Hammer Mill Days

Electrodes to power. Turbines to speed. Do I have to say that every time before we lift off? Yeah, I do. What of it?

Oh, yeah - hi, everyone. Big Green here, on the as-yet undiscovered companion (or “planet”) circling the star Sirius, once again preparing for lift-off after a relatively successful string of gigs. What do I mean by “relatively successful”? Well, that’s a somewhat qualified term, I will admit. Let me put a finer point on it. In the Big Green performance book, “success” is defined in degrees of survivability. ”Relatively successful” means that few of the bottles tossed at us from the first five rows actually connected with their targets. Fortunately, with someone like sFshzenKlyrn in the group, there’s a significantly lower likelihood of being hit by missiles of any kind, since our Zenite friend is himself a celestial object of indeterminate volume and mass, surrounded by complex magnetic fields that act like an invisible shield, like a protective blister of some kind. Beer bottles just bounce off that sucker, and sometimes vaporize like pyrotechnics. It actually adds interest to the show. (Though I think sFshzenKlyrn is going a bit too far by encouraging people to chuck shit up on stage. Not cool, sFshzenKlyrn… not cool.) 

How was the ride from Rigel? A little bumpy. Our new pilot, Urich Von Braun, is not as familiar with Soyuz spacecraft technology as he led us to believe when we interviewed him. So yes, there was a learning curve… a curve that covered about 27 light-years worth of extra travel. (Our budget is totally blown - don’t tell our label, for chrissake.) Much as we encouraged him to use the navigational console, Urich prefers flying by the seat of his pants, as it were -  a dubious approach to interstellar travel, in my humble opinion. There were a couple of occasions when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) attempted to draw Urich’s attention to one relevant read-out or another, but he was consistently rebuffed. It could be Urich has a problem with mechanical beings… or it could be he can’t see anything through those thick goggles. One way or the other, he’s clearly a pilot who takes no direction from anyone, not even his employers. (You’d think that would lend us some influence, at least. We’re not real good at this “boss” business.)

So, yeah, there were a few zig-zags, but we got here all right. On balance, it was head and shoulders over what we might have expected with Mitch Macaphee at the helm. Poor Mitch has been almost incoherent with obsession over his latest experiment - a new rubber-like substance that downloads and displays video podcasts and the like. So you can shape it like, say, a map of Madagascar, stick it to any wall you like, and watch, I don’t know, The Colbert Report in the shape of Madagascar. (As it happens, I prefer watching Colbert on a screen shaped like Portugal, but it’s your choice, really.) He’ll be working on that until the end of the tour, trust me - Mitch can really bury his nose in a project. Crikey, he spent the better part of a decade developing the technology that brought us Marvin, and Marvin’s I.Q. is more or less on par with that of the man-sized tuber. (You’ve heard of artificial intelligence? Marvin is artificial stupidity. Nearly as complex, but not quite.) So even with all of his quirks, Urich was a good hire.

Okay, well…. time to prepare for lift off. It’s almost nightfall, and this rocky little planet we’re on has a moon that radiates some kind of death ray (at least where humans are concerned). Mach schnell, Urich, mach schnell! 

Pagan Pleasures. The good folks at PaganFM! on Portsmouth Community Radio have included cuts from International House and 2000 Years To Christmas on their Nov. 16 podcast - click here to give a listen. Show a little love and vote for their podcast at Podcast Alley. There’s a good chap.

This week I’m going to rant about some issues that the new Obama administration should, in my humble opinion, address. However, it would be hard to post this without commenting on the Iraq/U.S. status of forces agreement approved on Thursday by the Iraqi parliament. This is, in essence, a timetable for withdrawal, setting an end date for our occupation of Iraq - something Bush repeatedly refused to do, used time and again to bait war opponents as being surrender monkeys, unsupportive of the troops, etc. (”Waving the white flag of surrender” as Sarah Palin put it.) So all of that…. was a lot of hot air again, right? Did you catch that too? Thought so.

