For those interested in such things,
this is a fascinating site devoted to dissecting the U.S. balance of trade. Here, for instance, is a snapshot of the vital buggy-whip riding-crop trade:
Warmish colors are those countries we export walking-sticks and riding-crops to; coolish colors are those countries we import such items from. (The hyphens just make them so much classier, non?)
We export riding-crops to about 30 countries, but we import lots and lots of riding-crops from just a few countries: China (surprise!), Taiwan, Austria, and Germany. In fact, if not for those four countries, the U.S. would be a net exporter of riding-crops.
I don't know about anyone else, but I just love to wallow in data like these.
Navel-gazing with the Bonfire Boys. Ann Althouse put up a post recently containing higher-than-average Pogo content.
One of the things that gives Casa Fleck y Breen its distinctive tone is that we house what may well be the only set of hardcover-bound, gold-stamped Pogo books in existence. 
It's not a complete set; we only have "Pogo", "The Pogo Papers", and "The Incompleat Pogo" (very true to its title, missing 4 pages). We used to have "Uncle Pogo So-so Stories", but that was lost in the mists of time and too many cross-continent moves.
These books didn't start life as hardcovers; they were simple, ordinary trade paperbacks that my father picked up in grad school. They travelled around the globe with him, growing gradually more tattered, until he met an itinerant bookbinder in Rangoon. The bookbinder bound these and many other of the family paperbacks. He wasn't very familiar with English, so the gilt-stamped titles were sometimes a bit at variance with what the author intended – but the Pogo titles were simple enough to survive transcription.
Althouse's strip is from Pogo's hippy trippy early-seventies days; the excerpt above is from the far more political fiftes. We all know who "Simple J. Malarkey" is, right?
"My family is starting to look at me funny..." Moira is putting most of her blog-energy into commenting on other people's sites these days, so I feel perfectly justified in swiping a chunk of the comment she left here just so that Alien Corn retains at least a small bit of that Moira Breen Flavor©™.
The topic is trade policy; you may start to see more stuff like this around here.
My family is starting to look at me funny, though that may just be projection and paranoia on my part. Then again, I'd love to be convinced that I was just turning into a paranoid crank about this stuff.For the record, I categorically deny looking at Moira funny. I can't speak for our daughter, though.
[...]
Over the last decade or so I've seen the cheerleaders for globalization and "free" trade transform their arguments, starting out like carnival barkers promising wealth for everybody and, more recently, furrowing their brows and switching to moral admonishments - how it's "our" moral duty to wave bye-bye to the middle class so the Third World can meet us somewhere south of the middle, wage-wise. (While one can see that there will be more competition for limited resources like oil, I have my suspicions that gutting the American middle class is not really the only way to raise living standards for Chinese and Indians. The easiest for the Chinese and Indians, and the most profitable for the geniuses of our short-term thinkin'/ADHD corporate class, yes. I figured that the adoption of the holy "moral duty" line was a veiled admission of the bankruptcy of the original arguments.) To summarize the change in the "sell" to the American worker:
First we get:
1) "The rising tide will raise all boats!"
Then:
2) "There's a pony in that shitpile for you somewhere! Really, there is! Just keep digging!"
Finally:
3) "Sucks to be you, loser!"
The "'our' moral duty" line I consider to be merely the more obfuscatory version of (3), above.
P.P.P.P.P.T.* So, I ended up in the hospital, again, a few weeks ago. (I could have written about it earlier, but — Slow Blogging!**)
I was at the local gym, lifting weights. This is something I've been trying to do about twice a week since December, when we got a gym membership, and I'd been keeping up fairly well, though there were inevitable breaks in the routine, like running off to D.C. for a week-plus. Perhaps I should have reduced the weight a little after that break; anyway, I didn't, and just about at the end of the workout I suddenly felt just beat. Really, really exhausted, out of all proportion (I thought) to what I was doing. I stopped and went into the locker room, mostly just to find a place to sit down.
As I sat on the locker room bench, I started feeling worse – completely out of breath, and faint. Chartreuse-and-magenta flashes started to show up all over my field of vision. I put my head down, closed my eyes, and waited... the gym pipes music into the locker rooms, a cavalcade of pop hits of the 70's and 80's. Material Girl played, then I Love the Nightlife, making me feel even worse. Some of the other gym regulars had come in by then, and were asking, in their circumspect way, if I was all right.
"Ah, you okay, there?"
"Just really dizzy and out of breath. I think I'll be ok in a minute."
"Well, ok." One of the regulars handed me an orange juice (I think I told him I hadn't eaten anything yet). I thanked him for it and drank.
After about ten minutes, I did start to feel better, and in a few more minutes, pretty much normal. I got up, showered and dressed. As I left the gym, two of the patrons who'd been checking on me in the locker room were waiting by the door, making sure I hadn't collapsed somewhere.
"Now, you be sure you see your doctor. This could be something serious."
"Yes, I will." Actually, I had no intention of that; I felt pretty much ok, and really didn't want to spend any more time in the emergency room. I thanked them again for looking out for me, and headed to the car.
I started up the mighty Saturn, and as I was pulling out of the parking lot it occurred to me that something felt odd in my chest, like I had a whole bunch of butterflies caged in there. Hmm, that's odd, I thought. I checked my carotid pulse; there should be a slight, steady, rythymic THUMP thaTHUMP thaTHUMP thaTHUMP beneath the skin just below and medial to the angle of the jaw. What I felt was more like:
thump thump (pause) THUMPTHUMPTHUMP thump (pause) thump THUMPTHUMPTHUMP thumpthump
...so I drove straight to the hospital, and walked to the emergency room, where they wired me up to an ECG (again!). "You're in atrial fibrillation", the ER doctor told me. Sweet.
Not only that, but the combination of reduced blood to the ventricles and chaotic electrical signals bouncing around the heart caused my ventricles to beat much faster than usual – my pulse was racing up to about 160. I borrowed a phone and called Moira. "I'm in the hospital again."
They stuck an IV into me and started pumping in a drug to calm my jittery heart down. I asked the ER doctor what the general plan was in cases like this. "Well, we want to restore normal rythym. We'll try this drug for a while, and if that doesn't work, we'll try another drug, and if that doesn't work, we'll have to shock you."
This was the second time in less than three months that I managed to get myself into the emergency room because of cardiac weirdness. It's enough to make me question my overall state of healthiness, which back in December I would have classified as "excellent". Then, one bout of angina, ok, that's a fluke. Now, a good hearty workout lands me in the hospital; WTF? (I say again, "WTF?")
(More later.)
*Residents' and interns' slang for a patient in chronic ill health – "Piss-Poor Protoplasm Poorly Put Together."
