Sherry Chandler

Aziz Rana, in his n+1 article Obama and the Closing of the American Dream, argues not that Barack Obama is elitist but that he represents the dominance of the professional class at the expense of the working class.

Throughout our history there have always been multiple versions of the American dream. These accounts held in common the hope that hard work, discipline, and self-reliance would allow those recognized as citizens not only to improve their economic lot and achieve personal happiness, but to participate fully in political life. Today, however, only one version of the dream continues to make sense as a sustainable personal project. This is the dream exemplified by Barack and Michelle Obama—as well as by their former rivals Hillary and Bill Clinton—a dream of success through higher education and a life in professional work. It is a vision of social advancement that leaves little room for historically important narratives of blue-collar respectability.

I had hoped to do a better job talking about this because I think this article addresses ideas we need to wrap our heads around. It gets to the heart of what makes sense to me about why Barack Obama and other Democrats before him have failed to win over the working class that was once their loyal base.

But I am tired this morning. I need a little time to digest the very intensive Kentucky Women Writers Conference I attended this weekend. Lots of energy there, lots of good words, good talk, leaving me as overstimulated as a child after a birthday party.

Some of that talk, by the way, dealt with how the only way to get out of having to work in the chicken plant is to go to work for Wal-Mart. Or how Immigration raids that shut down plants deport/disappear illegal workers but leave marginal white workers homeless.

So, Rana argues:

At the time [1905] when [Louis] Brandeis was describing the promise of professionalism, three earlier accounts of the American dream not only survived but were real competitors for social preeminence. In Thomas Jefferson’s founding republican vision, yeoman farmers were “the most valuable citizens . . . the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, . . . tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interest by the most lasting bonds.” To this Jeffersonian vision of “the cultivators of the earth,” a rapidly urbanizing nineteenth century added the small-business owner and the unionized industrial worker. The former aspired to the same freedom as the farmer by cultivating a shop instead of acreage; the latter strove (with mixed results) to achieve economic independence through collective political activity. In Brandeis’s time, these three versions of the American dream each still constituted a viable route to meaningful political and social life.

Today, by contrast, all such dreams are essentially foreclosed. The independent farmer lives on in the national imagination, but industrial farming has rendered him marginal both politically and socially. The quantity of small businesses begun each year suggests that the aspiration of having one’s own shop persists. Yet for the past half-century bankruptcy has been more likely than success. Statistics cited by Bush’s own Small Business Administration (SBA) show that more than half of small businesses close within four years and more than 60 percent within six. The title of the SBA article, “Redefining Business Success: Distinguishing Between Failure and Closure,” perfectly captures the difficulty of sustaining optimism, even for propaganda purposes, about the vitality of small-scale entrepreneurship. As for blue-collar workers, deindustrialization and the weakening of the labor movement have made the wage earner’s dream of middle-class respectability less and less tenable. Real incomes for working-class families have been declining for three decades, and highly skilled jobs once available to high school graduates are now memories from a previous era.

Yesterday after I left the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, I switched on the car radio to Weekend All Things Considered. In a feature about the election and the economy, Jackie Lyden went to Ohio to interview a laid-off industrial worker and a small business owner and then talked to economic advisers for Barack Obama and John McCain about how their proposed policies would benefit these folk.

Molly Dullae has owned a small historic hotel for 5 years, so she is right at the cusp of her viability. In the interview, she said she is probably going to go back to work as a critical care nurse so she can afford to pay her staff.

So what was the first thing the Obama adviser said? Obama is going to reduce the capitol gains tax so that when she sells that small business, she’ll realize the profits.

That struck me as one of the most tone-deaf remarks I’ve heard in a while.

Meanwhile McCain’s man offered the same old package of lowered taxes and more free trade.

As for the laid-off factory worker, well, at least Obama’s man held out the prospect of creating jobs in green industries.

But they both sounded like snake-oil salesmen to me, trying to cover our gaping social wounds with brightly-printed band-aids.