Okay, back to the O-man. As I wrote last week, Gaza and the D.R. of Congo are festering sores that should be attended to with all speed. There are many other foreign policy nightmares to dispel, and again, I don’t think I need to mention Iraq and Afghanistan as part of that “short” list. Let’s make the list a little longer:

Russia. One thing that is creeping up on us gradually is the threat of a renewed cold war with Russia. While a McCain presidency would most certainly have been a disaster on this front, we are certainly not out of the woods. Russia has a massive nuclear arsenal, nearly on par with our own. The rising price of oil has helped that country climb out of the economic hole that we helped put them in after the fall of the Soviet Union. The rising distrust they have for us is largely the product of our support for the application in the early 1990s of economic shock therapy and the resulting demographic disaster that took place, our insistence on expanding NATO (what was a hostile military alliance) deep into eastern Europe and right to their borders, our idiotic deployment of the dysfunctional boondoggle known as “missile defense” in Poland and the Czech Republic, and our enthusiasm and funding for creatures like Saakashvili, who started the conflict in Georgia this past spring. Obama could do worse than to reverse this policy before it gets beyond asinine.

Venezuela. Related to the above in terms of manufactured threats, the Bush Administration and many others in Washington - including Democrats - despise Chavez for the simple reason that he cannot be intimidated by them. They tried to remove him in a coup, supported by the U.S. and Britain, which quickly backfired. Now they treat him like a dictator, though in electoral terms he has far more legitimacy than George W. Bush, having prevailed in contested elections and plebiscites a number of times. Our leaders deplore his tendency towards empowering the poor and chipping away at the privileges the traditionally U.S.-oriented elite sectors of Venezuelan society, but what REALLY irks them is his material support for independent development and greater regional integration in Latin America. My guess is that most of Obama’s advisors will be on the same side as Bush’s Latin America team with regard to Chavez, judging by what the O-man has said himself. And now, in true cold war fashion, they are making hay out of his arms purchase from Russia and the presence of Russian war ships in “our” hemisphere.

More to follow next week, but as I’m sure you’re aware, the institutional tendencies towards confrontation run strong and deep in our foreign policy. There will be plenty of opportunities to speak up in the next four years.

luv you,

jp

How the hell do I know how they found you? It was probably a mistake leaving your forwarding address. We were only going to be gone a month or two, damnit. Ah, well.

Oh, hi, friends. No, we’re not being pursued by bill collectors (at least, not out here in the constellation of Orion). I’m just fielding questions from Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who apparently received a piece of financial spam from some company that identifies itself as “Direct Capital”, to wit:

Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 11:21 AM

Subject: Call Me - Line of Credit

           

Hi Marvin,

I can help you get set up with a Line of Credit (secured or unsecured) for On Time Van Trans In if you have any purchases you need to make.  

It’s pretty quick and easy. Give me a call at (877) 322-9235 and I can get you started.

Kenneth

__________________________

Kenneth Karpel
Finance Manager

Yeah, I know. It’s got spam written all over it, right? Well, try telling that to Marvin. He almost never gets any email. So when this sucker came sailing into his inbox, he nearly blew a circuit board. This could be a problem out here in Orion, where electronics stores are few and far between. Why, just last night I saw our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, re-wrapping and soldering a damaged motherboard under the glow of a battery-operated flashlight. (As I mentioned before, our converted Soyuz spacecraft offers few comforts… like intermittent air supply, for instance…)

So anyway…. after our triumphant, enthusiastic reception on Rigel, we decided to point our second-hand vessel towards richer pastures on Sirius, the dog star. Our perennial sit-in guitarist, sFshzenKlyrn, has chosen to go on ahead of us rather than tag alongside the Soyuz, and frankly I can’t blame him. For one thing, he can fly circles around us, and that’s without a space ship. For another thing, with Mitch in the driver’s seat, it’s positively hazardous. (Mitch has gotten kind of erratic as a driver. I think it’s the medications he’s taking. More on that later.) I don’t want you to think that we’re not taking this seriously - god, no! In fact, we have been offered a substitute pilot for the next leg of our International House promotional tour. As it happens, his name is Urich Von Braun, and I have it on the highest authority that he is a CRACK pilot. He’s a member of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, for one thing…. and that’s good enough for me. Urich’s got rocketry in his blood, goddamnit. In fact, he’s got a lot of things in his blood… which is why his license got suspended for a brief time. But that was another time and another era. That’s all I’m going to say about it now. If you want to find out more, ask your mother. (Jesus, is that the time?)