**Maybe that term needs to be shortened for maximum punchiness – "Slogging", perhaps.
Joining the club. A while ago, I bemoaned my miserable prediction record when it came to picking the survivors on Presidential Primary Island. I feel a little better now, having discovered that even generally smart people like Dan Drezner can lay some whoppers now and again:
If offshore outsourcing is not the cause of sluggish job growth, what is? A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that the economy is undergoing a structural transformation: jobs are disappearing from old sectors (such as manufacturing) and being created in new ones (such as mortgage brokering).(This was written back in 2004; emphasis added.) And maybe it's not fair to blame DD for cheering on the creative destruction that would herald the bright new dawn of a nation of mortgage brokers; it seems he was just passing on what the Fed told him.
Still, it does remind me that I read somewhere that we seem to have gotten into the habit of patching over the damage of financial bubbles by .... plunging into new financial bubbles.
Semi-related: it also reminds me of a day back in Oregon, back in 2001 or so, driving somewhere and listening to the local news on the radio... the state had come up with a plan to retrain all the out-of-work loggers so that they could become out-of-work IT guys. (Well, that wasn't how they put it – I just filled in a few extra steps for them.)
Folks hereabouts call it "Al Gore's tears".
It's snowing as I type. Snowing. Again.
On the bright side, all those billions of snowflakes might keep those ornery college students from rioting:
No greater expectation of riot this year than in past, police say
Midwesterners! Who knew?
The naming of the thing. Continuing with my newly-discovered practice of reading the blog-o-sphere very, very slowly, it has just now come to my attention that ... (drumroll please) ... Angie Schultz is back! Actually, she's been back for a week or so, but you know me, I'm readin' blogs – real slow! so I just found out about it.
In an effort to increase Alien Corn's success-O-meter reading, perhaps I should turn my everyday predilictions and laziness into a hot new trend or phenomenon. I'm surfing the internet – but really slow! I'm writing a blog – but really slow! I'll need a catchy name to promote this new idea of mine, something that combines the idea of slow and the idea of blogging, something like ... wait, it's coming to me ... something like:
“Slow Blogging”
Oh, wait. Nevermind. Okay, so I wasn't first. But you can be certain that my "slow blog manifesto" will beat the crap out of their "slow blog manifesto", when I get around to writing it.
Working on that recipe for failure. For some reasons that may become clear shortly, I've been very, very slow in catching up on my internet reading. This means I'm still working my way through old Dustbury posts, and via Mr. Hill have run across "The Top 10 Reasons Bloggers Don't Succeed".
This could be interesting... perhaps we can use it to answer the burning question, "Do I/We Have a Successful Blog?"
The top ten are:
- 10) They don't hang around long enough.
- Well, we've got that one covered, at least. Progressive Reaction(aries)/Alien Corn has been hitting the streets since January 2005, according to our sidebar. And Inappropriate Response, Moira's old blog, was established during the inflationary epoch of the blogosphere, in 2001.
- 9) They don't post enough each day. On a typical day, there are 6 posts that amount to roughly 2500 words or so ... Most successful blogs churn out at least 1500 words a day and most of them do considerably more.
- Oh, yeah, we fail bigtime here. Each day? How about, oh, I don't know, each month? What, you people expect to be entertained, or something? Jebus, I got my own life.
- 8) They don't link out enough.
- Link . . . out. . ? Oh, you mean interacting with other blog-entities. No, I guess we don't do that a whole lot. We are busy people here, busy, and linking to stuff would require reading said stuff, and who has time to do that? We (and I'm using the royal we, here) are much more interested in presenting vignettes of our life and thought to the world – to you, dear reader; surely that is more important that discussing the petty, dreary concerns of others?
- 7) Doing their initial promos too early. This is a pet peeve of mine.
- ...."Pro .... mo"? What is that?
- 6) They're not consistent enough. They take days off...
- Oh, my, my aching sides! Days off? I was thrilled to see we actually had posts each month last year. See #9.
- 5) They don't promote their work.
- Promote this? I don't think so.
- 4) They don't network.
- Nope, none of that, either. Though in fairness, we have exchanged some e-mails with some nice people, once or twice.
- 3) They're not unique enough.
- Well, I can very much sympathise with this one*. There are way too many shrieky angry political blogs out there already. But I like to think that this particular near-random collection of scribblings is at least unusual, possibly unique. Rambling, boring, pointless, disjointed – but unique.
- 2) They don't cover interesting material.
- Oh, come now. How can my concerns and interests fail but to be of vital importance to the masses?
- 1) They're just not very good.
- Perhaps now we are approaching the crux of the biscuit. "Everybody has different talents and skills and some people just aren't very good writers. In the blogging world, people who can't write either tend to pump out dreck or do huge excerpts of other articles with a line or two of their own content attached. That sort of post has its place, of course, but if it's all you're doing, it's not a good sign." Guilty as charged? A judgement call, I guess.
Which raises the question: So what the hell are we trying to do? As I tell the daughter, "That's a very good question." Which, translated, means, "I haven't the faintest idea what the answer is." So I guess the answer is, We just are. Or something.
*Even as the word-usage Nazi within stirs.
**Not that our commenters aren't very, very, good, and we treasure each and every one of you, and would take you all home if we could!
Declining and falling. Via Mr. Hill, this small-yet-profoundly-disturbing note. As the state of Michigan runs out of money, it is considering grinding up some asphalt road surfaces and replacing them with gravel.
This year, at least three mid-Michigan counties have considered converting paved roads to gravel as a budget fix.
...
"That's just part of a strategy we all are starting to face," said Michael Nobach, managing director of the Clinton County Road Commission.
Meanwhile, state legislators returned to the capitol building in Lansing to discuss further budget fixes.
Update from Moira: Well, damn. David is always at me to put up some posts, and then he goes off and steals my post ideas. I was going to steal this link from Charles Hill to inaugurate an ongoing series re "The Thirdworldization of America"*. (Send me links!)
The theme first occurred to me when I came across a 2007 article about infrastructure theft:
Theft of scrap metal, mostly copper, has vexed many areas of...life and industry for the last 18 months, fueled largely by record-level prices for copper resulting from a building boom in Asia. Common in developing counties, metal theft is now committed in nearly every state, largely by methamphetamine users who hock the metal to buy drugs, the authorities say.Thieves have stripped the wires out of phone lines, pulled plaques off cemetery plots, raided air-conditioning systems in schools and yanked catalytic converters from cars, all to be resold to scrap metal recyclers.
But perhaps no group has been as been as consistently singled out as ...farmers, who provide roughly half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. Irrigation systems, a treasure trove of copper, tend to be in remote places, out of the eyes of farmers and, until recently, law enforcement.
“This is the No. 1 crime affecting farmers and ranchers right now,” said Bill Yoshimoto, an assistant district attorney....