What has happened to what Aziz describes as our classless universality — “the hope that every American citizen, through free labor, could enjoy middle-class respectability, economic freedom, and the intellectual benefits of education”?

Instead we have been left with the professional ideal, which values only certain types of work and thus implicitly disdains the rest. It is an inherently exclusive ideal, structured around a divide between those engaged in high-status work and those confined to task execution. The political theorist Iris Marion Young writes, “Today equal opportunity has come to mean only that no one is barred from entering competition for a relatively few privileged positions.” The idea of exclusivity is a necessary structural feature of professionalization. As a model for society, however, it validates an economic and cultural divide between those with meaningful access to social respectability and the vast majority of Americans, who remain consigned to low status and low-income employment.

This divide is antithetical to democracy.

…

Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. argued that our social problems were structural, the result of fundamental disagreements between the haves and the have-nots. These disagreements could not be papered over by talk of consensus, because the interests of the culturally privileged rested on continuing a politics of exclusion. As King often maintained, freedom requires making democracy a general way of life. This means more than integrating liberal society; it entails eliminating the basic economic and political hierarchies on which postwar liberalism rests. Today’s professional creed—while undoubtedly better than the Bush administration’s culture of cronyism, corporate profiteering, and rejection of expertise—remains a long way from these aspirations.

Look guys, you need to go read this whole article. It’s never fair to an argument to pull stuff out of context like I’m doing, and I do think these are very important ideas if you want to understand why Sarah Palin resonates with voters when it seems to those of us on the intellectual left that she is a disastrous choice. He is also very good on the Civil Rights movement and why it is that Obama appeals so much to black voters. It is not, he argues, just a matter of skin color.

One last quote:

Political pundits like Tom Frank and Paul Krugman commonly ask why low-income constituents seem to vote less and less with their pocketbooks. This question suggests that the New Deal coalition was built primarily on a social welfare agenda. While such programs have been essential to providing millions of American with economic security, the heart of the New Deal lay elsewhere.

From 1932 until 1968, the Democratic Party rested on two descriptions of American life—the American dream as embodied by the rural farmer and the industrial worker. It gained sustenance from a respect for these accounts of middle-class achievement, economic independence, and democratic inclusion. Today’s party, however, has given up on establishing new forms of solidarity for nonprofessional citizens. All it has to offer is a lose-lose proposition: join the competition for professional status and cultural privilege at a severe disadvantage, or don’t join it at all.

I am off this morning to the Kentucky Women Writers Conference where I expect to spend the day celebrating writing with a fine community of writers.

For your catblogging poem, let me recommend this Jean Garrigue poem, Some Serious Nonsense for the Cats and Wolves which begins thus:

My cat peed in the coalbin, why?
Well, God himself asks many things
And gives no reason for the sky.
If we get used to life, that is the crime
Though distant evils rise and shine.
My cat peed in the coalbin, why?

And for your political commentary, I must recommend this Fresh Air interview with Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. You can also read an excerpt from the book at the site.

And let us send good karma to our friends in Texas, shoring up for Ike.

Update: Here is the NYTimes review of Bacevich’s book:

Andrew J. Bacevich thinks our political system is busted. In “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism,” he argues that the country’s founding principle — freedom — has become confused with appetite, turning America’s traditional quest for liberty into an obsession with consumption, the never-ending search for more. To accommodate this hunger, pandering politicians have created an informal empire of supply, maintaining it through constant brush-fire wars. Yet the foreign-policy apparatus meant to manage that empire has grown hideously bloated and has led the nation into one disaster after another. The latest is Iraq: in Bacevich’s mind, the crystallization of all that’s gone wrong with the American system.

This article by Andrew Hacker in the NY Review of Books, Obama: The Price of Being Black, is a pretty good run-down of some of the obstacles Barack Obama must overcome in order to be elected President of the United States.

I am certainly with Hacker on the voter suppression measures that have been put in place over the last several years. These measures include photo i.d. laws, various kinds of voter roll purges, and disenfranchising felons. While they affect all of the poor and the elderly, their biggest impact is on the African-American community. Such laws are at best classist, designed to keep the affluent and educated in control of the country. At worst, they seem designed to return us to the Jim Crow days of the early 20^th Century. They are a form of institutionalized racism/classism, and any self-respecting liberal should fight them vigorously.

