My Endorsement

I will cast my vote for Mitt Romney tomorrow. I will make the joyless slog from the Short Pump elementary school parking lot through the partisans handing out sample ballots on the sidewalks. I will check in at the A-H table and smile at the white-haired lady after she finds my name in her registrar’s book. The thought will enter my mind,…when the baby boomer generation has to be depended upon to provide these election day volunteers, will there be enough of us who can be bothered? I will enter the booth and follow the instructions carefully. It will surprise me, but my heart will begin to beat faster, my soul’s way of telling me that in the grand history of civilization, what I am doing is rare… precious. The first vote will be for President, then there will be the Senate contest between George Allen and Tim Kaine. I will vote for neither man, so disgusted as I have been with this Hobson’s choice. I can either give George Allen another shot, who promises if elected to do all the things he never bothered to do the last time he was in the Senate, or I can reward a career rubber stamper like Tim Kaine, whose one claim to fame is that he balanced the budget as governor, something all previous Virginia governors have also done since our state constitution requires it. Then I will proceed to the Congressional race between Eric Cantor and William Powell. Again, I will refrain from rewarding either one of these mental midgets, Powell being an untested party hack, and Cantor being thoroughly tested and found utterly incapable of an original thought. Then there will probably be several ballot initiatives that no one knows anything about, a couple of paragraphs of government-speak asking the citizenry to give local town councils the authority to paint every third house red in the event of a nuclear accident, or some such thing. Then I will exit the booth and pick up my “I Voted” sticker from the nice Rotarian volunteer beneath the exit sign of the gymnasium.

This will be my 9^th Presidential vote. My first was as an 18 year old when I proudly pulled the lever for James Earl (Jimmy) Carter. I remember that my hands were shaking. I remember thinking, now, I am a man. With each successive vote, my hands have shaken less. The event loses a shade of its romance with each exercise, becoming less and less noble, more and more civic duty. Part of this is my fault. Cynicism has eaten away at the great expectation of possibility that should always accompany the democratic process. I have wrongly held politicians to a standard of consistency and statesmanship that I have not been able to achieve in my own life. I expect politicians to askew self interest while I merrily look out for number one in most of my endeavors.

The tipping point was 2000. Bush v. Gore. Hanging chads. Battalions of lawyers. Ugly accusations of cheating, collusion, and the visceral hatred on the faces in the crowds in Palm Beach County. Ever since, election day has brought with it a sadness for me. The ideological battles have shrunk from principled to grubby. Bad faith is the coin of the realm. Instead of proudly backing a champion, I vote for the guy least likely to fiddle while Rome burns, the candidate who embarrasses me less, the guy who insults my intelligence less frequently, the one less likely to drive us all off a cliff.

Then I will go to work, and forget about the whole thing for a few hours. After dinner, I’ll watch the returns. My guy might win. The other guy probably will win. As soon as a winner is declared, I will move on. No balloons will drop from the ceiling of my house. No confetti will be flying. And I will be silently annoyed every day that I still see campaign signs in the median.

All You Need To Know About College Football

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Feeling Dumb...

Recently, I asked my daughter to send me a reading list of some of the works that she has been pouring over for the last year and a half in grad school at Wake Forest. She is studying English Literature, I like to read, so I thought it would be nice to get on the same page…as it were…with her, so I can better understand what her scholastic life is like. She forwarded the following list:

　

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Self-Reliance”

“The Poet”

“The American Scholar”

“Nature”

“Uriel”


T.S. Eliot:

“The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock”


Nathaniel Hawthorne:

“The Birth-Mark”


Truman Capote:

"In Cold Blood"


Walt Whitman:

“Song of Myself"


Jonathan Safran:

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”


Toni Morrison:

“Beloved”


Amy Tan:

“The Joy Luck Club”

　

So far, I’ve read everything on the list up to Whitman. I’ve loved everything except “The Poet” which was just too airy and bored me to the bone. Emerson and Eliot are pure genius, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing has always seemed beautiful to me. But the best thing about the list that Kaitlin sent me was her editorial comments about each recommendation. Without her permission, I share a few of them here:

About Whitman she says,” Whitman radically changed the American intellectual/artistic landscape. He collapsed the body/soul divide…”

Concerning Emerson’s poem, “Uriel” about which she will be writing a paper she explains, “ I’m going to read “Uriel” through an Ovidian lens, because in the Metamorphoses, Ovid writes about “discordant concord” as “the path life needs”, and I think “discordant concord” is rampant in “Uriel”. Ovid explains that fire is the enemy of water, but “moist heat engenders all things”. Both Ovid and Emerson complicate traditional binaries.”