“Virtually every farmer...has been hit,” Mr. Yoshimoto said. “But some have been hit far beyond the value of the metal. For the farmer to replace the pump is anywhere between $3,000 to $10,000, and then there is downtime, and loss to crops.”
And I thought, what is some guy named Yoshimoto doing working as an assistant DA in the Congo?
OK, I kid. I replaced all the references to California with ellipses.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I don't remember Third World infrastructure raping being a large problem in this country. And I know there's an army of Pollyannas out there who'll want to tell me but it's alway been like this and throw out some crime stat from the '50s about thieving juvies. Please restrain yourselves, unless you're a Californian who's been farming for 50 years and can attest that indeed it has ever been thus.
Like David, I am profoundly disturbed that previously paved roads in this country will be designated with the "unimproved" marker in the next map edition. That is, if a quotidian expectation of having easy access to up-to-date map information isn't the next First World amenity to go...
*Or, as I suspect my near and dear are starting to think, "The Dale Gribble-ization of Moira".
Travellin'. Yes, we've been on the road again, this time to cram history and some civics into our offspring's head.
Yep, we've been pretty negligent here. Nope, haven't posted a thing. Too busy; there's stuff going on. You know, stuff. And things.
Anyway, via Mr. Sullivan, here's a little only-in-Florida story that gave this ex-Floridian a moment of nostalgia this morning.
Dance, white boy. I ran across this fascinating web site, and one of its entries had immediate resonance for me.
A few months ago, we had the opportunity to see the Soweto Gospel Choir in concert here. I'm not a person who trafficks much in superlatives, so I will just say that the Soweto Gospel Choir is very very very good in concert. The melodies are still stuck in my head, the harmonies were almost other-worldly, and the beat – well, let's just say that these are just about the most rump-rattlin' rhythms around, anywhere. Sitting still through this concert ought to be legal grounds for your next of kin to start divvying up your estate.
So, anyway, the SGC did a concert here. There were some youngsters, college students, I assume, some of whom were actual South Africans; but the majority of the audience was the pale, frail set that dominates much of Iowa demographics – elderly white people, probably Lutherans. The Choir poured out the music and rhythms, and what did the audience do in return? The vast majority sat politely and clapped. The South African contingent of the audience cut loose, dancing like crazy in the aisles, and I could tell the Ranting Spawn wanted to cut loose too; and I must confess that I, pasty white guy that I am, almost overcame millenia of tuneless, beatless inhibition and cut loose myself – but the Rythym Suppression Field laid down by the rest of the audience kept me in my seat. But barely!
We wondered how the performers took this apparently cool-ish reception. Did they realize the audience was being as enthusiastic as its culture permitted it to be? Perhaps what they really needed was some younger white people in the audience; then they probably could have gotten people up and dancing, however dorkily.
UPDATE. Perhaps if "doctors implant some sort of funk-enabling servomotors in [our] joints"? Yeah, that might do it.
Good enough for a politician. I suppose this is just knee-jerk New Yawk haughtiness, mindlessly dispensed whenever dealing with those flyover-country proles, but just to be clear, Hy-Vee is not a "low-end" supermarket. It's not exactly a posh supermarket, either, but it's as good as it needs to be, and no better, which makes it very Iowan, I think. And their deli sandwiches are perfectly serviceable, as deli sandwiches go – especially the panini – though I would't go out of my way to eat there.
Our little town is host to two Hy-Vee's, one at the east end and one at the west end. The west end store is noticably spiffier than the east end store (wood-veneer flooring in the bulk and organic foods section, etc.) though the east side store has been undergoing a facelift. We figure it's because the west side store is closer to the U., and some of that University-inspired cutting-edge toniness – or tony edginess – has seeped into the retail environment. We commonly identify the two stores as "the Red State Hy-vee" and "the Blue State Hy-Vee". I suppose you wouldn't mistake either one for Zabar's. For one thing, the counter help won't insult you for thinking about your order too long.
It's not like the Clintonistas picked up some pre-formed frozen burgers at the local Sam's Club. Jeez.
[Via.]
Hey! I can string a bunch of quotes together into a blog post! About two years ago, I noted the invention of the "Mosquito", a boon for old farts everywhere as it – apparently quite effectively – rids the premises of the great scourge of modern times, young people. In fact, so effective is the Mosquito that now the government is considering banning the device.
Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, the Children's Commissioner for England appointed to represent the views of the country’s 11 million children, has set up a campaign – called Buzz Off – that is calling for the Mosquito to be banned on grounds that it infringes the rights of young people.First off: what is it with the British and their effetely hilarious names? "Aynsley-Green?" OK, it's not quite "Percy Dovetonsils" or "Thoatwobbler-Mangrove" and I guess one cannot be blamed for one's family name, can one, what? But still.
"The use of measures such as these are simply demonising children and young people, creating a dangerous and widening divide between the young and the old.”Sir Al is not quoted as saying what he thinks the root of the problem is, or indeed what the problem is at all, but later on the Times article notes that
He added: "This device is a quick fix. It's not tackling the root of the problem and it's indiscriminate."
...75 per cent of its sales have been to police forces and local authorities, who install it in spots where they are keen to prevent gangs of teenagers assembling.So you'd surmise from that bit that "gangs of teenagers" are a big enough problem in Britain to support sales of a device like this.
Looking elsewhere, there are some interesting comments on Slashdot concerning this issue. Of course, these are quasi-anonymous comments floating around on the Internet, and could have been written by somebody's cocker spaniel for all we know, but they seem to provide a bit more background, like this one:
The sad thing is that the swarms of chav/pikey kids that hang around until all hours playing loud music, vandalising, swearing, taking drink/drugs (and these are typically kids between 12 and 16) know they are untouchable. They all know their rights and care not for their responsabilities. When the police do pick some up and take them home, the parents tell the police to f-off for interfering and turf their ferel kids back out on the streets for round 2 to keep them out their hair.and this:
That said, it *is* a minority of kids - there are maybe 10-20 trouble makers out of perhaps 1000 kids but anything that breaks up this troublesome clump gets my vote although they then usually just find somewhere else to cause problems.
In my opinion, the biggest problem here is the (European) Human Rights Act being abused. Kids can do whatever they want with no real danger of any punishment. Even repeat offenders get away with it time after time. I know someone who had their car smashed by the neighbours 15yo kid but they have no hope of financial recompense and the kid has no itention of coughing up and knows he doesn't have to. His parents aren't legally obliged to and don't have the money anyway. They also say he is out of control and have no way to make him do a job to raise the money. Parents aren't allowed to lock them in their rooms or do anything other than give them a talking to and in many cases the parents just don't care.
i'm 38, and can hear the Mosquito. It's irritating, yes, but not moreso than I find the thumping beats in some shops that I now refuse to shop in.and this:
By being active in the communities in the area I live in, and around, I have noticed a lot more violent behaviour in the younger demographic. Significantly more so.