So… Sirius ahead, Rigel far behind. Urich Von Braun at the wheel. Sounds like an interstellar tour.  

There’s been a lot of talk in the pundit universe and surrounding blogosphere about cabinet appointments. I suppose that’s the kind of news I should expect to hear between now and January 20, aside from reports on the continuing economic disaster, now rivaling Iraq as Bush’s biggest fuckup ever (if not in lives, certainly in dollars lost). For my own part, I’ll reserve judgment until more of the Obama administration is in place. I’d like to spend this longish constitutional intermission between election day and inauguration day talking about the issues that I think should be a priority for the new regime. Not that they will listen, but… here it comes, Mr. President-Elect. 

This week, foreign policy.

The Congo War. This is the deadliest conflict since World War II (unless, perhaps, you roll all of the Indochina wars together), and it has gotten very little attention in our national media. This is pretty typical treatment for sub-Saharan Africa, but honestly… more than 5 million people have died over the past 10 years, and it’s still going. The war is often portrayed as impossibly complex and abstruse, but at its root are some very comprehensible motivations. The D.R. of Congo is a Western Europe-sized treasure house of mineral wealth, holding most of the world’s cobalt, as well as massive deposits of coltan and other materials necessary for the maintenance of our 21st-Century technology-obsessed consumer lifestyles. Whoever is doing the actually killing and mass rape at any given time - renegade Rwandan generals or Congolese government troops - these minerals continue to flow into our insatiable industrial economies, just as they did during Mobutu’s and King Leopold’s times. Seems to me that Obama’s foreign policy team could do worse than to make this war a priority, even if it isn’t costing U.S. lives. They could start by dropping the idiotic idea of creating an Africa Command for our military and taking a good hard look at U.S. companies - like Freeport McMoran - who do business in the Congo.

Israel - Palestine. The conflict in Israel-Palestine has run through eleven presidencies without resolution. Will Obama’s be the twelfth? I’m not sanguine about the prospects for an equitable resolution with Rahm Emmanuel, Dennis Ross, and Martin Indyk at the O-man’s ear. One can only hope that the President-Elect is smart enough and compassionate enough to recognize that what the Israeli government is doing right now, particularly in Gaza, constitutes a serious crime against humanity. There is only one obvious solution to this conflict and it’s based on the pre-June 1967 borders. Everyone knows this to be true, but we are frozen in the stalemate established by Nixon, Kissinger, and the Israeli government more than three decades ago. At the very least, Obama needs to apply some pressure to Tel Aviv to take the thumb screws off of those many thousands of families struggling to survive in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison. Something like this can only happen if people across our nation make their voices heard in support of that imprisoned population.

I’ve got more, but I’ll stop. Obama’s got a lot on his plate right now - don’t want to burn the guy out this early. Tune in next week, Barack-o. I’m just getting warmed up.

luv u,

jp

What the hell is this, Mitch? How could we be lost again? We’re using the freaking map. We’re following all the dotted lines. Is that not Rigel? It’s not? Mother of pearl….

