A Story

Martin and his friends began to build a house. Years ago, others had poured the foundation, but the town in which they lived refused to allow completion of the home. Martin and his friends decided to build it anyway. Officials from the town arrested Martin more than once and threatened him and his friends. But they kept building, brick by brick, board by board, nail by nail. And the house began to take shape.

The town's opposition to the house became hysterical. People from the town carried out many of their threats, often beating and sometimes murdering builders. But Martin and his friends kept building. If you can have a house, Martin explained, so can we. In fact, the safety of your house depends on us being able to build ours. And you can hit us as hard as you want. We won't stop building, even to hit back. Especially to hit back, for that is what you want us to do. And Martin drove another nail into another board.

That night, people from the town murdered one of Martin's friends.

John from the county stopped by. He had heard about the house but hadn't thought too much about it until Martin's friend was killed. He looked at the house and turned to the town. If you can have a house, they can have a house, John said. It's only fair. The town screamed at John. You're from another part of the county. We do things our own way in this town. Martin's friends were happy to live without a roof over their heads until he came along. John looked back at them. Fair is fair, he said.

Martin and his friends kept building.

A few weeks later, Lyndon from the county stopped by the house. John was gone, he explained, but Lyndon agreed with John that fair was fair. Keep building the house, Lyndon told Martin. I'll take care of the county. And Lyndon was as good as his word: Despite the opposition of the town and a county official name Strom who said he would stop the county from doing anything at all if it helped Martin, building permits flowed and zoning restrictions eased.

Martin and his friends kept building.

As the house neared completion, Lyndon found that he needed help from Everett to get one last permit. Everett grumbled about helping. Were it up to him, there would be no house. But it was almost built and people were watching. They thought that fair was fair, too.

Everett agreed to issue the permit, but only if the house wasn't built quite as high as Martin and Lyndon wanted. To get the permit, Lyndon agreed to Everett's terms. Martin wasn't happy about this, but decided that he could add on to the house another day.

Martin and his friends finished that house, and Martin began work on another one in another town.

Years and years later, the house still stood, even if it needed new paint and a new roof. The descendants of Strom and Everett gazed upon it proudly. They didn't see the rotting timbers or the dilapidated porch or the holes in the roof. This house, they said, is as good as ever. It's as sturdy as the day that Strom and Everett built it. It is a shame, they said, that Strom and Everett do not get credit for building this house.

Martin and his friends should be more grateful to Strom and Everett, said Everett's descendants. What, after all, would they have done had Strom and Everett not given them a place to live?

You're right, said Strom's descendants. The history books give all the credit to Martin and Lyndon when it was really Strom and Everett who built the house. We have an idea.

What's your idea?, asked Everett's children.

Let's change history, said Strom's children. So that people will know who really built the house.

And they did...

Bob Herbert reminds us (and Dean Broder) of the real John Boner...

The great E. J. Dionne writes that Democratic candidates are using the new health care bill as a centerpiece of their campaigns...

Paul Krugman on Fox News, the Republican party, and Citizen Kane...

New Glasses

Citizen K. paid an overdue and uninsured visit to the optician yesterday and discovered that he is in dire need of a new prescription. Which explains why he hasn't been reading much lately and probably why the quality of his blog entries has lagged. Hopefully in a couple of weeks, the miracles of modern optometry will work their magic on my fading vision and I'll be back to normal.

Whatever that is. I must say that having a wife to give thumbs up or down to the frame selection process makes it go quickly. I mean, Premium T. is the one who has to look at me more than anyone else, so I'm not about to buy something she doesn't like. We settled on a fresh look in short order, setting up the possibility of a completely new me. I'll try not to let it go to my head.

The optometrist I see has a strong repeat business and recognizes that his clientele is aging. His selection runs the gamut from "business attire" to age-appropriate with (hopefully) a bit of an edge. At least that's how I see it (or will, once the new prescription arrives). My 22-year old son -- who used to shop there with good results -- found nothing, whereas I still get to winnow down from a half dozen serious options.

Those of you not cursed from birth with poor vision don't grasp what a significant social development frame design has become. Once, one had to hide behind one's spectacles. They optometrist looked you over, waved grandly at his minimal selection, and said, "Here it is, son: Nerd City. And you can live in any house there that you want."

