of a very large portion of the American population? Religious, incurious, discomfited by natural science, narrow in the range of their personal experiences, abusive of their authority (i.e. in the workplace) but unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of their decisions, impulsive and instinctive rather than methodical and rational, preferring "common sense" and simple truths to acquired knowledge and reasoning. To me, it sounds like my best friend's mother, my mother's boss, many of my coworkers, most of my neighbors. It describes the "average" residents of York, PA.

While the Obama campaign somnambulates through a series of vague, high-minded appeals to the better angels of human nature, the McCain campaign offers Americans targets for their anger and anxiety. It serves up a gallery of treasonous leftists, crypto-socialists, and Muslim terrorists, who are to blame. For what? For whatever.

Look. The American consumer. If you're merely one more disposable unite of an Ouroboran, self-recycling economy of purchase and disposal, why do you need reason, science, history, cultural literacy, a sense of social continuity, a mutual and reciprocal investment in your lived community, a connection to the land . . . less yet a set of values that include austerity, judiciousness, thrift, candor, honesty, trustworthiness, and self-reliance. These are all values that are absolutely inimical to the political economy of our empire. Contra Progressive hand-wringing, the pig-ignorance of the American people doesn't represent a failure of the American education system, but rather its success. It produces exactly what it's designed and intended to produce.

People suppose that because Americans are Jesus-besotted and express priggish attitudes to priests and polsters, ergo we remain some sort of Puritanical nation. This opinion in particular infects the Europeans whom I know, despite all evidence of their eyes and ears. In fact we've become a deeply, deeply decadent people. The supposed proliferation of "fundamentalist" religion is really just a proliferation of devotional cults, and you must ask yourself: if Sarah Palin, for instance, is such a "religious nut," then why is she parading around in a bikini and plastering herself with makeup in direct contravention of biblical injunctions about modesty and humility? (Note: as pointed out in comments, this is not precisely true. Har-dee-har. The lack of modesty and humility stand.) Our modern sects are not actually Christian religions. They've simply appropriated Christian forms in the same way the early Christians appropriated the various pagan forms of the Mediterranean and Near East.

The cure for decadence is hardship, and callous as it sounds, the problem with America, pace Hope and Change, isn't that people are suffering, but that they're not suffering enough.

The Empire of Spite

You want change? Go to Iraq and take some fucking notes.

I'd quibble with not a word of Mr. Fundamental's yawp, so let me just second and amplify the point for the whaddawedo?! crowd. There is something that you can do. You can take up arms against the government of the United States. Drive an explosives-laden truck into the Eisenhower Tunnel. Take to the streets, en masse, in violent protest every day for months. Change you can believe in! Blow up cars in intersections. Cut telephone and utility lines. Occupy local government buildings. Kill people. If you haven't got the stomach for it, well, blog! Whaddarewegonnadoooo!?

Matthew Yglesias writes:

That’s true. I would add, though, that I think people should point out that it would be possible, in theory, to actually change the institutions of American politics. In the United States we do this very strange thing where almost every successful politician of either party and almost every pundit has a habit of complaining about gridlock, observing that Washington is broken, and other sundry clichés. And they’re right — we have a set of political institutions that were designed a very long time ago by men who, while intelligent, didn’t share modern values, didn’t have the benefit of observing different democratic political systems in operation, and had no sense of the challenges of modern politics. But at the same time as all this complaining about our broken system, the constitutional order that constitutes the broken system is revered. If, as a country, we really wanted to “change Washington” we could do what the Founders did, decide to scrap the whole thing, elect delegates to a big convention, and write a new one.