The real solution to this would be to chuck the area of the 'human rights' laws that say "ooo.. Child. Can't touch.. Naughty.. No!" when they throw abuse at you (and threaten to knife you), and let people give them a solid clip round the ear, as used to happen a few decades back.
That is nicely targetted, thank you very much. It would deal with the indiscriminate nature of the Mosquito.
However, every law we have says that if you target someone who's threatening you, you are extremely likely to be picked on legally (a granny in court of swatting a kid who was vandalising a war memorial; she's on charges of assault. People who hit back to stop assaults/burglaries etc. end up in court for assault charges. A woman was assaulted in broad daylight on a street (not empty), and nobody stopped, as almost everyone is afraid of getting either stabbed, or up on charges in court).
If you think it's only stories, about five years ago, a mate of mine was stabbed and killed for intervening in a group of kids that were trying to steal a mobile from a young gal.
Friends of mine in the police force locally are really beginning to feel the crunch of it. No matter what the statistics say, hearing them talk of how the job's changed over the last few decades is scary.
Granted, the long term causes of these issues need to be addressed, but the fact remains that these gangs of "young people" are causing criminal damage and are at best a serious concern and in some cases a genuine threat to the safety and liberties of regular members of the public. When people talk about the rights of children, they always think of the relatively innocent ones, the ones who are probably more like we were when we were young (and this is an image that those who are anti-Mosquito are trying to foster) but the truth of the matter is that the kids this device is being used on, have little in common with the British kids of the 80s. They are the sort who have no regard for other people's property or civil rights. They are the sort for whom a night out involves underage binge drinking and for whom violent behaviour is part of the fun, so forget about being idealistic, and taking the moral high ground here. You'll notice that those people who have posted who actually live in the UK are supporting the use of this device. There's a reason for this.and this:
I should also point out that in response to this campaign, the British Government said a couple of days ago that they will not be banning the use of the Mosquito. There is overwhelming public support for the devices, because there is a genuine need for them.
A typical example is just down the road from my house. There's a small shop, video rental place, takeaway, and a pub in a small patch surrounded by houses. During the day, it's fine. At night, it's a disaster area.Apparently, Sir Aynsley-Green's idea has not exactly been popular, at least not with the older, angry-phone-calling set:
The kids who gather there are an effing nuisance, they insist on playing football right in front of the cars trying to use the car park, they harrass people and treat adults there like crap, they've smashed the windows of the shops dozens of times, they throw rubbish everywhere... The list goes on and on, they're just out of control and their parents are nowhere to be seen. Nobody dares deal with it because if they do, *they* will be the ones who get punished for taking the law into their own hands, or they'll be on the receiving end of reprisals.
The police response is this: Several yellow signs have been put up on the lamp posts that have bizarre txt-speak drivel on them. A typical example is "If ur bad we'll tell ur olds."
And that's it.
You never, ever see the police turn up. They do *nothing*. The parents of the kids do *nothing*. For the reasons listed above, everyone else does *nothing*. The kids, meanwhile, go mental. It's a total failure of control.
Lyn, the receptionist at the office of the Children's Commissioner, has taken an unprecedented number of calls this week. Mostly from furious shopkeepers who want to tell Al Aynsley-Green, in no uncertain terms, what they think of his campaign to ban the Mosquito ... the "Buzz Off" campaign has suddenly propelled Professor Sir Al Aynsley-Green from a minor figure, who has previously issued predictable comments on subjects such as smacking children, to public enemy number one."Professor Sir". Now that's a title!
Sir Al would rather not see himself painted as a "bleeding-heart liberalist", but his views seem to undermine that.Or, as someone might say,
First there is his sympathy with the mantra, heard from many a youngster in trouble, that there is "nothing to do round here". This line emerges from a discussion about Gary Newlove, the father of three who was kicked to death by a gang of teenagers.
"Without talking to them, it's hard to know why they did it," says Sir Al. "What I can say is that many young people tell me they have nowhere to go, nothing to do. They say: 'Adults don't like us and won't work with us and we're bored and when we're bored we get drunk.' And the consequences of drink are obvious."
He is not excusing the appalling violence, he says, but follows that with the cliché that "it takes a village" to raise a child. He leaves the impression that all of us, not just the teenagers, have to take responsibility for the death of Mr Newlove.
Where does Whitehall get them from? Is there perhaps an agency which specialises in picking, as candidates for public service, Sixties throwbacks who are guaranteed to set the public's teeth on edge?
The Great Prognosticator. Wow. I guess I'd better put aside my dreams of becoming a political maven, pundit, sage, seer, what-have-you. What was it I said again?
I predict my choice, ultimately, will boil down to Clinton vs. Romney.Oh yes... But now, no more Romney. Things aren't looking real great for Clinton at the moment, either, but it's still a long slog to the Democrats' convention, and I'm sure she still has a few tricks up her sleeve.
(I wrote more, but realized that it was all probably just as prescient as the "Clinton vs. Romney" stuff, and deleted it. I have some sense of shame.)
Hey! I need that! Gimme! Mine!
Fate Of Rebate Checks In Limbo After Vote...and here I was counting on
And then there were four. A bit distracted from politics lately, what with the hospital thing and the effort involved in keeping Moira locked in the closet, but it looks like a classic good-news bad-news situation developed – the good: Edwards is out! the bad: Giuliani is out! My most-disliked and my least-disliked candidates both out of the running. (Among those individuals I considered as viable candidates at all, that is; Dodd, Kucinich, Paul, and Thompson never blipped my radar.) We're now down to four potential candidates – Huckabee will flame out soon, and Paul still doesn't count.
Let me take a brief moment to look back at the results of that little presidential quiz I took a few weeks ago:
- Giuliani 9
- Edwards, Kucinich 7
- Huckabee, Richardson 5
- Clinton, Dodd, Hunter, McCain, Romney, Thompson 4
- Biden, Gravel, Obama, Paul 3
Of course, as the travelling circus has moved on from Iowa, I don't really get to pick one of the four anyway; the next time the circus comes to town, there will be only two to choose from. But which two?
My guess, for what very little it is worth, is that on the D side of the scale Clinton will eventually wrestle down the nomination, though it will turn plenty nasty and ugly before she beats Obama into submission. Yes, Obama has Youth and Hope and Beautiful People swooning at his every mellifluous word, but my 4.5 decades of exposure to life and politics don't see good wishes and happy thoughts triumphing over the naked will to power. I suspect a lot of bright-eyed Obama supporters are going to come out of this election cycle very disillusioned and cynical, as Politics As Usual steamrolls "Yes We Can."
