Sherry Chandler

According to Political Wire, Greg Giroux of Congressional Quarterly is tapping races in Kentucky and Southern Indiana as bellwether races in the upcoming election. Here’s the quote:

There are quite a few that could be described as bellwether contests. But it might be helpful to note the key contests in states where the polling stations close early (Kentucky and Indiana at 6 pm). Those returns might foreshadow how the rest of the evening will go.

There are at least six contests — all being defended by Republican incumbents — in those two states that merit close watching: KY-2 (Rep. Ron Lewis vs. state Rep. Mike Weaver); KY-3 (Rep. Anne M. Northup vs. alternative newspaper publisher John Yarmuth); KY-4 (Rep. Geoff Davis vs. former Rep. Ken Lucas in a rematch of their 2002 race); IN-2 (Rep. Chris Chocola vs. lawyer, ‘04 nominee Joe Donnelly); IN-8 (Rep. John Hostettler vs. county sheriff Brad Ellsworth); and IN-9 (Rep. Mike Sodrel vs. former Rep. Baron Hill in a rematch of their close 2004 race). The Republicans in Indiana by and large are in a more perilous political condition worse shape than their counterparts in Kentucky, but we consider all six contests as competitive. (We’re also keeping an eye on the IN-3 contest between Rep. Mark Souder and Ft. Wayne city councilman Tom Hayhurst).

A few weeks ago, NRCC chairman Tom Reynolds told reporters that he expected Northup to win — but that he would be in for a long night if she lost.

I’ll tell you the truth — this election has me frightened. Maybe I’m falling for Karl Rove’s hype, but I have been so distressed by the events of the last six years, especially the elections, that I don’t even feel like I can stand to hope any more.

I just really hate feeling like elections are this dangerous. But I do feel that way. The current Republican government has been radical in transforming our nation into something like an oligarchy. An incompetent oligarchy.

And they’ve done it against the will of the people. The people of the United States did not want George W. Bush for President in 2000 (and I’m not totally convinced they wanted him in 2004), they did not want the War with Iraq, and they do not want rule by the Christian right.

Somehow, we need to garner some opposition with legs.

Turnout is the key and so I would urge both my local and my farflung readers to vote. And to vote for Democrats, no matter how flawed you may find them.

And if possible, to join a get-out-the-vote effort, such as MoveOn’s Call for Change, link below:

Here’s the way it works:

Basically, it allows people to log onto www.callforchange.org from their home computers and then phone target voters in the 30+ top House and Senate races around the nation. Our goal is to make 5 million phone calls to inconsistent voters who lean Democratic - we recently passed 1.5 million.

More here at the Daily Kos.

[Update: If you want to keep abreast of the ins-and-outs of local Kentucky races, I suggest you visit Mark Nichols's Bluegrass Report and René Thompson's View from the Sandbox.]

[Update 2: What's more, I'm tired of being demonized:

SUGAR LAND, Tex., Oct. 30 -- President Bush said terrorists will win if Democrats win and impose their policies on Iraq, as he and Vice President Cheney escalated their rhetoric Monday in an effort to turn out Republican voters in next week's midterm elections.]

Goblin Market
by Christina Rossetti

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—
All ripe together
In summer weather,—
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy;…

Read the rest of this Christina Rosetti poem and others at the American Academy of Poets Poets in the Graveyard.

You can also visit the graves of poets.

Thanks to Valerie Loveland for the tip.

And Happy Halloween

Robert Fagles’ new translation of The Aeneid is out this week to rave reviews from the NYTimes. I was struck by this passage:

“I usually try not to ride the horse of relevance very hard,” Mr. Fagles said recently at his home near Princeton University, from which he recently retired, after teaching comparative literature for more than 40 years. “My feeling is that if something is timeless, then it will also be timely.” But he went on to say that “The Aeneid” did speak to the contemporary situation. It’s a poem about empire, he explained, and was commissioned by the emperor Augustus to celebrate the spread of Roman civilization.

“To begin with, it’s a cautionary tale,” Mr. Fagles said. “About the terrible ills that attend empire — its war-making capacity, the loss of blood and treasure both. But it’s all done in the name of the rule of law, which you’d have a hard time ascribing to what we’re doing in the Middle East today.