Ok, she lost me at “Ovidian lens”. It is a continuing fascination for me to observe my children and the paths they have taken. I have a daughter whose mind burns with a passion for great writing, who reads great works of literature almost three dimensionally and takes such great joy in stumbling onto the centuries-old truths found there. I have a son who, as a composition student, daily reaches within himself to create music, and thinks in a musical language few can speak. What baffles me is the realization that when I was their age, the deepest thought that ever entered my head was, why is it that if you pour beer directly into the bottom of a glass, a huge head of suds rises to overflow onto the counter, but if you tilt the glass slightly, you can empty the entire bottle without spilling a drop…WHY??  For me, “discordant concord” is a perfect description of the 2012 Boston Red Sox, and I had to Google “binaries” and I still don’t know what it means. The apple may not fall far from the tree, but it must pick up 50 IQ points on the trip.

Election Prediction Update

Regular readers of this blog will recall that I have predicted that President Obama would win reelection in 2012, most emphatically here and here. Now that there are only 5 days until the election, the question is, have I changed my mind?

The low point for the Romney campaign was on September the 17^th when his now famous 47% video surfaced. Since then however, the Romney campaign has done virtually everything right. Obama’s pre-debate strategy had been not to run on his record, but to demonize his opponent. Millions of dollars of ads ran depicting Romney as a vulture capitalist, hater of women, hater of minorities, and all around bad man. That strategy was vaporized by Romney’s performance in the first debate. Americans saw a man who seemed even-tempered, in command of the facts and thoroughly presidential. In contrast, Obama seemed totally annoyed at the fact that he had to spend his anniversary on a stage with an opponent that he refused even to look in the eye. By every measure, the night belonged to Romney, and he has been on an uninterrupted roll ever since. Even Obama’s better performances in the subsequent debates were not enough to put the genie of his inevitability back in the bottle.

Still, the race is terribly close, the margins in key swing states razor thin. The path to victory for Romney is still much more perilous. People forget how difficult it has been historically to defeat an incumbent President. It’s only happened 3 times in the past 50 years. In 1968 LBJ resigned rather than run for reelection, in 1980 Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter with help from a 3^rd party candidate who pulled away 6% of the vote, and Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush winning only 43% of the vote because of Ross Perot’s candidacy which pulled a whopping 19% of the vote. So, incumbency is a powerful weapon in presidential politics.

While I have been surprised by the strong showing of Romney, and equally surprised at the rattled, chaotic campaign being run by the President, I still believe that Obama will eek out a slim electoral college victory with the very real possibility that Romney wins the popular vote. Much depends on turnout. No matters who wins, it will be extremely close and afterwards, be prepared for torrents of conspiracy theories from the losing side. The air will be thick with charges of voter suppression, intimidation, rampant racism, and fraud. My advice will be to turn off the television for a month, and turn your life back over to saner pursuits.

If Obama wins with 50.1% of the vote, it will be hailed as a triumph of democracy. If Romney wins with 50.1% of the vote it will prove beyond doubt that America is irredeemably racist.

Sigh……

Frankenstorm: Day Two and My Favorite Political Ad

Tuesday morning dawns cold and miserable but under full power. Frankenstorm has lived up to it’s clever name in places like New York City, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and in the higher elevations of Appalachia. For those of us living in central Virginia, Frankenstorm has turned out to be an over-hyped frenzy of meteorological hysteria, resulting in an extended school holiday, and a sales bonanza for the grocery business.

The biggest beneficiaries of this storm have been the 9 million or so people in the northeast who are at this moment without power and consequently are temporarily receiving relief from paid political advertising. My television has become an HD, flat screen, full color bullshit dispenser for the past two months, and to be totally honest with you, it’s starting to chip away at my sanity. There is no escape, no broadcast island I can escape to. No matter what I might be watching, be it sports, the History channel, or even a cooking show, every 13 minutes I am bombarded with rapid-fire character assassination. Tim Kaine is a puppet, Eric Cantor is a corporate tool, no wait,… he’s actually a savior of small business. Mitt Romney is the Snidely Whiplash of American politics, busy tying the screaming blond virgin that is the middle class to the railroad of poverty, as he greedily counts his millions. Barack Obama is coming after our guns, indeed the very foundation of western civilization crumbles literally under our feet every second that he remains President. George Allen is either the champion of black secretaries everywhere, or single-handily responsible for every lost job over the past ten years. I know all of this because the TV ads that are approved by each candidate tell me so.