Yglesias then appropriately notes that it ain't gonna happen, although he fails to note why, because, as he himself is not a revolutionary, he isn't inclined to remind people that what the Founders actually did was fight an 8-year revolutionary war against the recognized and, by the standards of time, legitimate government of the 13 colonies, then dithered for five years as a loose alliance of pseudo-states, then drafted the Constitution, then (as we take the long view here at Who Is IOZ?) fought a Civil War against a secessionary and revanchist confederacy of Southern states to the tune of 200,000 killed-in-action and 600,000 total dead, and then militarily occupied the South for over a decade in a failed effort to reintegrate the rebellious states into the Federal Union, a project that wasn't fully realized until the Federal government withdrew those troops, acquiesced to the practical eviseration of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, allowing the establishment of Negro serfdom, and coopted the white South into the growing permanent military establishment that was by then turning its attention to the annexation of the Mexican southwest and the acquisition of an overseas empire. In other words, institutional change is some hard-ass shit to accomplish, takes a long time, kills a lot of people and always, always, always fucks over even more.

The forces that have driven the United States from British colony to aristocratic republic to slavering, world-bestriding, debt-crippled, armed-to-the-teeth, full-spectrum-dominant, brain-addled, xenophobic, hypernationalistic, Christian-authoritarian Soviet empire have a big head of steam behind them, and if you propose to return it to its gentle roots you must first identify just when the hell this place was gentle and second establish some hardened positions, preferably on the high-ground, well-provisioned, with a reliable well and several routes of escape.

Abort Sex

I'm going to once again haul out my favorite passage from Coetzee's excellent collection, Giving Offense:

We have reached the entry-point into a debate about the rights of the individual as against the rights of the collectivity which is familiar enough not to need extended rehearsal and to which I have nothing to contribute except perhaps a caution against the kind of moral vigilance that defines vulnerable classes of people and sets about protecting them from harms whose nature they must be kept blind to because (the argument goes) merely to know the harm is to suffer it. I refer here primarily to children, though the same argument has been made in respect of so-called simple believers. We are concerned to protect children, in good part to protect them from the consequences of their limitless curiosity about sexual matters. But we should not forget that children experience control of their explorations—control which by its own premises cannot spell out exactly what it is that is forbidden—not as protection but as frustration. From the measures adults take to deny the satisfaction of children’s curiosity, may children not legitimately infer that their curiosity is censurable; and from the explanations with which they are provided for being constrained—explanations riddled with holes—may they not infer that they are not respected as moral agents? May the ethical wrong done to the child in the process not be more durable than any harm it may suffer from following wherever curiosity leads?

This is neither an argument for keeping sexually explicit materials away from children nor an argument against it. It is a reflection on how harms weigh up against each other, on balancing imponderables, choosing between evils. In making such choices we might include in our reckoning the considerations that to a small child the things that adults do with or to each other’s bodies are not only intriguing and disturbing but ugly and funny too, even silly; the consideration, too, that whether or not the child succeeds in blocking the thought that what the people do in the picture its parents may do too, it is hard for the parent not to project this thought upon the child, and, reexperiencing it through the child, to be embarrassed, ashamed, and even angry. Nor should we forget who is most embarrassed when to the candid gaze of a child spectacles of gross adult nakedness are exposed. The moment is a complex one; but included in our desire to keep such sights from the child may there not be a wish not to descend, by association, in the child’s esteem, not to become the object of the child’s disgust of amusement.

The profound obsession with sexual predation in the American society has produced a number of interesting outcomes and ironies, not the least of which is our current campaign imbroglio about whether or not Barack Obama advocated for something called "comprehensive sex education" for young children. Despite making outré use the so-yesterday "teh" (we forgive, we forgive), Hilzoy at Obsidian wings has the appropriate rejoinder. I also note that "comprehensive" sex education, insofar as the word holds any real meaning, would involve actual fucking, which as far as I can tell fails to appear on any Illinois school curricula.