Mercifully, my parents never made me live in the Nerd City slums: The unbreakable plastic black frames that bent and twisted, able to withstand any contortion dreamed up by the puerile, fertile, and febrile imagination of an 8th-grade boy and his friends. (As it turned out, those frames really couldn't be broken, despite some awfully creative efforts to the contrary. Petroleum byproducts are powerful things.) Those frames -- which went handily with buck teeth -- ruined many an otherwise perfectly decent appearance, consigning their victims to a junior high existence without girls, who never seemed to wear the female equivalent.

I was the first kid in my class (circa 1968 or '69) to wear wire frames. In South Texas, I caught no end of grief for adopting the hippie look, especially since I wasn't especially hip: I was just tired of brown plastic frames and wanted something different. My parents sympathized, and so I chose the one pair of non-aviator wire frames for sale by Kingsville's only optometrist. Looking back, they were no doubt hideous, although I did strike a blow for something (still not sure what). A year later, of course, everyone who wore glasses had switched to the wire look. Now, plastics are back in, only this time with some design sensibility. Go figure.

Kids today don't have to put up with that particular bit of teen angst, a consummation I devoutly wished for my own son when he needed glasses even sooner than I did. He's been able to look sharp and fashionable his whole life, whether he knew he was or not. As for me, people often asked why I didn't wear contacts or get Lasik surgery. The answer is simple: I've been waiting my whole life for glasses actually designed to look good on a human face. Now that they're here, do you think I'd miss out on it?

What does a bleeding heart liberal look like? John Hayes says it was his Chief Petty Office father, for one...

Pantheon has published Josh Neufeld's A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, a graphic novel about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the lives of seven characters from all walks of life and parts of the city. More here...

No French, No More...

Froma Harrop makes a case for the obvious: That it's time for the Democrats to go it alone on health care.

Every compromise President Obama offered in the name of bipartisanship was read as a sign of weakness. For Republicans, sticking it to the Democrats trumps doing what's good for the country. The heck with them.

Reforming health care should be both a liberal and conservative mission. Securing medical coverage for all Americans is the liberal part. The conservative part is containing the explosive rise in health-care spending, which fuels government deficits and hurts American business in the global marketplace.

Democrats will have to be both the liberals and the conservatives on health care...

E. J. Dionne writes that there's no place for guns at presidential appearances:

Try a thought experiment: What would conservatives have said if a group of loud, scruffy leftists had brought guns to the public events of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush?

How would our friends on the right have reacted to someone at a Reagan or a Bush speech carrying a sign that read: "It's time to water the tree of liberty"? That would be a reference to Thomas Jefferson's declaration that the tree "must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Pardon me, but I don't think conservatives would have spoken out in defense of the right of every American Marxist to bear arms or to shed the blood of tyrants.

Friday's Choice: Simon & Garfunkel sing "Homeward Bound" in 1966:

What a difference a year makes. From 1967:

The Wind Is In From Africa

Just A Little Green. Paul Krugman writes that President-elect Obama must learn from Franklin Roosevelt's errors as much his successes:

The economic lesson [of the New Deal] is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little...

Put On Some Silver. E. J. Dionne agrees that Obama must ignore the voices that claim America is still a "center-right" nation and act boldy: "Timidity is a far greater danger than overreaching, simply because it's quite easy to be cautious..." I don't think that the United States is defined by its political orientation so much as a preference for solutions, wherever they come from. If Obama and the Democrats get things turned around, the amount of people who describe themselves as "conservative" will drop until only the wingnuts remain...

My Old Man. Monday, Obama meets with John McCain to discuss issues on which they can cooperate. One thing you gotta say about our guy: He doesn't hold a grudge.

Fancy French Cologne. Meanwhile, world leaders have plenty of advice for the President-elect, who plays it cool...

We Don't Need No Piece Of Paper. The entire contents of The New Yorker election issue (see brilliant cover illustration above) are available free on-line. But since you can't display that cover on one of your kitchen cabinets without buying the news stand issue, you might want to pick up a copy of the 20th Century version. Especially worth reading is literary critic James Woods' assessment of Obama's victory speech, which unearths the speech's rhetorical roots in Lincoln and Martin Luther King...

All Romantics Meet The Same Fate Someday...Mark Illa explains how intellectual conservatism in effect turned on itself:

But their [intellectuals] function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them...

...Cynical And Drunk And Boring. Harold Meyerson tells Fox News to keep on doin' what it's doin' -- things are working out just fine:

Your work remains dangerous and disintegrative to the nation. But it is also, more narrowly, tactically, for now, a great gift to liberals and Democrats. You ensure the ongoing Palinization and marginalization -- electorally, the terms are synonymous -- of the Republican Party. And to think that you're doing all this not on the Democratic National Committee's dime but on Rupert Murdoch's...