On the level of individual choice, though he tells us how careful he is not to use the term racism, Hacker seems to repeat the Catch-22 of this election for white voters. There is no way to choose to vote for or not to vote for Obama that is not somehow tinged with racial guilt. The key sentence is here:

Almost all people who reject black candidates say they have nonracial reasons for doing so. And many undoubtedly believe what they’re saying.

That “many undoubtedly believe” speaks volumes. In plain English, it says “white voters may think they have nonracial reasons for rejecting Barack Obama but they are lying to themselves.”

I am in no way denying that racism is being used against Barack Obama. Appeals to racist fears is a tried-and-true Republican tactic for running against a Democrat. Reference George H. W. Bush’s Willy Horton ad, which was one of the most vicious pieces of dirty politics I’ve seen in my lifetime. For specifics about how this tactic is coming down in this particular election, you have only to read Melissa McEwans series: Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black Dude Watch which is now up to #80. Or look at this.

But what Hacker says allows for no possibility that any group of white voters might have legitimate questions about Obama. Unfortunately,arguing this racism Catch-22 hurts Obama, because it lends itself to the interpretation that accusations of racism are being used to shut people up. Insofar as this silencing tactic has been used by Obama supporters, it also cheapens the charge of racism and will make it more difficult to fight real racism (as in voter i.d. laws) in future.

In much the same way, Anglachel has argued that sexist opposition to both both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin has hurt Obama.

The politics of division just doesn’t work for liberals.

I find Hacker’s final paragraph, with its nudge-nudge suggestion to manipulate whitey, insulting:

Michael Tomasky has said that to win, Barack Obama “will need to build multiracial coalitions.” [8] What seems more needed, in my view, are two parallel campaigns: a quiet one to assure a maximum black turnout, and a more public one to make the most of the white backing the Obama-Biden ticket already has. His rallies, appearances, and advertisements would benefit from featuring white faces, and they should be accompanied by endorsements from white military veterans, union leaders, police chiefs, and firemen. His black supporters will know what is going on, and not take this as a rebuff.

To which I can only reply with Lambert’s reprise of “It’s the economy, stupid.” See Anglachel’s current journal for more on the way the Democratic party has turned tone-deaf to economic concerns. It might be argued that the real constituency that is being asked to tolerate the wink-wink nudge-nudge of this election is the working class poor. That includes both black and white, who often work side by side peaceably enough. The message is, we’re gonna talk about all this abstract stuff like “change” but you’re to understand that this is what we have to do to get elected. After we’re elected, we’ll take care of you.

But while poor African-Americans have a favorite-son reason for voting Obama, poor whites do not. As Anglachel points out, if they’re not given economic reassurance, they’ll vote culture issues (i.e., cling).

See also Obama and the Closing of the American Dream:

How can Barack Obama, a man who only recently paid off his student loans and who lives a relatively modest life in Chicago’s Hyde Park, a few blocks from one of America’s poorest neighborhoods, be more “elitist” than John McCain, the son of an admiral (not to mention the husband of a beer heiress), or more “elitist” than Hillary and Bill Clinton, a couple whose joint earnings since 2000 top 100 million dollars? Yet the E-word, and the charge that Obama is out of touch with the experiences of white, blue-collar workers, first leveled against Obama by the Clintons during the primary race, still hang heavy over his otherwise charmed campaign.

These charges stick around not because of the working-class credentials or commitments of Obama’s opponents, but because of a problem inherent in contemporary politics that neither party ever addresses, that highly educated professionals are the driving force, financially and politically, behind both major parties. The Democratic leadership particularly continues to present itself as the best hope for the working class, while sharing few economic interests and fewer cultural experiences (now rebranded as “values”) with the people it claims to represent.