The topic of "inappropriate touching," as goes the current euphemism, interests me, because while on one hand it seems only rational to seek means of protecting children who cannot legitimately give consent to sexual acts from adults who would force, intimidate, cajole, trick, or otherwise coerce them into sex, on the other hand I'm deeply suspicious of "the kind of moral vigilance that defines vulnerable classes of people and sets about protecting them from harms whose nature they must be kept blind to." Seeking to educate children about the perils of sexual abuse and how to avoid it while also procalaiming that they're not yet old enough to understand sex itself, or more accurately that they're not yet old enough to be allowed to understand sex itself, seems to me to be a fundamentally impossible and ridiculous task. Socrates sez: why is Kindergarten too young to begin learning about sex and human sexuality?

The obvious answer is good, old-fashioned taboo. Even the more liberal (in the non-political sense) members of our society tend to view sexuality as something that begins in adolescence and the onset of physical maturity. We have special trouble with early adolescence because our biology refuses to cooperate with our mores, and so consider 13-, 14-, and 15-year-olds generally too young, immature, and emotionally undeveloped to be active sexually, even though by that time most teens are sufficiently physically mature to fuck and procreate and so forth, not to mention subject to the same natural, sexual urges as adults. The idea that it is appropriate for a 14-year-old high school couple to kiss, but that genitals are off limits until . . . when? . . . well, is perfectly absurd and morally dubious. The most prevalent argument against adolescent sex is that they are unprepared for the depth of emotional attachment inherent to major acts of physical intimacy, to which the flippant reply is: clearly all those cocksucking high school sluts and horndog pussy-chasing dudes (and let's not forget, let's not forget the pretty little dykes and fags) aren't suffering from any post-blow-job emotional trauma . . . "But I thought he loved me." Well no, no you didn't. Counterclaim: such behavior is overreported (true) and anyway, do we really want to tolerate the transformation of sex into a joyless, mechanical act, devoid of true pleasure and divorced from real love? Hey, we tolerate marriage, don't we?

The reason sex, particularly for youth, particularly for girls, is so fraught with contradictions and emotional pitfalls is that we tell them that sex is fraught with contradictions and emotional pitfalls. In childhood, sex is mysterious; in adolescence, serious. Meanwhile sex is one of our most prevalent cultural commodities, hence its popularity with the yutes, even as we routinely denounce its prevalence in our media. It seems to me that the only rational way to approach the sexual education of our youth is to completely dismantle the embargo on information that we've erected in order to protect their morals, sensibilities, frailties, and so on. So we return to the question of pre-adolescent sexuality, which most terrifies us, and mostly sparks a steadfast refusal to admit that exists. Plainly, though, children are in Coetzee's words boundlessly curious about sexual matters, to which our uncomfortable responses consist largely of prevarications and denials, except for the limited circumstances in which we warn them that grown-ups want to do it to them and are Bad. Yet without a frank understanding of what sex is, such moral admonitions can only produce confusion, frustration, and regret.

So, to the charge that Obama supports sex ed for kids, it would have been refreshing (if entirely impossible, unbelievable, inconceivable, ad inf.) for him to say that yes, he believes children who know the names of their body parts are old enough to begin learning about all their uses. Judging by the defensiveness of his supporters on this issue, I may have undersold the titanic unlikelihood of such an admission or belief. Their concurrent utter disdain for the 17-year-old whore daughter of Sarah Palin, or more specifically for Sarah Palin producing such a whore, who is now doomed to a white-trash existence cooking bathtub meth until she dies in a trailer fire, is further proof that when it comes to incoherence on the proper social attitude toward human sexuality, conservatives have by no means cornered the market. If one were a cynic, one would be tempted to suggest that sexual politics is nothing better than a moral cudgel to be swung at one's nominal, doctrinal opponents whenever the opportunity is available. But, boundless positive thinker that I am, I will suggest instead that most people are simply morons.

Defeatism in Poetry

James Tate is one of my favorite poets, a weirdo belonging to no school who just keeps getting weirder. Also, probably another dishonorary defeatist. Two of my favorites:

My Great Great Etc. Uncle Patrick Henry

There's a fortune to be made in just about everything
in this country, somebody's father had to invent
everything--baby food, tractors, rat poisoning.
My family's obviously done nothing since the beginning
of time. They invented poverty and bad taste
and getting by and taking it from the boss.
O my mother goes around chewing her nails and
spitting them in a jar: You shouldn't be ashamed
of yourself she says, think of your family.
My family I say what have they ever done but
paint by numbers the most absurd and disgusting scenes
of plastic squalor and human degradation.
Well then think of your great great etc. Uncle
Patrick Henry.