“It’s also a tale of exhortation. It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer. The price of empire is very steep, but Virgil shows how it is to be earned, if it’s to be earned at all. The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden.”

The classical scholar in my house tells me that Virgil did not want to write The Aeneid. He wanted to write pastoral poetry, such as his Eclogues. But Augustus was Virgil’s patron — Augustus saw himself as a great patron of the arts, but he was pretty hard on poets who defied him — and Augustus wanted a great national epic to justify his empire. He was, after all, the first undisputed emperor Rome had ever had.

And so Virgil wrote The Aeneid, over ten years at the rate, this article says, of about three lines a day. He was still working on it when he died and some say he wanted it burned as a failure.

Mr. Fagles says the work transcends propaganda.

Now’s your chance to find out.

From the NYTimes:

KETE KRACHI, Ghana — Just before 5 a.m., with the sky still dark over Lake Volta, Mark Kwadwo was rousted from his spot on the damp dirt floor. It was time for work.

Shivering in the predawn chill, he helped paddle a canoe a mile out from shore. For five more hours, as his coworkers yanked up a fishing net, inch by inch, Mark bailed water to keep the canoe from swamping.

He last ate the day before. His broken wooden paddle was so heavy he could barely lift it. But he raptly followed each command from Kwadwo Takyi, the powerfully built 31-year-old in the back of the canoe who freely deals out beatings.

“I don’t like it here,” he whispered, out of Mr. Takyi’s earshot.

Mark Kwadwo is 6 years old.

Sold into endentured servitude by his parents, who don’t have enough money to feed him.

A story that tends to make my grilled tilapia taste like sawdust.

Bobbie Bobbie Ann Mason in the New York Times:

ONE day last summer I was shopping at a natural-foods supermarket. Outside it was 100 degrees or so, but inside it was arctic. The cashier told me she was cold, but the staff wasn’t allowed to change the temperature. This sounded familiar. Last winter a friend who was in a sweltering computer chain store asked why the workers didn’t turn the heat down. He was told that the thermostat was in Houston.

In Kentucky we’re used to remote control. Historically, outsiders have dominated the place like a kudzu invasion….

Read the rest.

While you’re there, read A Windy Walmart, in which Wal-mart comes to the West Side of Chicago.

Historian Garry Wills has a long article online at The New York Review of Books describing the incursion religion — in the form of GWB’s evangelical Christianity — has made into our government, from justice and social services to science and war. All of this is stuff that we know about but seeing it all laid out, the history of the last six years is pretty scarey stuff.

The article begins like this:

The head of the White House Office of Personnel was Kay Coles James, a former dean of Pat Robertson’s Regent University and a former vice-president of Gary Bauer’s Family Research Council,[2] the conservative Christian lobbying group that had been set up as the Washington branch of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. She knew whom to put where, or knew the religious right people who knew. An evangelical was in charge of placing evangelicals throughout the bureaucracy. The head lobbyist for the Family Research Council boasted that “a lot of FRC people are in place” in the administration.[3] The evangelicals knew which positions could affect their agenda, whom to replace, and whom they wanted appointed. This was true for the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and Health and Human Services—agencies that would rule on or administer matters dear to the evangelical causes.[4]

The White House was alive with piety. Evangelical leaders were in and out on a regular basis. There were Bible study groups in the White House, as in John Ashcroft’s Justice Department. Over half of the White House staff attended the meetings. One of the first things David Frum heard when he went to work there as a speech writer was: “Missed you at the Bible study.”[5]

One of the most frightening aspects of this administration has been its attack on women’s rights, most obviously in the form of reproductive choice.

• At Justice: do you remember how John Ashcroft drug his feet about investigating the incidents of white powder being sent to abortion clinics during the anthrax scare soon after the 9/11 attacks?
• Do you remember how he subpoenaed women’s hospital records in an attempt to enforce the ban on late term abortions?
• Do you remember how the FDA was pressured out of approving the morning after pill.
• Of course you remember how information about condoms disappeared from the CDC and abstinence programs became the only way to prevent venereal disease.
• The National Cancer Institute was not allowed to expose the false claim linking abortion to breast cancer.