Over on the R side, I have a hard time believing that McCain can actually get the nomination, regardless of how well he's doing right now. At least, if what I'm being told about McCain is true – that he's basically a rogue RINO with zero party loyalty, a Republican Joe Lieberman with anger management issues – well, if the Republicans allow someone who Isn't Really A Republican to get the nomination, that doesn't say a whole lot for their nominating process, does it?[1][2]
An interesting commonality between Obama and McCain[3] is that they seem to represent a desire on the part of a big chunk of the electorate to go beyond "the establishment", beyond "politics as usual". They are both firmly bound within the establishment, of course; but the desire is notable. It seems as though more people than usual across the political spectrum are feeling that life in the US is somehow out of joint, and in response they are attempting to cut the Gordian knot of business-as-usual with someone they think will be different. The American electorate is like a wounded beast; it lashes out. Not in any coherent manner, mind you, but it lashes out just the same.
So that means I predict my choice, ultimately, will boil down to Clinton vs. Romney.
Host: do you still want the blow on the head?Woman: Yes, yes.
Host: I'll offer you a poke in the eye.
Woman: No! I want a blow on the head.
I don't know what I'll do when that comes to pass; not yet. My prediction, at this point, based on nothing but a sinking feeling in the gut, is that Romney wins. That's not a prediction made with any enthusiasm; it's just what I feel is going to happen.
[1] Or maybe it just means that the core party faithful are losing their hold, as less-partisan Rs are getting fed up. Maybe McCain really is the face of the Republican Party, circa 2008.
[2] McCain is not a household favorite at the Casa Fleck y Breen. Type "McCain" in the search box at the upper right to get some idea of why.
[3] Oh, yeah, and that Paul guy, too.
Passing the ham, part 3. (Sorry for keeping all six of you on tenterhooks for five days. In sympathy, apparently, with my own health adventures, my trusty PC came down with hard drive troubles, now resolved. I hope.)
Anyway, back to the hospital. On the second evening, the nurses came in and stuck another IV line into me, this time into the back of my left hand – "just in case". So now both hands sported IVs. Moira stayed as late as she could, and then I succumbed to the lure of mindless television – I think I watched the same Mythbusters episode 3 times in a row – and then a nurse came in and offered to put on a featurette on angiograms and angioplasty. Ok, fine... hey, all these people are a lot older than me. And they're getting outpatient care! Another nurse came by and dropped off the informed consent form, and I saw a bunch of terminology on it that I didn't remember ever discussing with the cardiologist, so I left it unsigned. The angiogram would run a catheter up my right radial artery, so the nurse shaved all the hair off my wrist. I turned out the light and, with tubes stuck in both hands and 12 ECG leads on my torso, I tried to get some sleep.
The next morning, I could only get the pre-surgery breakfast – clear, saltless broth, yellow Jell-O, and tea, no milk – I lay on the bed in a funk, swathed in the big fuzzy robe that Moira had been kind enough to bring. Some co-workers arranged to drive my car, left at work two days before, back to our house, because we were anticipating near-blizzard conditions by that evening. The cardiologist stopped by; we discussed the consent form, and he answered my questions satisfactorily, so I signed. A nurse came by and asked to see my feet.
"Why?"
"We need to know where on your feet we can get a good pulse during the procedure."*
She massaged each foot for a minute, then took out a black Sharpie and marked a big black X on the top of the arch, and again near the ankle. I looked like I was getting measured for crucifixion.
Moira kept me company while I waited for something to happen; the catastrophizing part of my brain kept evolving scenarios that held me captive in the hospital for days. Everything about being in the hospital seems designed to make the patient feel cut off from the world of the healthy. There's no way I'm getting out of here today, my brain kept repeating. Oh, well, at least I can look good. The IV tubes in my hands discouraged me from making use of the shower in the bathroom, and my hair was getting pretty rank, but at least I could shave, and I did. Much better. Look sharp, feel sharp...
Then a nurse came in with a Valium and a cup of water. After that, details start to get fuzzy. I remember getting on a gurney, pushed by a big strong lad from the cardiac catheterization unit, or "cath lab", as they called it. Another nurse gave me a heated towel to cover myself with. As we headed down into the bowels of the hospital, we discussed sushi options around town, and the advisability of eating sushi when 1500 miles from the ocean.
Down in the cath lab (hey, I like the sound of that. Cool. Punchy. Monosyllabic.), one of the nurses opened up a small oven packed full of hot towels, and got me another one. Neat! Now, the details start to get really fuzzy. Moira took her leave, and the cath lab guys (I'm, like, one of them now, so I can call it that cool name) wheeled me into the operating room, or lab room, or whatever. They hooked up my IV to some kind of bodacious sedative, and from that point on I didn't care what they did. I was conscious throughout, but all I remember now is that it seemed like we all, the nurses and the cardiologist (begowned now) and I, were all just having one big party, hanging out, shooting the breeze. I think they were talking about football, or movies, or something. I don't remember anything about any angiogram, any part of it. I fully intended to watch the whole thing, but at this point I don't remember them actually conducting the procedure at all. By the time it was finished, I would have been perfectly happy if we turned around and did it all over again, it seemed like such a mellow good time.
And the result of it was... I was clean. No appreciable blockages at all, anywhere. The stress test implied a blockage, but the angiogram was the definitive answer, and the angiogram said I was fine, so fine I was. In my serene and equanimitable mood, that was ok. Anything would probably have been ok at that moment, but "no blockage" was definitely ok.
The rest of the day is fairly jumbled up in my head still. They put some sort of pressure bandage on the catheterization site, so that I wouldn't spring a leak. Once back in my room, I remember having all the other bits of paraphernalia removed. I remember Moira and the Ranting Spawn being present, and having a splint put on my wrist (to keep the catheterization wound from reopening) and speaking to my father on the telephone, and apparently I was released from the hospital. I clutched a little packet, containing a business card for the cardiologist, an appointment card with my regular physician, a page or two of patient care advice, a little card signed by my buddies, the cath lab nurses (I mean, those are the guys. I love those guys!) and an insulated water bottle with the hospital insignia on it.
And I'm still not sure what caused the whole thing.
*Why did they need to know that? She explained it, but it's all gone fuzzy now.
Uncontrolled handbasket acceleration. If you've noticed I (Moira) haven't been posting much lately it's because David, perhaps weary of my constant doom-mongering and demented jeremiads, had decided to lock me in the closet 'til after November to keep me away from reading news and poli-blogs. Due to his recent distractions, however (see below), I managed to break out and sneak over to my desk, there to soak up a big fix of the good stuff for another round of apoplexy. But sometimes it's just a little item that can reduce even my excitable nature to a state of bewildered quasi-serenity and send me quietly mumbling back to the closet:
“The sooner we get this ['stimulus' package] relief in the hands of the American people, the sooner they can begin to do their job of being good consumers," said House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.