Teaching the Ape to Write Poems

They didn't have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there.
Why don't you try writing something?"

Things You Should Listen To

Johannes Brahms totally underrated Quartet No. 2 in A Major for Piano and Strings, which is big, sometimes muddled, occasionally strange, surprising, and wonderful. The repetition and variation of the opening theme through the first movement is wistful and nostalgic; the adagio is lovely and wandering. The finale is a little bit nutty. A really great, interesting piece.

The Beauty of the Plan Is Its Simplicity

Although increasingly convinced that Osama bin Laden is in fact holed up in a suite at the Georgetown Ritz, I'm amused by the 2500 words the Post requires to point out that indiscriminately bombing the people whose assistance you require to find him is probably a flawed tactic.

Grain Alcohol and Rainwater

You have to understand that the US Federal government now effectively controls one half of the mortgages in America. When you hear the pinheads on "Marketplace" yapping about the fine distinction between conservatorship and receivership, you can safely disregard that pish as serious posh. The government owns your houses, dudes and dudettes, and you're paying them for the privilege of living there. Consider this: although effectively nationalized, you're still paying interest. There's this word that starts with an S and rhymes with Nerf, but it escapes me at the moment. This in any case has all occured under a supposedly conservative administration. George W. Bush: biggest socialist in America. I love this land.

Burn down the disco . . . hang the blessed DJ

Loyal Donk Netrootsia is panicking. Three months out and tied in the national polls is a fine place to be, but heaven descend and forbid, they seem to believe that unless Barry O. goes nasty, they're gonna get shit-kicked out of Ohio and PA, thus consigning America to four more years of death-penalty-loving, war-starting, corporate-purchased executive dictatorship. Unlike the death-penalty-loving, war-starting, corporate-purchased executive dictatorship of the Community Organizer, who, like John Kerry before him, had some actual, palatable beliefs (Kerry was a serious anti-war activist) prior to discovering Ambition. (As my buddy tggp pointed out recently in comments, Obama's time in the community served principally to convince him that he'd be better off going to Harvard Law.) Although the prospect of a McCain presidency appeals to the part of me that wants civilization to burn to the ground so that we can all return to the pre-agrarian human norm--hunting, gathering, and occasionally trippin' balls--I must admit that a.) I think McCain is considerably less insane than he's obliged to appear for the actually insane voting base of his party, and b.) I still don't think he's going to win. A textbook case of Follow the Money, one need only observe where the hedged bets of Wall Street et al. are higher. This season the big money's backing Obama, and with Republican rule having pushed the mortgage sector of the finance economy toward what will surely become receivership, i.e. nationalization, not to mention all the other lousy economic news of late, the big dawgs of State Capitalism need some calmer heads to preserve the veneer of the free and independent market, someone graceful, less prone to constantly stumbling through the 4th wall.

Honestly, though, I, like friend Dennis P., usually find myself slyly rooting for a Donk victory just to watch the crummy bastards eat shit while Barack & Joe threaten Iran, send the Marines into Pakistan, ramp up the Drug War (uh, "reestablish relationships with fiends in allies in our own backyard"), advocate for the death penalty, jack around with Social Security, increase the size of the military and the scope of its responsibilities, expand the police state fix the mess that is Homeland Security, dither and prevaricate on social matters relating to The Homosexuals, pass a patchwork of mostly unfunded mandates in order to appear to be doing something about health care, and so on and so forth. Of course, Obama could yet ascend to the throne and prove to really be some kind of Muslim Communist, in which case I will be thrilled to be proven wrong.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Whatarewegonnadoooooo, IOZ? Whatarewegonnadoooo!? America's engaged in disastrous foreign wars and is torturing people and the economy's going bust and Sarah Palin's daughter is going to give birth to a space-oddity superbaby in the orbit of Jupiter and and and and. I mean, yeah, the world sucks. You wanna fight about it? You think you've got it bad? This shit is nothing compared to the seriously bad times. Put that in your 9/11 and smoke it.