The most shameful thing this administration did along these lines was to put an abortion gag order on foreign aid and to withdraw funding completely from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) on the grounds that the money went to fund abortions.

But it’s not just in reproductive rights that this government has thrown its religious weight around. I recommend that you read the whole article.

A member of my family once said that she did not doubt George W. Bush’s conversion. He is a sincere Christian, she observed, but he is a Christian who has not grown in his faith. He is like a child.

Spoiled children are bullies.

from a NYTimes editorial:

To avoid looking like Scrooge, the Internal Revenue Service typically lets up around the holidays in its hounding of tax delinquents.

But this month, the indulgence began even before Macy’s was decorated. The Times’s David Cay Johnston reported yesterday that on Oct. 10, the I.R.S. commissioner Mark Everson told his troops to delay tax enforcement in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina — until after the midterm elections and the holiday season.

Until after the elections?

To explain his action, Mr. Everson said that a pre-election reprieve was as routine as the Christmastime hiatus. Four former I.R.S. commissioners interviewed by Mr. Johnston disputed that.

The current online New York Review of Books has a disquieting article by Garry Wills, A Country Ruled by Faith, recounting the ways the Bush administration has turned our country over to certain elements in the Christian Right over the last six years. None of what Wills says is breaking news, but to see the list in aggregate makes one realize just how outrageously radical Bush has been.

But, as I’ve argued here before, the Christian Right is not as monolithic as it may seem and there are indictions that the hegemony of the single-issue evangelicals may be breaking up. As witness today, this article from the New York Times, datelined Hale Gap, Virginia:

“Doesn’t it say in Scripture, ‘Who can weigh a mountain, measure a basket of earth?’ ” Ms. [Sharman] Chapman-Crane said, recalling descriptions of God’s omnipotence in Isaiah 40:12. “Well, only God can. But now, the coal companies seem to be able to do it, too.”

Ms. Chapman-Crane, her colleagues at the Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia [based in Whitesburg, Kentucky] and other Appalachian Christians are trying to halt mountaintop removal, and at the heart of their work, they say, is their faith.

They are part of an awakening among religious people to environmental issues, said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an interreligious alliance. Increasingly, religious people across denominations are organizing around local issues, like preventing a landfill, preserving wetlands and changing mining.

“People of faith are thinking afresh about human place and purpose in the greater web of life,” Mr. Gorman said. “They are asking, What does it mean to be present in a crisis of God’s creation made by God’s children?”

The photograph of McRoberts, Kentucky was taken by Michael Temchine for the New York Times. It’s part of the slide show associated with the article.

• Dave Cazden writes to say his poem “Vermiculture” made the Special Merit list in The Comstock Review’s annual Muriel Craft Bailey award, Thomas Lux judge. You’ll find the complete list by clicking the link.
• Meredith Sue Willis is proud to announce that she’s the featured writer in the current issue of Appalachian Heritage.
• James Burgett’s photographs will be among those exhibited at the Creative Camera Club’s show at the Kentucky Horse Park November 17 - December 31. The show is part of the annual Southern Lights Festival.
• The Mosaic Poets will read on November 8 as part of Connections, a multimedia, intercultural and interfaith art event in Lexington, October 12 - November 17. The Mosaic reading will happen on November 8 at 7 p.m. in the Great Room, Art-in-the-Cathedral, 166 Market Street (enter on Cathedral Way). Poems to be read were written in response to works of art in the exhibit.

It’s Dylan Thomas’s birthday and that has reminded me that one of the things that got lost in the great crash was my link to the Chelsea Hotel blog, Living with Legends. It was at the Chelsea that Thomas lost his rage against the dying of the light.

And of course that other Dylan claims, in Sara, to have been

Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel,
Writin’ “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” for you.

The blog is written by a displaced Kentuckian, Ed Hamilton, and his wife Debbie Martin. It has been featured in the NYTimes [PDF file]. Another displaced Kentuckian, Ben Lucien Berman, lived at the hotel for years.

So drop by once in a while and see what’s going on in Bohemian New York. We have ties.

And if you want to raise a Black Russian to Mr. Thomas, you can hear him read the world’s most famous villanelle here at the American Academy of Poets.