populism 8

Many years ago I took the H and R tax course, hoping to get a job with them, pretty boring crap, and that’s where I took up the idea that everybody has to file every year no matter what. But the web has informed me otherwise, I was wrong. But I warn you that doesn’t happen very often, that I admit being wrong.

Of course you know a gay accountant, yearning to marry his beloved, might be so distracted that he didn’t notice some little detail that might put his client, a known anti-gay-marriage voter in the slammer where he would not be voting. Just sayin’.

I assume that when you refer that ‘fake government shutdown thing,’ you are referring to the government shutdown thing, the one that scared the shit out of our creditors and raised our interest rates so that all Americans are in a deeper hole than they would have been otherwise.

But I certainly support your support for the nut who is calling out the incumbent as a guy who has been reasonable a time or two and is therefore unfit for office. I assume the new nut is proclaiming that he will never compromise on anything, and making various right wing noises that will offend moderates, independents, and dems (not that the dems would ever vote for him, but he will scare the shit out of them so much that they will male a point of coming out to vote against him), so that if he wins, he has less of a chance of beating the dem than that foolish incumbent who did one or two reasonable things.

And just by the way, how much do you know about the new nut, besides his rhetoric? If the old nut had tea party support I assume he was using the same rhetoric as the new nut, so how do you know the new nut won’t turn out to have a reasonable bone in his body somewhere?

I’d be a little worried that my arguments would change your mind so that you would vote for the old nut because a nut in the house is better than two nuts outside of the house ranting at the dem in the house. But fat chance of you listening to reason, so I won’t worry about that.

Well I did a similar thing back in 1968 when I was gung ho on voting for Dick Gregory, but I was afraid that if I registered to vote, at the last minute I might have a flash of reason and vote for Humphrey, and to solve all that I cleverly did not register to vote.

The thing about populism is that it’s what the man in the street thinks. If he’s the man in the street he is not the man in the fancy office, and the men in the fancy offices are most surely working to make sure that he never gets into a fancy office, and that he never gets any money from them and indeed the man in the fancy office can probably find a way to squeeze more bucks out of the man in the street.

So he is probably downtrodden, and nobody likes to be downtrodden, so he supports some guy who promises to equalize things. And this is something we Americans all applaud. But because he is uneducated and all, he also tends to be racist, maybe anti-Catholic, probably a religious fundamentalist, probably pissed at some country he couldn’t find on the map, and ready to go to war with them.

So I have a little soft spot in my heart for populism because of the downtrodden thing, but because of all the other baggage that comes with it, I ultimately don’t like it.

Looking back on hippie days, I remember that the reps and the dems seemed only a little different from each other compared to how far they both were from causes we supported, so we felt justified in trashing the 68 dem convention, though we did choose the dems to trash over the reps because we did think that they would be more sensitive to us then the reps. Which, looking back now, doesn’t make any sense. But it’s what we believed at the time.

But we were hardly the downtrodden, we were mostly the privileged kids of the middle class, also we had a narrow age range, we certainly didn’t have any support from anybody over thirty. So although we had some similarities with populists, I don’t think I would put us in that category.

The tea party on the other hand seem to fall pretty well into that category. At first glance you might not think so, since many of the early guys were pretty rich, and they had that fancy libertarian veneer, but anymore if you look at the regions of the country where most of their support is coming from it is from the poorest and most uneducated so I think it would fall into that category.

But some of the tea party types seem pretty intelligent and educated, and I wonder how they can say the things they say when the evidence all around them refutes it, and I just assume that they are speaking from some feeling in their heart and ignoring any conditions or things said from the real world. I wonder if you think that way about liberals.

And I believe that is the whole reason we started this blog, isn’t it?