Meanwhile, a correspondent has brought my attention to these Rantings of a P.T.A. Mom in the NYTimes. The money quote:

Let us just say that if Mr. and Mrs. Obama — a dynamic, Harvard-educated couple — had chosen public over private school, they could have lifted up not just their one local public school, but a family of schools. First, given the social pressure (or the social persuasion of wanting to belong to the cool club), more educated, affluent families would tip back into the public school fold. And second, the presence of educated type-A parents with too much time on their hands ensures that schools are held, daily, to high standards.

But the significance of educated families opting in to their local public schools goes deeper than that. Research done by Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, indicates that poor children benefit hugely by mixing, daily, with middle-class children (particularly those from families who value education). Conversely, as long as the deleterious effects of poverty, like rampant absenteeism and serious health issues, do not overwhelm the school culture, middle-class children suffer no ill effects. Furthermore, studies have shown that new immigrant children learn English faster and master the complex linguistic skills they need to succeed on standardized tests when they are in classrooms with native English speakers. Sadly, because of the widespread flight of higher-minded families, ethnic segregation (not to mention class segregation) in public schools today is so extreme that only one in five immigrant children will have even one native English-speaking friend.

I am avidly in favor of public schools. The right to a free and equal education is one of the fundamental strengths of our democracy. It also gives poor people a strong tool for moving up through the class system.

Separate but equal does not work.

While I understand a parent’s urge to do what is best for his or her individual child, I abhor the way the affluent and educated have abandoned our public school system rather than fight for it. Here again we’re up against a rampant classism.

Lest you think this is just my pick-on-Obama day, the author goes on to mention that the McCains are just as, if not more, guilty than the Obamas. She ends thus:

And yes, I know I appear to be ranting on like a pit bull without lipstick, which brings me to the final nail in the coffin in this sorry election year. As a Democrat I am horrified that Sarah Palin is the one who snagged the deeply profound — and absolutely ignored by professional smart people — emotional real estate of “P.T.A. mother.” I too am, in fact, not just “my kids’ mom” but their Title I Los Angeles public school P.T.A. secretary. This unheard female howl is, for better or worse, what Ms. Palin has set out to tap into; it is real, and I am sick that we’ve let the Republicans charge this ground.
Sarah Palin’s children went to what looks like a humble little public school: Iditarod Elementary on Wasilla Fishhook Road. The school’s score on www.greatschools.net is a 4. That’s a lot of street cred, for a gun-totin’, snow-mobilin’ creationist-lovin’ lady.

Oh, I’m such a depressed, Democrat P.T.A. mother.

Meanwhile, I will try to redeem myself by pointing out this blog you might want to take notice of, or to which you might want to contribute: Women Against Sarah Palin

Update: Oh dear, Willie Brown also is advising Obama to go under the radar for the African-American vote. Maybe there’s something I’m not understanding here.

Obama ad slams McCain on abortion rights:

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Barack Obama has launched a broadside against John McCain’s opposition to abortion rights and moved one of the most divisive issues in modern American politics to the airwaves on a large scale for the first time in this presidential campaign.

Obama’s new radio ad, airing widely in at least seven swing states, tells voters McCain “will make abortion illegal.” It’s airing as McCain courts female voters with the addition of the staunchly anti-abortion governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, to his ticket.

Democrats had, until now, sought to appeal to women primarily on economic issues such as health care and workplace discrimination; abortion rights were hardly mentioned at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last week.

I found this through Digby, who says:

This is it. The Obama campaign is going on the offensive with a flat out liberal appeal on a culture war issue. No more mushy post partisan nonsense.

I found Digby’s comment through Jane Hamsher, who says:

Say what you will, the angry broads who refused to vote for anyone until they were appeased managed to do what the blogosphere couldn’t — they brought their issues front and center in this campaign, and to the victor go the spoils. Those who signed themselves over early can look forward to being Sistah Souljah’d as the campaign goes forward, but with the female vote in play the Republicans coughed up Palin as a VP candidate and the Obama campaign is now taking a stronger pro-choice stance in swing states than we’ve ever heard a Democratic presidential candidate dare before.

Which gets to my issue—you should get something for your vote.