Oh, yeah… hi, friends. Having another little problem here with the navigation. Nothing new. We were making the passage from Aldebaran to Orion and Mitch is getting a little confused on which star is which. I keep telling him, you need to follow the arrow back from Mintaka, not forward to Sirius! (I’m like, be serious, and he’s like, Sirius? Are you saying I’m a star? And I’m like…) So, of course, we overshoot Orion’s belt by about a light-year, so we have to double back. Then Mitch gets Betelgeuse confused with Rigel, like he’s looking at the whole freaking constellation upside-down. (Actually, the map was upside-down, so it wasn’t entirely his fault.) And we’re hunting in vain for the third companion (Rigel III) when, of course, there weren’t any orbiting Betelgeuse. (I told him the freaking star was too red, but did he believe me? Huh?)

See, the problem is, our first gig was on that third Rigel companion (also known as “planet” in common parlance). We were running late, owing to our antiquated second-hand transportation, and the Betelgeuse diversion (hmmm… sounds like a blockbuster film starring, I don’t know, Doug Woodstock) cost us precious hours of bobbing pointlessly in space, listening to tuneless whistling emanating from Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has taken to heart the acknowledgement we afforded him in the liner notes of our new album, International House, as recognition for the minor role he played in its creation. (Woof… what a sentence!) It seems Marvin fancies himself a jazz whistler now, on the order of Maine’s legendary Brad Terry, be-bop whistler and clarinetist (not in that order)… except that Marvin’s whistle sounds more like quitting time at the paper mill. (As I heard Taj Mahal say once in response to audience participation, “Strong… but wrong.”)

Okay, so we spent a couple of days cooped up with the interstellar version of Captain “Wrongway” Peachfuzz and a tone-deaf robot with delusions of grandeur. Kind of a morale-killer, frankly. So by the time we spotted the bleak horizon of Rigel III, we weren’t in much of a mood for performing. Still - we’re troopers, okay? Never let it be said that Big Green isn’t professional enough to overcome a little hardship and put on a good show. (Never let it be said… even if it IS true.) Lord, no… we slammed that crowd with rousing versions of cuts from the new album, as well as old favorites from 2000 Years To Christmas, such as Holiday, Pagan Christmas, and Merry Christmas, Tarzan. Damnedest thing - these folks have heard this stuff! They must get PaganFM! out here! Then we played singing saw solo, blew off some M80s, and set the atmosphere on fire. What fun.

Right, well… if we had done that last bit, we certainly wouldn’t be invited back. Even the M80s would get us in trouble on Rigel III. But it hardly matters - so long as Mitch is driving, we’ll never find our way back there anyway.

Yes, the Bush Administration is rolling to a close - sprinting to the finish line, as Junior has said - and they seem remarkably unfazed by a record of failure unsurpassed in modern presidential history. Just this past week Bush took the stage at the global economic summit in Washington and defended “free market” capitalism, “free” trade, and related virtues so dramatically discredited of late, warning his fellow national leaders not to depart too drastically from the neoliberal order concocted by Washington and implemented by the I.M.F. and World Bank. I was not in the room, but I imagine there were a few grimaces, maybe a laugh or two, and perhaps a lot of inattention during Bush’s remarks. Honestly, who is going to listen to the captain of the titanic as he lectures everyone on marine safety? How many of those people have one of those “Bush’s Last Day” countdown clocks on their desks? (Or wish they had one?)

Irony department: As Bush argued for hewing to the I.M.F./World Bank line, the I.M.F. released a report that was critical of the United States’ massive trade deficit… criticism which, of course, the U.S. can blithely ignore, in as much as we are an extremely wealthy nation and accept orders from no one. For the poorer nations, well, there are ways of making them cooperate, and any departure from the neoliberal order can bring consequences, often grave ones. This sounds like a double standard, but as Noam Chomsky and others have pointed out many times, it’s actually a very consistent single standard - wealth enjoys privileges. The “Washington Consensus” and the international institutions that enforce it were created by America and its rich international partners expressly to benefit themselves. Who will respect this system now that it has crippled its creators in much the same way as it has its subjects in the developing world?

