Tag Archives: culture wars

making sure it goes on

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The title is stolen from the late Richard Hugo’s collected poems. I’ve loved it for many years. Maybe I should write something about Hugo, here—but whatever, it’s time for something new.

So I’ll remember that The Hon. Russ Carnahan was in town last week and walked into a restaurant where a number of us were having dinner to celebrate birthdays. We noticed him across the room, and he must have sensed our recognition because he came over to our table to talk. We told him that all of us were hoping that he would continue to support the public option part of proposed health care legislation. He allowed that he would and added that the public option will be in whatever bill the house advances.

Carnahan also volunteered that he thought the health care debate was a good thing, even though much of it had been rough, taking a view that I think can be defended: that our new president has re-energized public discourse. It was good to talk to the congressman.

As for the health care debate, so called: The Daily Beast offers this video with the headline: “NJ Town Hall Reaches New Low.” True enough, but the woman on camera is spunky, and she gets her message past the hecklers.

Just another example of what is fast becoming the norm in my country where swaggering thugs carrying assault rifles parade outside venues where the president is speaking. It’s good to think that moral suasion can sometimes cut through the lies and bravado.

and as if Tina Fey weren’t enough for your average Monday,

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Garrison Keillor has a wonderful Salon column today about how the Republicans are running against themselves. I especially like this couple of paragraphs, in light of all the sneering and hand-wringing about elitism I’ve encountered lately.

. . . [A] former mayor of a town of 7,000 who hired a lobbyist to get $26 million in federal earmarks is now running against the old-boy network in Washington who gave her that money to build the teen rec center and other good things so she could keep taxes low in Wasilla. Stunning. And if you question her qualifications to be the leader of the free world, you are an elitist. This is a beautiful maneuver. I wish I had thought of it back in school when I was forced to subject myself to a final exam in higher algebra. I could have told Miss Mortenson, “I am a Christian and when you gave me a D, you only showed your contempt for the Lord and for the godly hardworking people from whom I have sprung, you elitist battle ax you.”

In school, you couldn’t get away with that garbage because the taxpayers know that if we don’t uphold scholastic standards, we will wind up driving on badly designed bridges and go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung, so we flunk the losers lest they gain power and hurt us, but in politics we bring forth phonies and love them to death.

Right on!

And while I’m at it, here’s David Brooks scolding my guy for failing to correct the manners of vicious liberals.

. . . [Obama] needs to attack the snobs who are savaging Sarah Palin’s faith and family. Many liberals claim to love working-class families, but the moment they glimpse a hunter with an uneven college record, they hop on chairs and call for disinfectant. Obama needs to attack Bill Maher for calling her a stewardess and the rest of the coastal condescenders.

As a former hunter (in my childhood and youth) with an uneven college record, I can testify that no liberal has ever sprayed me with disinfectant. Nor has Bill Maher ever called me a stewardess. My neck is as red as the next man’s, but I am a proud liberal and member of the religious left, though I don’t believe in God in a creedal sense. In my checquered life I have managed to read a few books and perhaps learned a thing or two. My beloved, who is a real professor, tells me that I am an intellectual (though she may agree with Margaret Soltan that few professors are such). If this is true I got to be an intellectual over a long time and as a result of some honest labor. I don’t share most fashionable contempt for the professorial class (of which I am generically a member, having spent most of my adult life teaching and working in universities), though I do think the concerns of many academics are pretty parochial.

I’m thinking of writing something about the reconstituted culture wars here, and may do so soon. Today, I merely observe that Brooks’s comment about “coastal condescenders” is a self-indulgent piece of stereotyping to which Michael Kinsley quite rightly objects. Soltan doesn’t like Kinsley’s argument, but I rather do. And about the culture wars, Tim Burke has been writing some good posts recently. You can read a couple of them here and here.