In Booman’s recent post Four More Years!! I made a comment that boiled down to “OK. You got re-elected, Mr. President. Now show me that you are who you say you are.” DerFarm replied “Have a drink and chill dude. It’s Miller Time.”
Which I did.
Have a drink, that is.
A good Rhone red, actually. Miller beer is piss fit only for Republicans and other drunken frat boy types.
However, the fact remains that during his first term Obama not only did not go after the war, political and financial criminals who have put this country in grave danger for the past 50+ years, he actually cooperated with them. He signed the Goering/Goebbels-like National Defense Authorization Act; he hired outright thieves to ruin run the economy and he continued a foreign policy of militarily-enforced economic imperialism that is driving us into the poorhouse while simultaneously making the U.S. a pariah nation to most of the rest of the world. So-called bipartisanship can only go so far before it becomes collaboration. If Obama is in truth a reformer, a purveyor of hope and change, he will have to prove it to me by getting seriously in the face of the parts of the PermaGov that are allied with the tarpit-headed New Minority…you know, the ashen faced middle-aged white people like those who could be seen standing at Romney headquarters in a state of shock as the reality of their new status as a soon-to-be-extinct species began to dawn upon them. This win was evidence of a demographic sea change in the United States, and the media networks…on purpose or simply because the weight of the evidence of this change forced them to no longer be able to ignore it, I am not sure…presented ample visual evidence of that fact not only last night but as early as the convention coverage. The multiracial groups of youngish people who could be seen all across the country last night finger popping and dancing in celebration were the same kinds of people who were in plentiful evidence on the floor of the Democratic convention, and the sad-looking, tired, middle class/working class 40-ish and 50-ish whites at Republican gatherings were the same losers who dominated the floor at the Republican convention.
It was sea change time last night. Obama’s first win could be excused away as a reaction to the Bush II administration’s total failure, but four years later the truth of the matter has become perfectly clear. The most recent census…the one that couldn’t count straight, as almost everybody in the U.S.with half a brain could see if they could manage to walk down most American streets with their eyes open…missed this demographic change because it was structured to miss it, but there it was last night right out in plain sight. The truth of the matter. America is now a brownish nation, and a young nation as well. It is browner and younger than it was four years ago, and inexorably accelerating in that same demographic direction by the minute.
Read on.
Obama now has no more excuses. He can’t say that he is trying to get re-elected and he can’t say that the existing Republican power establishment can still be reached in a bipartisan manner. They have proven themselves unreachable over and over and over again and should be attacked without quarter for the next four years on every level possible. If he continues his collaboration with these criminals over the next few months then there is only one conclusion that will be able to be drawn. He is part of the problem.
We shall see.
Hope springs eternal?
Maybe.
But as the sleeping prophet G. W. Butch the Second so (in)eloquently put it:
There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.
Fool me?
I won’t be fooled again.
You?
We shall soon see.
Won’t we.
Later…
AG
We shall soon see.
Won’t we.
AG
Nah, just four more years of less evil than the alternative.
And four more years to trying to build the power to make the lesser of two evils less evil than it would otherwise be if we left the arena to the control of those who would do ever more evil.
Hey, it’s not great, but it’s better than the alternative. We’re still alive. We can still sing our own songs.
OK. I can deal with that. Thank you.
AG
Just to buttress my totally subjective “demographic sea change” idea above, here are some compulsive political counters/totally profit-oriented media types (you choose which) also ringing in the new demographic era.
There ’tis, folks. A younger, blacker, more hispanic, more multi-sexual electorate is now officially in power.
The sole remaining bastion of white middle-aged conservative privilege? Voters for the House of Representatives and other relatively small samples of the overall U.S. population. As the dinosaurs herd into ever-smaller sections of their country on their way to extinction, their voting power in those areas is concentrated. Thus, the House is their last bastion as far as national elections are concerned.
Is this demographic change a “good” thing? I dunno. If conditions in this country improve as an overall result then yes, it is. But if this New Majority proves to be as gullible and as easily hypnotized by the corporate-owned media as was the Old Majority then it’s just going to be more or the same-old, same-old, only dressed up in different clothes.
We shall see.
Long term, I am quite encouraged. (Provided of course we do not blow ourselves up real good before we get anywhere.) I have recently been spending some time in Ithaca, NY…now a wonderful college town, one in which I spent the two years after JFK’s assassination long ago and far away. Back then, the population of that town…including almost all of the students…was a square and as white as has been the Republican voting bloc in the last two national elections. It was an unbearably stuffy place to me and I got outta there as soon as I was able to support myself as a musician. Now? Now it is in the forefront of the demographic change that I have been referencing. Culturally, racially and in terms of the way the colleges there operate on most levels it is almost a perfect model of the New Majority. As the best and the brightest go, so go the rest. Only a little later.
That’s the theory, anyway.
That is my prayer for this country.
We shall see.
Soon enough.
Let us pray. Or be preyed upon once again.
Later…
AG
P.S. More good news? The people who I met…mostly grad students…barely watch TV at all anymore. You cannot be hypnotized if you don’t stare at the hypnotic spiral.
Word.
Word.