All this via Avedon, plus the bra of the week.

And by the way, I thought Obama did okay on the O’Reilly Factor, considering that O’Reilly won’t take any answer but the one he gives to his own questions. Video here.

“The only difference between the two parties is marketing,” said Adam Jung, a youth organizer who was interviewed during the Rage concert in Denver. “Electing Democrats to end the war is like drinking light beer to lose weight.”

This quote comes from the NYTimes, which this morning has a lively article describing the antics of Rage Against the Machine, which “formed an ad-hoc convention in opposition to both major parties,” one in Denver and one in Minneapolis. The article is worth reading. I found it very refreshing after two weeks of canned heat.

While I can’t condone violent protest and vandalism (e.g. bricks through windows. slashing tires), I am glad to see a populist spirit of opposition alive in the land.

And while I will give Democrats credit for appearing to be less threatened by this kind of protest than are the Republicans (copious arrests being made in Minneapolis), I am no more convinced than Adam Jung that the Democrats will end this war. Joe Biden is a right smart argument against the notion that they’ll even try.

First things first, Barack Obama has broken a very big racial barrier and we should all be very proud of him and of our country for that.

But he is not the re-incarnation of Martin Luther King, Jr. He’s a politician. A Chicago-machine politician. To state this is not necessarily to slander Obama. Any African-American man or woman who would be elected President of the United States of America would be a politician.

And it is true that this war is a Neocon, Republican war, but with a few brave exceptions, the Democrats have acted as enablers throughout.

Still I believe in politics. We need politicians. Maybe almost as much as we need poets.

I would expect an Obama administration to put a more human, diplomatic face on our foreign policy, and that is an important difference with the Republicans. It is my hope that he’ll be able to de-escalate things a bit. To stop with the posturing and the toothless threats. But I don’t imagine that he will be able to restore the Empire and the Pax Americana. Bush has already shown the world that the Wizard is just a little man suspended by a lot of hot air.

We ain’t the only big guy in the room any more.

Anyway, to deflate my own argument a bit, I think our economy may well be what stops the war. Like I said, we ain’t the only big guy in the room.

I would think Obama would close Guantanamo, but the horse has left that barn.

I would also expect Obama to stop tying U.N. funds for women’s health to abortion politics. And that is a very big foreign policy difference for me.

Obama may draw down troops in Iraq, a process that already seems to be underway, but he has never said that he’d leave altogether. What will he do about Afghanistan? Pakistan? Iran?

Politicians don’t stop war. The history of the 20^th Century proves that. Forward-looking leaders don’t come from the field of politics. They come from the people.

We must make our politicians accountable. We’ve never succeeded in stopping war before but we must not stop trying. Just as we must continue to resist totalitarianism and terrorism. I continue convinced that the best weapon against all these things is a “war on terror,” not of guns and bombs, but within the individual heart. We must not succumb to the politics of fear but speak out against atrocity, whether it comes from our side or the other.

And remember that marching in lockstep, even with the good guys, is a dangerous thing.

That is why I’m delighted by Rage Against the Machine (though I probably won’t listen to their music).

I share with you a quotation for Hannah Arendt that I found in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting:

The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. …the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not …Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

In 1650, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America was published in London. If I remember correctly, it was the first book of poetry to come out of North America, certainly of that area which was to become the United States. And it was written by a woman! Bradstreet knew such a publication could be at the least a scandal. At worst, it could get her in real trouble. Anne lived in Puritan Massachusetts Bay, where women were expected to keep their decidedly secondary place. A decade earlier (1638), another Anne, Anne Hutchinson had been exiled from the colony for the heresy of daring to think for herself and teach religion. Penelope Scambly Schott has published an excellent biography in poetry of Anne Hutchinson, A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth.

In an attempt to forestall a similar fate for herself, Bradstreet included this apparently fawning prologue. Irony and satire are not 20^th century inventions. The poem is a rhetorical masterpiece.

You’ll find a nice hypertext gloss here to help in understanding Bradstreet’s complex word play. Obnoxious, for example, has several meanings more than the one most of us are currently familiar with, though I like it here in the modern sense.