It does seem as though people are becoming openly contemptuous of the administration’s financial team, in particular, in the closing months. Even ordinarily reserved public broadcasting was giving Treasury Secretary Paulson what passes for a hard time this past week, with somewhat prickly questioning coming from the likes of Robert Siegel and Jim Lehrer, for chrissake. Paulson and his assistant secretary Neel Kashkari have both been grilled by Congress (again, in a somewhat less incisive fashion than in previous decades, but nevertheless). Everybody is taking swings at them because public faith in the administration is so abysmally low… and with good reason. It’s pretty easy to shoot holes in the $700 billion bailout plan(s), which seems to be evolving by the minute. What amazes me is that, with states facing something like $100 billion in red ink, they don’t seem to show any impetus towards sending some of that money back to state legislatures just to shore up essential services. I mean, if we’re spending like sailors to get the economy going again, shouldn’t we at least consider a state government bailout? I’ve yet to hear it suggested by anyone other than economist Robert Pollin. (Would that Obama would make him treasury secretary…)

Oh, well. It’s nearly “over” time for them. Let’s try to make certain they don’t sink the ship before they jump overboard.

luv u,

jp

Good evening, Aldebaran! How is everybody out there? Thanks for coming out tonight! We love you, man… we love you!

Hi, folks. Thought I’d offer you a transcript of our last performance in the Aldebaran system, on the big planet Mjumbo. Try to picture this in your head. (Are you trying? Good.) Imagine an enormous stadium - bigger than the astrodome, built along the rim of an enormous impact crater thousands of years old. Thousands of shapeless blobs of protoplasm in the seats, all holding lit matches. (This, we later learned, is something they do all the time on this planet - it burns off the bad air.) Now picture, if you will, the usual Big Green line-up of miscreants on the stage, plinking on keys, plucking at strings, banging on skins, and hollering into microphones. (Also adding mood, in a way that only the man-sized tuber can.) And swinging from the scaffolding, warning people about the “brown acid”? Marvin (my personal robot assistant). While in his magnetic lock pedestal during the trip over, he had occasion to watch Woodstock: The Movie.

So what’s next - a cameo by Wavy Gravy? Not on this tour. No, sir… this was more like one of those primitive mid-sixties shows. Our speaker stacks are relatively primitive, our amps antiquated, my piano in excess of a dozen years old (i.e. relatively new). Don’t have to tell you that there was a bit of a buzz in the air that night, and I don’t mean the buzz of excitement. I’m talking bad patch cables, mostly. Still, it was fun for some of us, and the many thousands of blobs of extraterrestrial goo were nodding their pseudopods in time with “Enter the Mind” (a cut off of our new album, International House). Quite an amazing site to behold, actually. Stunning, I’d say. Or perhaps the word is, well… nauseating. Though our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, has been capturing images of this phenomenon, hoping to use it in one of his new graphic user interfaces.

Well, that was then, this is now. And right now, we’re cruising away from Aldebaran at 30% of light speed in our modified Soyuz spacecraft. Destination? Well, that’s a bit up in the air. Our corporate uber-label, Loathsome Prick Records, originally wanted to send us out to Orion’s belt to do a string of gigs. Then sometime last week they changed their minds and decided that we should head over to the Pleiades cluster (the seven sisters). Of course, our initial reaction was, “What, all seven?” There was some grumbling over the phone, some muffled oaths, some veiled threats, and ultimately we agreed just to do three of the seven. Once in transit to that cluster, however, we received word from the overlords at LP that they wanted us to divert back to Orion again. Apparently there’s a bidding war going on for our presence. (Can you say ”payola”?)

I can certainly say payola. I just can’t pay payola. So I guess that means we go where they tell us to, even if that turns out to be somewhere where the sun don’t shine. And as you know, the sun don’t shine in space… except near the sun.      