We're doomed, guys. Doomed.
Via Carrie's Nation, one of whose commenters remarks, "[T]hat says it all, doesn't it? [W]e're not citizens, we're employees and our sole function is to buy shit."
Passing the ham, part 2. So I mentioned to my boss that I needed to take off a bit early, what with the incipient heart attack and all, and he nicely dropped everything and drove me to the hospital. I ran through my list of symptoms for the woman behind the admissions desk, and quickly got wheeled to an exam room where they hooked me up to a variety of beeping and blinking gadgets. (By this time, I had called Moira and said, Don't freak out, but could you come to the emergency room right now? I'll explain later.)
I recited the symptoms again to the emergency room nurses while they were rigging me up, and then again when the ER doctor appeared. Then Moira and Ranting Spawn arrived, and we sat in the windowless room, and waited, and waited some more... eventually the ER doc. reappeared; my ECG was normal, indicating no obvious damage to the heart, and my blood tests were clean - there were none of the enzymes released by stressed or dying heart muscle present. So there was nothing obviously wrong -- but given the chest pain, the risk factors, etc., he wanted to run me through a cardiac stress test. But it was too late in the day. I would have to wait. Overnight. In the hospital. I tried to argue that we only lived 10 minutes away, I could be back in the morning in a jiffy - but he wasn't buying it, the cardiologist had a full night's worth of periodic poking, jabbing, and prodding planned for me already.
So M. & R.S. left to pack me an overnight bag. My shirt and sweater were replaced by the usual dignity-sucking hospital robe. A nurse looped an oxygen line over my ears and up my nose. I had ECG leads stuck all over my torso, and I could just see the monitoring equipment if I turned my head a little. A nurse stuck an IV into the back of my hand, not for anything in particular, but just in case. Every fifteen minutes a blood pressure cuff would automatically inflate and take my blood pressure.
After a while, the cardiologist came in, and I gave him the Litany of Symptoms again, and then the he asked the usual chain of questions, which I answered as I had before.
Moira returned with my bag, and then they wheeled me upstairs to my room. Not bad – private, (fake) wood-paneled floor, LCD TV in the corner, "room service" on demand... "Hey, can you take this thing out of my nose?" The nurse checked my oxygen saturation and shrugged. "Okay." Ahhhhhhh. Then she hooked up all the ECG electrodes that were still stuck all over my torso to a small wireless unit that attached to the gown - they could track the ECG's of all the cardiac patients on the floor from the nurses' station.
In the morning I was all ready to get tested and get it over with, but my schedule was not the hostpital's schedule. From what I could see, the hospital moved at a languid pace, with at least an hour between any sort of major event, such as me being moved to the stress lab, or being moved back to the room, or having person pop in and give me an update as to what was going on. I ate breakfast (egglike substance, bagel, low-fat "cream cheese", orange juice). I finished Flashman. I picked up Thucydides. Those Athenians sure were full of themselves, weren't they? Pericles was all, "Hey, face it, we're tyrants. Let's be the best damn tyrants we can be!"*
My regular physician came by, and I repeated the Litany of Symptoms again. A nurse came in with a Russian accent an a metal-shielded syringe. "I have to give you the tracer now," she said. She attached the syringe to the IV line sticking out of my hand and depressed the plunger. "There. Now you are radioactive." (Now you are radioactif.) More waiting. More endlessly quarrelsome Greeks. About 2 hours later, they wheeled me down to the nuclear medicine lab, and I lay very still on the gamma camera, a small table with big moving detectors clustered closely around it. I had to lie there for about 20 minutes. It was quiet, dimly-lit and not unpleasant; Paul Simon's Negotiations and Love Songs played in the background. Some of the lyrics were a bit jarring: "Now I would not give you false hope/ on this strange and awful day..." but not a bad patient experience, overall.
I watched the monitor, scintillating points of light outlining bits and pieces of my insides. My gall bladder was intensely lit up; a sign my liver was dilgently trying to scrub this strange foreign substance out of my body. The intestinal circulation was a diffuse halo, and my heart was a dim oval near the top of the image. After round one with the gamma camera, they wired me up to another ECG** and made me stress out on a treadmill, followed by another dose of tracer in the IV, followed by more waiting, followed by another session with the gamma camera (still with the Paul Simon), followed by a return to my room. Then the wait. Surely it can't take this long to interpret results, I thought. How much is all this costing, anyway? I briefly entertained a few visitors. Finally, the nurse on duty came in: My stress test results were abnormal. The cardiologist would be in with details. When?? Sometime.
I called M. and told her what I could – it didn't look like I was getting out anytime soon. Pace, pace, pace. As I was pacing, the cardiologist, a small, dapper man, fell in with me. We returned to my room. "So, what do you do for a living?"
"I'm a software programmer." (Incomplete, but the simplest answer.) He looked me over for a second, and said, "Here's the situation." He started writing on the whiteboard in my room. "There's a patient with chest pain." He wrote CP +. "Cardiac perfusion at rest is good, and exercise capacity is good." He wrote Ex. Cap -. "Blood enzymes look good." He wrote Blood en. - "But under stress, the muscle at the apex of the left ventricle showed less of a signal than the surrounding muscle, possibly implying a blockage." He drew a very credible little heart diagram, showing how the tracer didn't distribute itself as expected. Then he wrote Card. perf. + "Given this, and adding in the patient's history of hypertension –" hypert. + "– high cholesterol –" hyperch. + "– and family history –" fam. hist. +; what would you do?"
"I'd assume that there was a problem."
"Yes. The most likely explanation for you episode is that there is a partial blockage in this region of the ventricle –" he circled the apex – "and that something -- a clot, a broken-off bit of plaque -- got stuck at the blockage momentarily, resulting in the angina. It will happen again, and it will probably get worse. An angiogram will tell us definitively what the state of the arteries is in your heart; it is the gold standard. Depending on the degree of blockage, we can either prescribe medication, or perform an angioplasty, insert a stent, or (in the worst case) perform bypass surgery."***
Oh yeah, I'm lovin' this. "When would you perform the angiogram?" Can I please please please go home now?
"As soon as possible. Tomorrow."
"And could I go home, before....?"
"No. I wouldn't advise it. You need to be prepared." Oh, great. I'm never getting out of here.
* A paraphrase.
** I was still finding and removing ECG electrodes from my body the morning after I finally got back home.
*** Another paraphrase.
Passing the ham, part 1. In the icy dawn twilight I scraped the driveway clean, and the sidewalk too, as clean as they could be scraped considering the weeks-old layers of ice at the base. But it was a light snow, requiring just a few minutes effort, and then off to work. Then sitting in my cubicle in front of two big computer monitors, doing that thing that I do, until 11 o'clock rolled around.