Blow This Damn Candle Out. "Our aim should not be more government, it should be smarter government." George Bush actually said this. Yesterday. Had he figured that out eight years ago, John McCain might be our next president...

Friday's Choice. Discerning readers of a certain age may have inferred that we've been listening to Blue, Joni Mitchell's 1971 classic. With a nod to John and Cindy, here's Joni singing "My Old Man" at a 1970 BBC session:

Yes We Did!

I'm 53 years old and haven't felt this way -- meaning hopeful and great -- about the new president in my entire life. 

Despite the best early efforts of the talking heads -- even Rachel Maddow! -- to make up a story line that the first ten or so states indicated a long night because none of them had flipped, there was a key sign that 2008 was much different than 2004. Wisconsin, the Badger State, was a nail-biter in 2004, with John Kerry revailing by a hair. Last night, the networks called it almost immediately for Barack Obama.

We sent up the first cheer when Pennsylvania broke our way. McCain had gone all in in the Keystone State, and it was hard to see how he could win without it unless he ran the table of Ohio, Virginia, and Florida. When NBC called Ohio for Obama, the champagne began to flow. When his electoral count passed 200 before the West Coast polls closed, we knew it was over: Anyone who lives out here knew that Washington, Oregon, and California (73 EV) were mortal locks. What we didn't expect were all three states being called the second polls closed at 8:00 Pacific time.

Hugs and cheers! Now it was time for the Veuve Cliquot! And we -- friends, neighbors, and family -- drank deeply and with great satisfaction...

Hubert Locke, great-grandson of slaves and University of Washington professor emeritus, writes movingly of the impact of Obama's victory in the form of a letter to his dead parents:

You would be particularly proud, Papa, of the fact that President Obama stands in the grand tradition and will take up the mantle of other cherished men of color -- Gandhi, Mandela, King -- who have shown the world what great leadership truly is. It is, I think, one of the surprises of history -- that hardship and oppression can produce leaders of enormous vision and immense compassion. Our new president's parents and grandparents, and the places where he was raised, all give him that wider perspective on the world in which we are so desperately in need...

E. J. Dionne says that it is time to hope again:

Above all, it is time to celebrate the country's wholehearted embrace of democracy, reflected in the intense engagement of Americans in this campaign and the outpouring to the polls all over the nation. For years, we have spoken of bringing free elections to the rest of the world even as we cynically mocked our own ways of conducting politics. Yesterday, we chose to practice what we have been preaching...

Don't miss David Horsey's wonderful drawing here...

The New York Times and Washington Post have good campaign overviews here and here. It's irrelevant now, but the papers offer curiously differing accounts of the Obama camp's response to addition of Sarah Palin to the Republican ticket. According to the Times the campaign was caught flat-footed, while the Post says that from the beginning it looked at the choice as an unexpected gift. Both agree that the contest against Hillary Clinton created a juggernaut and that Obama's calm response to the financial crisis was the turning point of the general election...

I don't know who this beautiful little girl is, but she pretty much speaks for me and millions more. The river is waiting, come rise up...

Come On Up For The Rising!

This is driving me nuts! Will the American people do the right thing, the necessary thing, and elect Barack Obama president tomorrow? Or will we shrink from our responsibility and vote in an aging war hero with no real grasp of the problems facing the country, much less what to do about them. All signs point to the former, but as a Red Sox fan and a Democrat, I won't be convinced until Obama takes the oath of office. And even then...

The Monday before the elections of 2000 and 2004 found me pessimistic. In 2000, I figured the election would come down to Florida and Ohio, and didn't like our chances in either. That night, when one of the networks actually called Florida for Al Gore, I began channel surfing to see if any of the others had. One of my kids asked me what I thought; I told him that if Gore had won Florida, I didn't see how he could lose. But I also told him that I didn't believe Florida yet. In the event, of course, Gore did win Florida only to be cheated out of it. A little remembered postscript from the 2000 election is that had Gore won New Hampshire, he would have survived the loss of Florida. I mention the Granite State result in particular because Bill Clinton won it twice and because Nader proved to be the difference there. Gore also lost Arkansas -- and I'll always think Clinton could have made a difference there had Gore asked him to intervene -- and his home state of Tennessee.