Looks like Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com was right. Never would have thought it. Barack Obama winning North Carolina? Virginia? Florida? Astounding. Pretty solid victory for a Democrat, I must say. (It bears remembering that Bill Clinton never broke 50% of the popular vote.) I will admit to a certain divided sentiment going into this election. On the one hand, it felt inevitable that Obama would win - not so much because of the polling, but because he just seemed like the person for this moment. On the other, I just found it hard to believe that this country would elect an African American guy named Barack Hussein Obama President of the United States. Up until the last couple of years, I’d always assumed that the first black president - if ever there was to be one at all - would be a Republican/conservative hawkish type, like Colin Powell…. you know, offset the “otherness” with a healthy dose of jingoistic cultural hegemony. But hey, w.t.f., so much for that. I guess it’s true until it’s not, like sitting Vice Presidents never win. Now … there’s going to be a black liberal Democrat in the White House this January.

Readers of this blog (all five of you) know that I have significant political differences with Obama and, more generally, with the Democratic party. But Tuesday was a source of both joy and relief to me. Joy after eight years of Bush and an even longer stretch of just plain bad government, descending into catastrophe over the last two terms. Relief that a hot head like McCain is not going to be driving the ship of state over the falls, or crashing it like one of his planes. I felt a little bit of this when Clinton won the first time, though I was never as comfortable with big Bill as I am with Obama. I suppose I experienced a kind of visceral charge out of, for once, pulling a lever with someone’s name on it and having that someone end up president. That didn’t count for much. And I can’t say that I was in a gloating mood around the McCain voters the next day… though I did leave the Obama lawn sign up for the rest of the day. (If I could endure the fool for eight years, they can stand that sign for a few hours.)

As it happens, there’s a personal dimension to the success of the Obama campaign. One of the first people to talk to me about the Illinois Senator was a neighbor, a retired school teacher named Lynn Beaton. He lent me Obama’s most recent book, actually, which I have yet to read (and yet to return). Sadly Lynn died of a heart attack last year, but since then it has almost seemed as though he were observing the race from afar, coaxing it along. Every time I thought Obama really didn’t stand a chance, he would pull it out somehow, and I’d think about Lynn. When my wife Karen and I went into the voting booth this past Tuesday, we both thought of him as we pulled that lever. How he must be smiling right now… and I don’t mean at all that stuff about Palin’s wardrobe (though he’d probably get a kick out of that, too). For all it means to so many people, I’ll always think of this election as Lynn’s. He was out ahead of most of them.

Anyway, congratulations to all those who wanted this to happen. Now the work begins.

luv u,

jp   

Man, it’s hot on Aldebaran. (How hot is it, Joe?) Well… it’s hot enough to make the man-sized tuber sprout new branches. (W.t.f., Joe… that’s hot and a half!) Damn right.

Hi, there. Got a little sick of the monologue, so I thought I’d throw a call and response deal in the old blog. (Got to keep entertained somehow.) Big Green here, and I’m here to tell you that everything you learned about red giant stars is wrong. Sure, I know - they always told you that red giants are big, fat, overly cooled-down stars, right? Not so hot as those blue dwarfs, right? Well… looks like they was wrong, as they say in the old neighborhood (when somebody was wrong, that is). It’s hot as all get-out up here. It’s so freaking hot, Mitch Macaphee had to invent a sno-cone machine out of available materials… materials that included Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I regret to say. (Sorry, Marvin. I owe you one, man. Actually… I owe you a dozen, if memory serves.)  

I don’t mind telling you, it took us ages to get here. That second-hand Soyuz we’re flying is nothing to write Moscow about. It’s cramped, leaky, and can’t get out of its own way, what with that four-cylinder ion drive Mitch cobbed together and wired up to Marvin’s internal power source (again, Marvin…. sorry… sorry…). Fact of the matter is, we had to fly through a hastily-contrived space/time warp in order to get there in less than a century or two. Luckily, our perennial sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has one or two tricks up his sleeve with respect to the space/time continuum. In as much as he is an etheric being of no fixed temporal location (or hairstyle), he can play with time like it’s a wad of Silly Putty, stretching it, flattening it, pressing it onto the Sunday comics and making Dagwood Bumsted look like he weighs 3,000 pounds. (Lots of laughs.) So, luckily for us, sFshzenKlyrn has served as our interstellar fixer, once again. (Helps to have friends in high places. Very high places.)