The Prologue

To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,
Of cities founded, commonwealth begun,
For my mean pen are too superior things:
Or how they all, or each their dates have run
Let poets and historians set these forth,
My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.

2
But when my wond’ring eyes and envious heart
Great Bartas sugared lines do but read o’er,
Fool I do grudge the Muses did not part
Twixt him and me that overfluent store;
A Bartas can do what a Bartas will
But simple I according to my skill.

3
From schoolboy’s tongue no rhetoric we expect,
Nor yet a sweet consort from broken strings,
Nor perfect beauty where’s a main defect;
My foolish, broken, blemished Muse so sings,
And this to mend, alas, no art is able,
“Cause nature made it so irreparable.

4
Nor can I, like that fluent sweet tongued Greek
Who lisped at first, in future times speak plain.
By art he gladly found what he did seek,
A full requital of his striving pain.
Art can do much, but this maxim’s most sure:
A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.

5
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits;
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

6
But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild
Else of our sex, why feigned they those nine
And poesy made Calliope’s own child;
So ‘mongst the rest they placed the arts divine;
But this weak knot they will full soon untie,
The Greeks did nought, but play the fools and lie.

7
Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are
Men have precedency and still excel,
It is but vain unjustly to wage war;
Men can do best, and women know it well.
Preeminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.

8
And oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies,
And ever with your prey still catch your praise,
If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes,
Give thyme or parsley wreath, I ask no bays;
This mean and unrefined ore of mine
Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.

— Anne Bradstreet

Susan Faludi nails it in the NYTimes:

Today, the United States ranks 22nd among the 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal lawmakers. The proportion of female state legislators has been stuck in the low 20 percent range for 15 years; women’s share of state elective executive offices has fallen consistently since 2000, and is now under 25 percent. The American political pipeline is 86 percent male.

Women’s real annual earnings have fallen for the last four years. Progress in narrowing the wage gap between men and women has slowed considerably since 1990, yet last year the Supreme Court established onerous restrictions on women’s ability to sue for pay discrimination. The salaries of women in managerial positions are on average lower today than in 1983.

Women’s numbers are stalled or falling in fields ranging from executive management to journalism, from computer science to the directing of major motion pictures. The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as half a century ago: secretary, nurse, grade school teacher, sales clerk, maid, hairdresser, cook and so on. And just as Congress cut funds in 1929 for maternity education, it recently slashed child support enforcement by 20 percent, a decision expected to leave billions of dollars owed to mothers and their children uncollected.

Again, male politicians and pundits indulge in outbursts of “new masculinist” misogyny (witness Mrs. Clinton’s campaign coverage). Again, the news media showcase young women’s “feminist — new style” pseudo-liberation — the flapper is now a girl-gone-wild. Again, many daughters of a feminist generation seem pleased to proclaim themselves so “beyond gender” that they don’t need a female president.

And Garry Trudeau nails it at Gocomics.com

Today is, of course, the anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment.
__________
Added: from Eric Boehlert:

What’s so startling in watching the coverage of the Clinton convention-speech story has been the complete ignorance displayed about how previous Democratic conventions have dealt with runners-up like Clinton. It’s either complete ignorance or the media’s strong desire to painstakingly avoid any historical context, which, in turn, allows the press to mislead news consumers into thinking Clinton’s appearance (as well as the gracious invitation extended by Obama) represents something unique and unusual. Something newsworthy.

Based on previous conventions, if a candidate had accumulated as many delegates and votes as Clinton did during the primaries and then did not have her name placed into nomination, that would represent a radical departure from the convention norm.

…

Even after all these months, I still don’t completely understand why Clinton’s essentially centrist campaign for the White House ginned up so much open contempt from the press corps, which has felt completely comfortable addressing her in an openly derogatory and condescending manner. The issue of her convention involvement simply allowed the press to whack her around like a piñata one more time, regardless of the facts.

Couldn’t be because she’s a woman?

If you read the whole thing, especially the last three bullet points, you might be led to believe that.