We're all going to die and we may as well get used to it. The constant drive to improve our lot is a kind of atavism I just can't get behind. I'm a selfish bastard and I love my creature comforts and I'll claw my way to any luxury within reach, but political activism? Reform? Revolution? America ended up with the South. The French ended up with the Terror, and then Napoleon. Look at that Solzhenitsyn asshole--dude wails about the horrors of Soviet Russia and the gulag. With good reason. He certainly got the short end of that stick. Then, barely a decade after the Wall and he's ubercreepster KGB-man Bad Vlad's BFF, yodeling about pan-Slavic unity, just one more Orthodox crypto-Czarist on his deathbed. If I ever joined a revolution and, Titans forbid, turned out to have picked the winning side, I'd become just as much a blood-drinking monster as the current gang. It's a lifetime's work to look at things the way they are without bothering to change them. If you're going to risk your life, risk it on a black hole or something else truly useful, or entirely purposeless, which are often synonymys in my dictionary.

Nooz @ 11

I'm pretty sure I've said mean things about Ezra Klein before, but I like this post. Excerpt:

The media is incapable of admitting itself to be an actor. They shape the public's understanding of politics, but pretend they are a mode of transmission rather than an agent in control of information. That gets you the consistently confusing coverage where the very people who will decide how the public understands an event makes that decision by speculating how they think the public will understand an event. It is the pretense of objectivity at the expense of honesty. But it reaches new heights of absurdity when the subject is not politics, but the media itself, and the media must answer questions about itself by asking how they imagine viewers are judging their coverage. And it is sad, too, watching people who once wanted to be Carl Bernstein reduced to moderating a focus group that exists only inside their heads.

Although, to be fair, aren't we all ultiamtely just moderating a focus group that exists only in our heads? It's, like, the nature of the subjective consciousness in an oblivious, probabilistic universe, man.

But, uh, seriously. I'm the sort of person who says things like, "I don't watch television," because a.) I am an effete intellectual snob (also: prefer vinyl!--no, not really) and b.) because I don't watch television. The internet has better porn and also . . . everything on the television. So, what exposure I do have to the flickering blue hearth of the American home is intermittent and generally quite jarring. Television advertising, for instance, makes no sense to me at all. That Geico shit? Whatthefuckaretheytalkingabout?

Cable and network news, though, in all their incarnations, are so . . . colorful. Literally. Wolf Blitzer could easily be broadcasting from the set of Best Damn Sports Show and no one would be able to tell the difference. These supposed newscasters have people who formerly worked for other people talking about the employers of the people they used to work for, set in contrast with other ex-post-ad-hoc-factotums of this or that political luminary, and they all gallop in circles weeping and screaming and speaking in tongues. Then some dude named Jack Cafferty comes on and reads emails that other people have sent to him while pretending to by my 10th-grade gym teacher. A giant lizard named Nancy Grace rushes out onto the set. Catch her! Her tail pops right off and she skitters away. Don't worry. It will regenerate.

Someone complained to me recently about Bill O'Reilly, and noted as an insult that he used to host Entertainment Tonight. Well let me just say this about entertainment and sports journalism: it's still journalism. However preposterous and celebrity-driven these sub-genres have become, I can nevertheless glean some essential, actual, data-backed information from them. How much is so-and-so getting paid. What were the per-screen weekend grosses. What was the score? I mean, imagine if the sport press reported on the Steelers-Texans game as their newsroom brethren have reported ont he Russia-Georgia conflict. Who won? What were the comparative strengths and weaknesses? Who are the key players? Who's on the IR?