Well, by the time we got on stage on Aldebaran, we were all so dehydrated that we probably looked like the California Raisins up there… or those Fruit of the Loom guys doing the Coldplay knock-off. Matt launched into the first song off of our new album, International House - a little number called “Welcome To It.” I admit, the band sounded a bit raspy at first. No question but that the enormous bucket of Gatorade was a welcome site when Anti-Lincoln came peddling up with it near the end of the first set. Always thinking ahead, that anti-Lincoln (though he is such a contrary creature, when he thinks ahead he’s actually remembering). We plowed on through the set and a half of material on the new album, then took a well-deserved rest… on the tailgate of a vehicle owned by one of our Aldebaran patrons. Some kind of jitney, I believe. (Though an oddly misshapen blob of protoplasm, I think he’s in the motor coach trade. Who would have thunk it?)

Anyways… we got through our first performance, with only a minor rescue needed. Mitch has our Soyuz in parking orbit around the crust of rock our corporate label, Loathsome Prick, chose for our first venue. In fact, I’d better fly…. I think the meter’s running out in about five minutes.  

All right, already. The general election is Tuesday next, and I hope you’re all planning on voting. Unless of course you’re voting for Admiral McCain - if so, please just stay home. There, that’s done it. Election over.

Not quite. Would that it were that easy. Of course, as is usually the case, people generally to the left of the political center have to overcome themselves as well as the legions on the right - legions of pre-organized churchgoing Republicans who march out to the polls each and every election and pull the lever or punch the card or touch the icon next to the biggest caveman’s name. (We’ve seen the results.) The liberal-left does not come in simple, pre-organized packages like this - neither do the folks in the natural constituencies for leftward political appeals, such as the poor and working class. We’re constantly carping at one another. We splinter in so many different ways.

A lot of people far to the left, like me, are disgruntled with Obama’s tepid positions on issues we feel strongly about. Understandably so - these are crucial issues of war and prosperity, health and civil liberties, etc. Still, I intend to vote for Obama and encourage you like-minded folks to do the same. In fact, I’m actively working for his election. Here’s why: McCain. He’s certainly the best argument for voting for Barack Obama. I don’t know about any of you, but the thought of having McCain in the White House after eight years of Bush/Cheney is enough to make me scream. This man is all over the road. He lurches from one thing to the next. His vaunted foreign policy credentials are bogus; just the fact that McCain’s taking advice from Randy Scheunemann, a prominent booster of Ahmed Chalabi six years ago, should be enough to convince anyone that his administration will be like a third Bush term. (Scheunemann looks like a prime candidate for National Security Advisor or some senior State Department post.)

McCain’s economic team is no better, hawking the usual G.O.P. prescription of cutting rich people’s taxes, gutting social programs, and glutting the war machine. In as much as that brain trust is likely to be headed up by UBS exec. Phil Gramm, former senator, and primary architect of the current financial meltdown. He would no doubt be joined by Joe the Right-Wing Talk Radio Wingnut (and unlicensed plumber), who is full of great ideas and is, in McCain’s words, a “national hero” and the Senator’s “role model.” (Honest.) Since presidencies are largely about the people the successful candidate drags with him to Washington, this does not augur well for a McCain administration.  

Sure, Obama’s got a lot of points that irk a leftist like me. (The fact that Rashid Khalidi is somehow being used to “slime” Obama merely by his being in the same room as him at some point is astonishing to me.) But he’s marginally closer to my way of thinking than any Democratic nominee in quite a few years. I have less trepidation about voting for him than I did with either Kerry or Gore, frankly. And in a zero-sum match-up against McCain, I’ll vote Obama. I encourage you to do the same. Just don’t let it be your only political act of the next four years. 

Let’s pull this thing out, folks. Otherwise it’s going to be another long four years. 

luv u,

jp