At 11 I have a regularly scheduled meeting where key personnel from our end of Global Megacorp interface with key personnel from another sub-sub-branch of Global Megacorp (le MegaCorpe Mondiale), ensuring the smooth and continuing delivery of our widgets to correctly function within the context of their gizmos, etc. All routine stuff. As I sat listening, it slowly dawned on me that something odd was happening in the vicinity of my sternum. Yes, a very definite odd sensation was taking hold down there, a feeling very hard to describe because of its falling outside the bounds of normal sensation; not painful, but disturbing, and distracting; the needs of the gizmo-makers and the looming necessity of buy-in, so that we'd all be on board, going forward, from yet another sub-sub-division of the business (die Grosse Weltkorp) – all began to occupy less and less of my attention as I attempted to characterize just what was going on.
Not pain, but uncomfortable; more like a feeling of compression, as though my ribcage wasn't quite big enough, as though... and then it popped into my head: as though I was passing a ham through my left ventricle.
(Let me quickly state that the phrase is not original to me. 95% of the contents of my brain derive directly or indirectly from The Simpsons, Futurama, some variant of Star Trek, or Mystery Science Theater 3000, and this one is no exception: it comes from the MST3K treatment of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, an unsightly blemish on the late Raul Julia's acting career and a good argument for never allowing Canadians and Public Broadcasting to mix, which we had watched courtesy of Netflix just the evening before.)
But...damn, that pretty much summed up the feeling. As it progressed (it was probably around 11:10 by now), odd pulsing sensations travelled up my neck and into my jaw, making my molars ache. Wow, this is pretty weird, I thought. I wonder if I should do something about it. I didn't really feel short of breath, but on the other hand I did feel slightly less odd if I took deeper breaths than usual. Every so often I needed to interject something into the meeting, so I'd take the phone off mute and say whatever it was, then re-mute and get back to trying to figure out what was going on. After another five minutes or so, the sensation began to subside, retreating back down my neck, lessening in severity... then a mild resurgence, then resubsidence, until it faded away, leaving me cold and perspiring slightly.
The big conference call ended about the same time. I felt ok, more or less. Got up and walked around a bit, engaged in several extended conversations with co-workers. Ate a sandwich for lunch. Did some work. Starting browsing the internet, looking for something resembling my little episode. Eventually, my internettatory perambulations got me onto the Wikipedia page for angina[1]. Now, I had always thought of angina as always denoting a sharp, acute pain in the chest, but then I started reading through the description:
the discomfort is usually described as a pressure, heaviness, tightness, squeezing ... Typical locations for radiation of pain are arms (often inner left arm), shoulders, and neck into the jaw... It is exacerbated by having a full stomach and by cold temperatures. Pain may be accompanied by breathlessness, sweating...Well, dang, I thought, that sounds familiar.
Major risk factors for angina include ... high cholesterol,Check.
high blood pressure,Check.
... family history of premature heart disease.Check. Hmmm. Well, now the article had my full attention. Reading on,
Angina may further be classified as stable or unstable angina ...Typical presentations of stable angina is[2] that of ... minimal or non-existent symptoms at rest. Unstable angina ... may occur unpredictably at rest which may be a serious indicator of an impending heart attack.Well, that's a bit of kick in the old teeth, eh, what?
Mental gears officially shifted to ALARMED, I call the clinic, and describe my symptoms to the voice on the other end of the line. Should I, like, you know, do something about these symptoms, which are surely nothing serious, right?
"You should get someone to drive you to the emergency room right now," the voice said.
[1] All throughout my youth, I thought the chorus to Eric Clapton's version of Willie and the Hand Jive was "An-gina, an-gina, mumblemumble mumble an-gina". It seemed like a really weird concept for a song.
[2] Subject-verb agreement has never been a Wikipedia strong point.
You don't say. Universities overproduce Ph.Ds, the AP helpfully informs us today. This was something that dawned on our little doctoral cohort back in 1991 or so, when one day we sat down and did the math; figuring out how many Ph.D.'s were cranked out per year, and comparing that number to the number of positions offered in Science and Nature and their ilk. It was already obvious at the time that a huge group of degreed but basically unemployed biologists was forming, necessitating the wholesale development of the postdoctoral position – a precariously-funded, one- or two-year position whose whole purpose is just to keep you in play so that you can pay your rent and ramen-noodle bills while squeezing out as many publications as you possibly can, as fast as you can. (Bitter? Moi?)
The postdoc. phenomenon (or its equivalent in the humanities, the perpetual adjunct) that we saw spreading into biology then seems pretty firmly entrenched across just about all academic disciplines now. Graduate schools are cranking them out at far above replacement rate, faster than academia can absorb them, and apparently faster than industry can make use of them.
"It's not uncommon to have a disconnect like this in higher education, in which people are both concerned about the difficult career prospects being faced by recent Ph.D. graduates and concerned there aren't enough Ph.D. students," said Michael Teitelbaum, of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.Ahhh, but we made the connection. Schools need a large pool of (low-paid) grad students, adjuncts, and postdocs to handle a lot of the low-level work around the department – someone's gotta teach the labs, run the greenhouses, run the mundane experiments, and the schools can't very well afford to have the full-time faculty doing it. But the little buggers keep graduating, or dropping out, or getting real jobs, and so the pool must be constantly replenished with fresh blood. The unfortunate side effect is a growing population of newly-hatched Ph.D.'s, clutching their bound diplomas*, desperately yeeping at their faculty advisors and acquaintances, hoping for some morsel of relevant employment to be jammed down their throats.
The ideas, he said, "often don't get connected. It's puzzling."
In fields like history, recent numbers show the market improving, and there will be more jobs as baby boomers retire.They were peddling that particular lie when I was an undergrad. There's always a Wave of Retirements, Just Around The Corner, Really, This Time We Mean It, but it doesn't really matter, considering the size of the waiting pool of applicants.
Groups such as the Business Roundtable have grabbed headlines with urgent warnings about the need to ramp up production of American scientists. In fact, Teitelbaum testified to Congress last year, there is no evidence of a shortage of scientists and engineers — particularly on the Ph.D. track.I think the shortage the Roundtable is talking about is the shortage of scientists and engineers willing to work full-time for $20,000. But perhaps I am being too hard on them.
*I occasionally thought about having a copy of mine reduced to business card size, so I could stick it in my wallet, and at the appropriate point in some barroom argument I could whip it out and say, "Well, I have a Ph.D. in science, and I think...." but I never got around to it.
Thug, meet free man. I'm sure you've already seen these videos linked elsewhere, but Ezra Levant's tanglings with Alberta's "human rights commission" star chamber dusted up my shopworn, cynical soul and gave me a little hope for the future. To paraphrase the lot so far: "I am a free man, and you are a thug". If your imagination holds only menacing, muscled young males in your "thug" visualization slot, please go view the videos to expand it. You'll see, you'll see what I mean. (Is there some evidence on the face of the bored mid-level bureaucratic thug that she dimly intuits that she's not in Kansas anymore? No, I'm sure that's wishful thinking on my part.) Start here for the first video and work your way up from that on the main page. Or just start at the bottom of the main page for background. He'll be posting more.