Felicia Mitchell, nominated by the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature for inclusion in Sundress’s 2008 Best of the Net anthology, calls her online chapbook There Is No Map

Here is his Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Will it help if I say that I was so homesick for South Carolina two weeks ago that I got into Google Earth and called up a tiny corner of Williamsburg County, my mother’s birthplace, and then moved to the small town of Sumter, where I was born, to find the exact neighborhood where I once played with my brothers in the dirt with our coal bucket in the backyard? It’s possible that living where I have lived for twenty years, southern Appalachia, could make me a southerner, but that’s not the case. My roots are in South Carolina, and when spring comes I’m like a dog catching a scent in the air. I want to get in the car and drive down the mountain to the low country where I was born and bred, where generations of my family were born and bred. Two years ago I brought my mother, Mama, up near me to live, and you’d think that having her with her equally southern accent and charm ten miles down the road in a cozy nursing home that I visit almost too much would make me feel as if I’d brought the most important part of South Carolina, my father already buried down there, up to me. I’ll tell you the truth. When the two of us get together and sit on the porch (since I picked her nursing home because it has a porch and flowers she can tend and horses across the street that we can watch and all the loving care you’d get in a big extended family living in a big house the way her family did a few generations ago), it’s almost like being back on her porch. But it’s not quite the same.
Would I lose points if I said I qualify for Colonial Dames but am not at all likely ever to join? Having moved away from the South Carolina where my family had lived for generations without straying far, having married a man from New Jersey, having borne a son who doesn’t talk like he comes from South Carolina—these things should not be held against me.

I currently live in Meadowview, a rural town in Virginia near the border of Tennessee, and work in Emory, an even more rural town in the interior of Meadowview (Emory is a village within a town, a very small village within a very small town).

Her nominated poem is also called “There Is No Map.” You can read it here.

__________
There is the list of all six poets nominated by the Mule for The Best of the Net. Like Helen, I hope one of us makes the cut.

But three servants and a free-standing lab with a full-time lab assistant. And of course patronizing friends.

I really didn’t care much at all for Dark Victory, not even for Humphrey Bogart and his faked Irish accent. Sort of fun to see Ronald Reagan playing a drunken playboy, though it’s possible that being incoherently amiable wasn’t a big stretch for him.

I can see that this is a great performance by Bette Davis before she became “Bette Davis” but the plot is so ridiculous and the rest of the cast so lame that I don’t really care much. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen Humphrey Bogart do.

By the way, as a Kentuckian I feel compelled to set the record straight. I’ve seen reviews that say that Bogart is playing a “stable hand.” He is, in fact, the trainer for the heiress’s stable of steeplechasers. Not a lowly job, though it doesn’t exactly make him one of the gentry.

From the ACLU:

WASHINGTON – Today, in a blatant assault upon civil liberties and the right to privacy, the Senate passed an unconstitutional domestic spying bill that violates the Fourth Amendment and eliminates any meaningful role for judicial oversight of government surveillance. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was approved by a vote of 69 to 28 and is expected to be signed into law by President Bush shortly. This bill essentially legalizes the president’s unlawful warrantless wiretapping program revealed in December 2005 by the New York Times.

“Once again, Congress blinked and succumbed to the president’s fear-mongering. With today’s vote, the government has been given a green light to expand its power to spy on Americans and run roughshod over the Constitution,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This legislation will give the government unfettered and unchecked access to innocent Americans’ international communications without a warrant. This is not only unconstitutional, but absolutely un-American.”

The FISA Amendments Act nearly eviscerates oversight of government surveillance by allowing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to review only general procedures for spying rather than individual warrants. The FISC will not be told any specifics about who will actually be wiretapped, thereby undercutting any meaningful role for the court and violating the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The bill further trivializes court review by authorizing the government to continue a surveillance program even after the government’s general spying procedures are found insufficient or unconstitutional by the FISC. The government has the authority to wiretap through the entire appeals process, and then keep and use whatever information was gathered in the meantime. A provision touted as a major “concession” by proponents of the bill calls for investigations by the inspectors general of four agencies overseeing spying activities. But members of Congress who do not sit on the Judiciary or Intelligence committees will not be guaranteed access to the agencies’ reports.