On the other hand, and unlike (I suspect) Mr. Klein, I'm not generally of the opinion that some kind of independent press is going to function as a meaningful counterbalance to the powers of an actual, central government. That seems to me like willful fantasy--I mean, even if they had such an intention, the press lacks the resources and wherewithal to monitor something like the US Federal Government--the largest, richest, most powerful, most capably violent organization in the entire world. Ever. It makes for a fine, plucky detective story, but what really happens when Nancy Drew goes after the smugglers is they shoot the bitch and dump her body in a lake. Or pay her off. Or offer her inside info and good options on the IPO. Reporters and news personalities are broadly deserving only of contemptuous laughter, and before some gives me that Jefferson line about picking newspapers over governments, you might want to see the other things he said about papers. The great man was many things, but never consistent.

Well, it appears that we had to

. . . destroy the village in order to save it. This shit happens all the time, and it's worth noting in passing just how dishonest is our whole Liberation theme here. You invade a country and depose its tyrannical government. The insane Buddha-blower-uppers go underground and mount an insurgency along with some various and sundry allies. From time to time, some of them enter a village or town in order to . . . what? Resupply? Grab some food and water? Kidnap a hostage or two. And what do you do? You call in air support and bomb the fuck out of the place, then deny that you killed any civilians. Dudes, you bombed a village. One begins to suspect that rather than going to the logistical trouble of constructing suicide bombs, these guys are just rolling into town, waving their hands, and waiting for the Americans to come and kill everyone for them.

What They Do

Mr. Paulson did not fully recognize the extent of Fannie’s and Freddie’s financial problems until recent months. In July, seeking to avoid a government takeover, he asked Congress for the power to bail out Fannie and Freddie — hoping that gaining such authority would calm markets and make a rescue unnecessary.

So. Not having "fully recognized" the immense, spiraling clusterfuck that was (and is) the American mortgage hustle, Paulson asked for the authority to intervene in said clusterfuck, in order to prevent such clusterfuck, which he did not recognize from, um, occuring.

And then it turned out that they'd been on the holodeck all along!

The fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind

Deus abscondus help me, I am going to quote Tom Friedman:

But where are our priorities? How many wars can we fight at once without finishing even one? Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Georgia. Which is the priority? Americans are struggling to meet their mortgages, and we’re sending $1 billion to a country whose president behaved irresponsibly, just to poke Vladimir Putin in the eye. Couldn’t we poke Putin with $100 million? And shouldn’t we be fostering a dialogue with Georgia and with Putin? Otherwise, where is this going? A new cold war? Over what?

How totally Decline and Fall of us. A series of pointless, expensive border wars while the sewers crumble in the capital.

PA, OH

Sunday morning and I'm so rockin' to the tune of the Donk quite seriously looking at losing this Presidential election. Los Netroots are all agog because spokesmodel Joe Biden can't shut up about what an awesome guy is John McCain while Sarah Palin is making the rounds screeching that Barack Obama will personally rape her with his giant Afromuslim mandingo unless the good people of Central PA vote for her and gramps. And you know what? It's working. Prof. Sartwell thinks it has to do with the semiotics of class, and I've got to second that emotion. The advocates of Uplift, the Whatsamatta Kansans of the world, are blinded by the neo-liberal, Tom Friedman illusion of a post-class, high-tech, Google-and-biotech nation of middle managers and "information economy" workers. Meanwhile the self-proclaimed conservative faction goes in for good, old-fashioned, Marxian appeals to class solidarity. I mean, if you need proof of the assbackwardness of American political labeling, just consider that our right wing runs against the elites and the intellectuals while our left wing represents the educated, cultured elite. But but but, you say, the GOP doesn't really stand for Joe Schmoe and the Donk isn't really the party of urban affluence. Yeah, yeah. When has an election, here or anywhere, ever, ever hinged on what a candidate or faction actually believes or represents? It's all stagecraft and signaling, and the Republicans are good at it.