Hell in a handbasket, part 56,278. I was at the gym this afternoon, and as I was just doing a quick warm-up on the elliptical machine, hadn't brought my earphones. Thus I had only the video when I punched on the machine's little tv. A Fox news channel appeared, with some talking head apparently discussing the South Carolina primaries. The caption read:
"Will voters take democracy into their own hands?"
Come now Fox News. OK, some of us do grouse quietly about our "rights" and stuff now and again, but surely we would never get that uppity.
Upgrading the presidential software. I pay a bit of attention to Ralph Grabowski's CAD Industry blog, and so learned about his torrid ongoing hate affair with Microsoft Windows Vista. Makes me gladder than ever to be a Linux/BSD guy, personally....
A thought occurs – Hillary Clinton is the Windows Vista of presidential candidates. Think about it: both in the works for years, both presumed inevitable and unstoppable, and both remarkably unable to dent the marketplace.
UPDATE. Yet another beautiful analogy bites the dust. Oh, well... at least Edwards came in third.
...and the queen ate Snow White's liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti...
Meanwhile, back in high school, the Ranting Spawn prepares to rip the lid off the seamy underbelly of the Brothers Grimm.
"[Obama] is not the Word made flesh...
but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair."Gee, Mr. Klein, show a little more enthusiasm there, ok? But thanks for clearing up the Obama-vs.-Jesus confusion.
UPDATE: Dissention in Klein's comments: Not the Messiah, but a bodhisattva.
A-caucusing we will go (wherein I fail in my task). So, enacting my Edwards-thwarting plans, I headed to our local Democratic caucus site. Along with hundreds of other people, I jammed into the local high school... and not a moment too soon; I didn't realize that the caucuses not only started at 7pm sharp, they don't let anyone in after 7pm either. I was the 5th-last person in.
I joined a long line of independents waiting to change party registration. I am now a Democrat (it burns! it burns!). After undergoing the transformative operation, we joined another line, which terminated in a seated group of the elderly people who always seem to run all things electoral, waiting behind a folding metal table. I signed my name and was given a small, blank square of paper. "Hang on to that!" I was told. (We never did anything with them.) We filed in little groups into the school's auditorium – which was packed, standing room only.
The first order of business was to get an exact count of caucus-elegible people in the room (there were a number of little kids running around – I assume they didn't get counted). The whole business was run by three elderly women, who had each row stand up in succession and count off from one end to the other: "One hundred thirty! One hundred thirty-one!" Every so often someone would mess up the count; the women in charge would roll their eyes – Can't you people count? – and pause until the counter got the number right. There were 625 of us – a record-large crowd, apparently. The bizarre rules of the game stipulate that a candidate needs to get 15% of the crowd to be considered viable; less than that, and the candidate's supporters either leave or join up with a more popular candidate. So there was a momentary hush as the women on stage calculated 15% of 625 (94, rounded). Any candidate unable to drum up 94 supporters was doomed.
So now we did the famous shuffle: all the supporters of a given candidate gathered in some part of the auditorium, but it was so full that moving around was difficult. The Biden supporters had to meet out in the hall; Richardson's, Dodd's, and Kucinich's groups met up on stage. It was a festive, party atmosphere; Kucinich had all of 6 supporters, but they got a huge round of applause just for not giving up immediately. Two things were immediately obvious; (1) Obama had more support than anyone, and (2) the only contest was going to be between Clinton and Edwards for second place. After the first round of totting up supporters, it was clear that everyone besides Obama, Clinton, and Edwards was doomed.
So now came the second part of the festivities; people from the larger groups would wander over to the too-small groups, and try to talk their members into joining one of the larger groups. Obviously, I was no use in this... "Uhh, vote for Hillary because she's... well, she's not John Edwards. Yeah, that's it." Everytime someone split off and joined another group, the people in the joined group would cheer and clap wildly. During this time, I thought about the caucus system, and decided that it was probably constructed by a bunch of bored farmers who just needed something to do in the wintertime. They could have just had a straight up and down ballot, but instead, decided to construct an elaborate social event out of the process... because it is intensely social, friends, neighbors, their kids, all gathering for a big gabfest and talking, talking, talking.
For about half an hour, the doomed candidate's groups gradually shrank (except for Richardson's group – they stood in a tight block on stage, radiating a what-are-you-gonna-do-for-us vibe). Those of us without the enthusiasm to go and evangelize for our candidate sat and waited; the woman next to me alternately checked her Blackberry and her cell phone. I saw two co-workers and my next door neighbor over in the Edwards group.
Eventually, the coordinators called time, and said that all the non-viable candidate supporters had to make up their minds; the Richardson group now split, streaming people into the Clinton and Edwards groups mainly. It was time to do a second head count. From my counting, it was clear that Obama had a commanding lead, and that it was going to be a squeaker between Clinton and Edwards... 260 for Obama... 174 for Clinton... no, 177 for Clinton, they forgot the three women on stage... and 180 for Edwards. The Obama and Edwards groups went wild. The Clinton group sat quietly. The woman next to me looked up from her Blackberry, said, "Edwards??", and made a sour face.
My favorite color? Blue. No, yellooooooo....! Ok, so two days ago I said there was no way I'd put up with the Democratic caucus dog'n'pony show. But since then, I've been thinking – what outcome from the Iowa caucus really concerns me? On the Republican side, it's going to be Romney or Huckabee; I'm unenthused about the outcome, no matter what it is, and I don't consider either Mitt nor Huck to be noticably better than the other. I could be one of Giuliani's twenty or thirty Iowa votes, but that seems like kind of a waste, as it's pretty clear that even Giuliani doesn't care if anyone in Iowa votes for him. So my impact on the Republican side of things is negligible, even from the symbolic standpoint.
But on the Democratic side, there is one outcome that I really don't want; I really don't want Edwards to win, or even come in second, if possible. And the race is looking very tight. If I woke up Friday morning and the blowdried pseudopopulist comes in better than third, I will hang my head in shame knowing that I didn't do my little electoral bit to stave it off. So, despite the drawn-out idiocy of the Democratic caucus process, I think that I may have to go, after all, just to try to prevent that outcome.
Whom to vote for? Obviously, it has to be either Clinton or Obama. It's not much of a choice; I don't care for either one, any more than I care for... Romney or Huckabee. But given the choice, I'm thinking of going for age and guile over youth and hope – so Clinton it is. Maybe. Until I change my mind again. Twenty-one hours to go!