The bill essentially grants absolute retroactive immunity to telecommunication companies that facilitated the president’s warrantless wiretapping program over the last seven years by ensuring the dismissal of court cases pending against those companies. The test for the companies’ right to immunity is not whether the government certifications they acted on were actually legal – only whether they were issued. Because it is public knowledge that certifications were issued, all of the pending cases will be summarily dismissed. This means Americans may never learn the truth about what the companies and the government did with our private communications.

“With one vote, Congress has strengthened the executive branch, weakened the judiciary and rendered itself irrelevant,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This bill – soon to be law – is a constitutional nightmare. Americans should know that if this legislation is enacted and upheld, what they say on international phone calls or emails is no longer private. The government can listen in without having a specific reason to do so. Our rights as Americans have been curtailed and our privacy can no longer be assumed.”

In advance of the president’s signature, the ACLU announced its plan to challenge the new law in court.

“This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment.”

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And then there’s this from the Baltimore Sun:

With Congress on the verge of outlining new parameters for National Security Agency eavesdropping between suspicious foreigners and Americans, lawmakers are leaving largely untouched a host of government programs that critics say involves far more domestic surveillance than the wiretaps they sought to remedy.

These programs - most of them highly classified - are run by an alphabet soup of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity.

The surveillance includes data-mining programs that allow the NSA and the FBI to sift through large databanks of e-mails, phone calls and other communications, not for selective information, but in search of suspicious patterns.

Other information, like routine bank transactions, is kept in databases similarly monitored by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“There’s virtually no branch of the U.S. government that isn’t in some way involved in monitoring or surveillance,” said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and fellow at the National Security Archives at The George Washington University. “We’re operating in a brave new world.”

…

“You don’t have to look far into history to know that when the government, any government, is given secret authorities, that those authorities are ultimately abused,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “You don’t even have to attribute bad motives to anyone. In an intelligence officer’s zeal to protect the country, they often will overstep their bounds.”

In part to assuage privacy concerns, the Department of Homeland Security has established a privacy czar to ensure that the technologies and programs initiated by the federal agency do not erode privacy laws or violate civil liberties.

Read the rest. Somehow I don’t have a lot of faith that our own little caesar for privacy will have much success.

Or, you could just read Lance, who sees what we’ve all been seeing for a while now, The bad guys are going to get away. The movie isn’t supposed to end like this:

They’re going to ride off into the sunset, their saddle bags stuffed with loot, whooping and hollering and laughing at the marshalls who can’t get their boots in their stirrups to get on their horses to ride after them. They’re going to live out their lives on the other side of the Rio, safe and fat and happy in their haciendas, surrounded by friends and fawning servants and beautiful senoritas with roses in their hair playing the guitar and singing ribald songs about limp-dicked Democrats.

George Bush probably doesn’t even know he’s loathed and despised and he probably won’t ever know. He’ll always be in the company of flatterers and sycophants who will assure him over and over again that he was a great President and he saved the country from the terrorists and children will be singing songs about him for the next three hundred years.

Dick Cheney and Karl Rove know they are hated by all decent people, but they think decent people are chumps and saps and to be hated by them is a sure sign of success.

Update: I received this e-mail from Chris Dodd, entitled “A Heavy Heart”:

Yesterday was a sad day for the United States Senate.

It is my hope that the courts will undo the damage done to the Constitution.

But let us stand tall, knowing that by working together we were able to make wiretapping and retroactive immunity part of the national discourse these last number of months.

We came together – all of you, Senator Feingold, bloggers like Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, organizations like the EFF and ACLU, and untold hundreds of thousands of Americans who simply wanted to make sure that this one, last insult did not happen with ease.

I’m sorry we weren’t successful.

I just hope I’m lucky enough to have you by my side in the next fight, whatever that may be.

Thanks for all you’ve done.

Chris Dodd