I never felt good about 2004, despite Bush's unpopularity and the failures in Iraq. John Kerry ran an uninspired campaign and never offered a viable alternative to Bush's conduct of the war. Kerry would not commit to ending it, instead flourishing a fig leaf about "getting the allies involved." He never explained why the allies would want to get involved in a mess that they had opposed since the beginning. I also wrote off Florida; it was obvious that Jeb Bush wasn't about to let his brother lose there. Kerry never seriously contested the Sunshine State anyway. Instead, he bet his chips on Ohio, which at the time was owned and operated by the Republican party. We know how that went.

But Barack Obama has run a completely different campaign. He's eschewed the 50% + 1 strategy that plays into Republican hands. He's organized a formidable ground game based on the assumption that it can attract enough new and first-time voters to put a number of red states in play. There's a risk inherent in that, but on the other hand the potential reward is a mandate-level win. I've always wondered what would happen if the Democrats gave up their addiction to TV ads and returned to their core strength of getting out the vote. We're about to find out, and as of this moment things look pretty damn good...

In one of the few times he's ever been a warm-up act, Bruce Springsteen opened for Obama before a crowd of 80,000 in Columbus, Ohio. "So I don't know about you, but I want my country back, I want my dream back, I want my America back," said the Boss. He went on to say that

"I have spent my life as a musician measuring the distance between the American dream and reality.

"I look around and I see people who are losing their jobs or their retirement incomes or don't have health care. The distance between that dream and reality has grown greater and more painful than ever.

"I believe Senator Obama has taken a measure of that distance in his own life and in his own work. I believe he understands in his heart the cost of that distance in blood and suffering in the lives of Americans."

Speaking of suffering Americans, don't miss a new blog called Caterpillars And Butterflies, about the daily experiences of a nurse in an inner city health clinic. From her most recent entry:

I talk to a patient on the phone and she yells at me. I tell her if she doesn't stop yelling at me I will need to hang up the phone. She says, "I'm not yelling. Believe me, you'd know if I was yelling". I tell her I think she is yelling at me and she needs to stop. She calms down, and proceeds to tell me she will be at the clinic in a few minutes and has to be seen right away. I tell her there may be a 2 hour wait because she doesn't have an appointment. She hangs the phone up on me and comes to the clinic anyway. I bring her back to a clinic room and do my assessment. Her lip is swollen and she thinks she was bitten by a spider. She spent the last two nights in an abandoned van. She's African American. She has fake two inch purple fingernails. She tells me she must be out of the clinic in 20 minutes because she needs to pick up her 8 year old son who will be waiting for her outside the YMCA. I beg one of our doctors to see her ahead of other patients because her son will think he was abandoned. They are homeless.

If you haven't yet heard Sarah Palin get punked, here's your chance. How anyone could believe that it's the President of France on the line is beyond me. Much of it is excruciating. She actually listens seriously when told that the French equivalent of Joe The Plumber is Marcel With Bread Under His Armpits...

Win or lose tomorrow, Paul Krugman thinks that the Republicans are in for an internal Reign of Terror, led by the anti-intellectual know-nothings...

Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By says that we are at a turning at that we know it: "I sense something new in the zeitgeist, a seriousness and urgency among the people. After eight years of the disastrous administration of George W. Bush that has bankrupted the country, killed thousands of our young people, decimated the military, transferred billions of dollars in wealth to corporations and one percent of the populace while impoverishing the middle class and gutting the Constitution, we are at a turning point."

E. J. Dionne writes that Obama is not just a good politician, he's a great one: "By creating a new social movement, new forms of political organization, and a sense of excitement and possibility not felt in politics for three decades, he bids to become one of the country's most consequential leaders."

Foxessa writes an insightful critique of Air America from the left. Despite misgivings about its current direction, she points out that "...the rank-and-file Air America crew has worked tirelessly and enthusiastically since its inception during the darkest days of the regime that seemed to be permenently installed as the single oligarchical ruling class, as the neoCONs blithely, publicly, declared was the Goal."

Hendrik Hetrtzberg likes W.: "These characters are cartoonish, but in a good way. They're political cartoons, not Disney cartoons (though there's a touch of Chuck Jones in the antics of Cheney and Rice). he movie reminded me that I learned a lot about the politics of the 1940s from David Low and the 1950s from Herblock."

Quote of the Day: "McCain is a gifted comedian, with perfect delivery skills..." From a comment on the blog Draft Sarah Palin For Vice President. I kid you not.