Last night Willard “Mitt” Romney narrowly avoided being drowned in the Santorum fever that issued forth from over 30,000 Iowans.
The Rascal parking was doubtless backed up for blocks. This grand coup was accomplished at the bargain price of a mere $3,960,000 in Romney and Romney-friendly advertising in the month of December for a total of 30,015 votes. Extrapolating to he national election, Willard needs to spend about $8.8 billion to get as many votes as Obama got in 2008.
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A common theme among authoritarians is that of “the enemy within.” This idea has been used to great effect for as long as recorded history. In the last millennium, we have seen this idea spread from the witches and heretics of the medieval church to the counterrevolutionaries of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
We like to think of these paranoiac visions as belonging to foreigners. If you’ve read this far, though, you probably imagine a few scenarios I might recall from recent American history. Foremost among them will certainly be the Red Scare of the McCarthy era. Since then, few reasonable people would entertain the idea that dissent was tantamount to treason. Yet that is where we find ourselves now. From the patently absurd claim that the war in Vietnam was lost due to anti-war protesters to the controversy of not wearing a silly flag pin on the lapel, we are presented with old fashioned propaganda modernized only in the media used.
I find one seemingly obvious facet of the meme interesting. Anytime the meme is brought up, the proposed solution is a concentration of power in the hands of the already powerful.
This was at the tail end of a post from John Cole at Balloon Juice that I thought summed up well my thoughts on the end of the year:
… So, I guess my message to you in 2012 is the following- let your kids stay up late and spend time with you even if you hate the fucking Chipmunk movie, give your pets too many treats, drink that extra beer and eat that extra scoop of ice cream, always tell mom and your wife you love them, always pet your dog when you can, always give your neighbor the benefit of the doubt, try everything new you can and repeat everything you love as often as you can even when it is bad for you, and live hard, fast, and full throttle and don’t you fucking dare apologize for it.
Cheers, and Happy New Year!
Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
Where Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia causes dangerous spikes in blood pressure, this book is written in such a way that the reader finds himself bemused rather than angered. It is as if the reader has been lulled by his vantage as a mere spectator, rather than victim. Similarly, the locales involved are shown nearly as bystanders to the economic train wreck.
I appreciate the novel approach of introducing each locale almost as a travel writer. Indeed, he even coins a phrase for it: “financial disaster tourism.” He begins each chapter with a description of the local character, then proceeds to implicate its contribution to the situation. From Iceland’s peculiar gender segregation to Greece’s pervasive tax evasion to institutionalized gelding of tax collection ability in California, Lewis uses the narrative of the disinterested party to take his audience beneath overt causation and into the deeper subtext.
I have no idea how I even got this book, but I found it fascinating. Presenting the backdrop upon which this tragedy cum farce has been painted leaves the reader with a sense of how the calamity is a patchwork quilt made up of widely disparate participants, most of whom were caught completely by surprise in what should have been obvious.
I attended the organization Christmas party the week before last. Up to that point, I was fairly pleased with our new director. Where he had a history of longwindedness, he was more terse as director. But he did make sure to give a brief speech at the party. Then he said (I’m paraphrasing) this: “… I wish you a Merry Christmas. That’s right, not holidays, but Christmas.” —claps and whistles from a handful of mouth-breathers— “This time of year, I am reminded of (some thing or other) and A Charlie Brown Christmas…” He then goes on about the meaning of Christmas according to the theology of Linus. I wondered if it was fitting that he so embrace the philosophy of a preschooler with security blanket issues.
Worthy of Reverence
Then it all made sense.
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