My personal favorite is the one that lists every failure of Obama’s first term in rapid fire bullet points while ominous music plays in the background. Mysteriously, lights flicker throughout the add suggesting that Tim Kaine favors electrical blackouts. Then, a 2 second clip of Tim Kaine being interviewed by an unidentified journalist flashes on the screen in grainy black and white. Tim Kaine is heard saying…”I’m just doing what the President has asked me to do.” What we don’t hear is what the question was. We don’t hear anything said before or after this sinister declaration. The glaring omission of context leaves it to the imagination. Here are a few possibilities…

Info-Babe: Governor Kaine, Is it true that you not only pray for President Obama every day, but the Republican leaders in Washington as well?

Kaine: Well, I’m just doing what the President has asked me to do.

-or-

Info-Babe: Is it true that you are working daily behind the scenes to obstruct the will of the people of the State of Virginia by issuing regulations that will lead to communism and Sharia law?

Kaine: Well, I’m just doing what the President has asked me to do.

　

See, context can make a huge difference. But providing such context would be like taking the sizzle out of the steak. Instead, the men and women who create these ads prefer to treat us all like idiots. And as long as we allow such adds to influence our votes…and they do…we should get used to our status as idiots. *

　

　

　

　

　

　

* I’m Doug Dunnevant. I’m not running for office. This blog costs me nothing to produce, and I approve of it’s content. If you’re a Kaine supporter, don’t get excited. I’m not voting for him.

Chronicaling The Devastation

The next 24-48 hours will be, no doubt, one of those events that I will one day tell my grand children about…God willing. Watched the last weather report last night around 11 o’clock, then settled in for a fitful night’s sleep. When I said my prayers I remembered to thank God for the wisdom on display over at the Henrico County School Board. That ever-vigilant bunch had the good sense to cancel school for today, adhering to the sage advice of generations of mothers and grandmothers that you would much rather be safe than sorry.

When I woke up, I fought back the rising panic and dread that began to overwhelm me as I lay there listening to the faint sound of soft rain on my windows, clearly the prelude to the torrents to come. Part of me just wanted to pull the covers tight and stay there, pretending that the horror that awaited me outside was all a dream. But, part of me really, really had to go to the bathroom…so, I screwed up all the courage I could muster and trudged downstairs.

I grabbed my cell phone to record everything for posterity. Luckily for me, no satellites had fallen from the sky during the night, and no damage had yet been done to cell phone towers on the beleaguered east coast, so I still had service. When I opened the garage door, I was greeted by this:

　

                                                                             
　


A mere 36 hours ago I had taken my leaf blower to this area and had it entirely free of leaves, pine needles, and other fall foliage. I can hardly imagine what the next 36 hours will visit upon us.

Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this Frankenstorm, I took the following video to help you appreciate the power of the winds that this mega-storm of the century has unleashed:

　

                                                                         

 After I got dressed, I headed for the office, praying for the best, expecting the worst. Thankfully, the power was still on. However, when I walked out onto the sidewalk that runs behind our office, I discovered the first signs of what is to come:

                                                                           

Obviously the first of many displaced planks that soon will be sailing through the air around here like sabers of death. I will do my best to faithfully chronicle the devastation as long as I am physically able.

Peace.

Stay strong.

Bring It On, SOTC!!!

Never let it be said that I let my natural cynicism get in the way of being prepared when it comes to the STORM OF THE CENTURY, or SOTC for short. We have done the following things as of 7:47 Sunday morning the 28^th day of October in the year of our Lord 2012:

# Cut the grass

# Moved the electric light up fake jack-o-lanterns into a corner on our front porch, and secured their chords to the iron railing to prevent them from being blown over by the 280 mph winds to come

# Went to Martins and filled our pantry with two weeks worth of staples, essential for the preservation of life without power. These include but are not limited to…canned soup, milk, peanut butter, fresh fruit, Snyder’s cheddar cheese flavored pretzel bites and one six pack each of Killian’s Irish Red and Samuel Adams Boston Lager

# Did an extra load of dark clothes before going to bed last night, since everyone knows that you should never wear white during a SOTC after October first

# Gave Molly a bath

# Took extra care in emptying the dish washer this morning

# Remembered to not wash either car yesterday, what with all the rain in the forecast, it would be pointless

　

Moving on to other topics…last night Pam and I sat down to prepare today’s lesson in the Art of Marriage class we are teaching. This one was about defining the proper roles for husband and wife. You know, the submission thing and who should be the leader etc… Once again, we discovered that we are totally unqualified to teach this class. We have done practically everything wrong! There was this one section entitled..”25 ways to spiritually lead your family” I read through the list and was only able to check off 14 out of 25 and that was because of a very optimistic scoring. The crazy thing is, Pam and I have always gotten along great, and have always been pretty proud of what we have put together here for the past 28 years. That is, until we started teaching this class, and discovered what terrible failures we have been! Actually, I exaggerate. But only a little.