"I said, 'Be careful that old man is really a commie...'"

Said SteveR in the comments to yesterday's post about the very effective Bernie Sanders ad that uses the brilliant Simon & Garfunkel song "America." The ad only uses the first verse:

Let us be lovers,
We'll marry our fortunes together.
I've got some real estate
Here in my bag.

It's funny, because you can't have real estate in your bag, so the speaker is either a huckster — not a good image for a politician — or, most likely, a poor guy comically conveying the fact that he's got nothing, so his offer to "marry fortunes" is, we realize, early on, nothing but the proposed love. The lyrics have to stop there because the next line is "So we bought a pack of cigarettes," and no one's going to be smoking in a political ad. But if we were to keep going, we learn that the man is on the bus with his girlfriend, Kathy, and to pass the time they are "playing games with the faces"...

She said the man in the gabardine suit
Was a spy.
I said, "Be careful,
His bow tie is really a camera."

Hence SteveR's "I said, 'Be careful that old man is really a commie...'"

If we go on with the song we get to the most evocative lines:

"Kathy, I'm lost", I said,
Though I knew she was sleeping.
"I'm empty and aching and
I don't know why."

In the comments, Meade quotes that and adds:

Then Kathy woke up and looked out the window.
Alarmed when she realized where we were.
"Art" she said,
Though she knew my name is Simon.
"We're somewhere near Greece!
Why didn't you wake me up?
We should never have made that left turn back there.
We need to make America great again!"

Mrs Whatsit drew attention to the same "Kathy, I'm lost" passage:

That song is an awful choice for a political campaign. It's not about hope and promise. It's about looking for America and not finding it.

The lovers hop on the bus hopefully enough, but by the end they're out of cigarettes and out of things to talk about, and she's flipping through a magazine rather than looking out the window at the country rolling by. Last verse:

Cathy, I'm lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and I'm aching and I don't know why
Countin' the cars on the New Jersey turnpike
They've all come to look for America, all come to look for America

A sad, superannuated song for a sad, superannuated candidate.

Ah, but that's why I like it. There's this deep feeling we have about America. It makes sense to speak of looking for it, longing for it. Obviously, we are right here in America, so what's to look for? But that obviousness is obtuse. We understand the idea of looking for America, finding the real, more essential, more beautiful America, the America that fulfills our dreams and lives up to our ideals. Donald Trump says "Make America great again," as if there's one America and sometimes it's good and it can go bad and it can become great again. But another, more poetic way to put that would be "Make America America again" or "We'll find our way back to America."  I don't recommend that as a slogan for Trump. Too easy to call him reactionary and racist. But you see my point: Americans understand the idea of searching for America: We've all come to look for America.

Now, bagoh20 said, referring to the point in the ad when we see lots of faces in tiny squares:

Oh man, the dinosaurs are swooning. Lets all do a little more Baby Boomer damage before we go. If you want socialism, you specifically, and adamantly don't want America, but there are many places to go join the Borg - the huge cube of faces, all equally too small to see, drab, helpless and dependent. Please leave us individuals a home on this planet not ruined by guilt, fear, and sloth.

I said, Be careful that old man is really a commie....

"I am continually shocked and dismayed by the nearly Victorian notions promulgated by today’s feminists about the fragility of women and their naïve helplessness..."

"... in asserting control over their own dating lives. Female undergraduates incapable of negotiating the oafish pleasures and perils of campus fraternity parties are hardly prepared to win leadership positions in business or government in the future.... ‘Rape culture’ is a ridiculous term – mere gassy propaganda, too rankly bloated to critique. Anyone who sees sex so simplistically has very little sense of world history, anthropology or basic psychology. I feel very sorry for women who have been seduced by this hyper-politicised, victim-centered rhetoric, because in clinging to such superficial, inflammatory phrases, they have renounced their own power and agency. ... ‘Yes means Yes’ laws are drearily puritanical and literalistic as well as hopelessly totalitarian. Their increasing popularity simply demonstrates how boring and meaningless sex has become.... [T]oo many young feminists want their safety, security and happiness guaranteed in advance by all-seeing, all-enveloping bureaucracies... "

Said Camille Paglia in a really interesting interview.

And this is especially important — for men and women, even though it starts out referring only to women:

Women must find a way to develop their full potential in the professional world without also disrupting and draining their private lives. The corporate business model invented in northern Europe after the Industrial Revolution is hyper-efficient but also vampiric. Too many people, both men and women, have foolishly conflated their personal identities with their jobs. It’s a bourgeois trap and a distortion of the ultimate meaning of life.

IN THE COMMENTS: Mrs Whatsit said"

Oh Camille. She's brilliant and maddening and the older I get, the more I agree with her. But sooner or later she always ends up contradicting herself in spectacular fashion. Here, for instance, first she spends hundreds of impassioned words pleading with young women not to cede their freedom and agency to paternalistic institutional authorities like universities and the government in exchange for the delusion of perfect safety. Then she gets to her ringing conclusion.

"I want universities to create more flexible, extended-study options for young women who choose to have earlier (and thus safer) pregnancies, and I want more public and private resources devoted to childcare facilities for working parents of every social class. Finally, I call for the investigation and reform of the current systemic exploitation of working-class women (many of them black or Latina immigrants) who have become the invisible new servant class for affluent white women leaving childcare to others as they pursue their feminist professional dreams."

In which Paglia first calls for protective, paternalistic solutions to women's problems from institutional authorities, and then for taking away the freedom and agency of women who choose to work or hire each other to work as nannies. Investigate them! Reform them! God forbid that women work together to come up with their own market-based solution to a societal problem. Women shouldn't be free to work as nannies if the government didn't hire them! Women shouldn't be free to hire nannies if the government isn't paying them! Only the government should be solving women's problems!

What? Inconsistent? Who, me?

Hendrik Hertzberg says he didn't call Rush Limbaugh a racist...

... even as he calls me an "'ax' murderer." In the pages of The New Yorker! No, not the "the great magazine itself, where space is too valuable to expend on close analyses of radiocon conneries." On a virtual page of newyorker.com.  To be fair, I was really mean to him. You can decide for yourself whether he's unwedged the ax from his noggin.

I could have pointed out that there is a meaningful difference between saying something (unintentionally) offensive about Obama in a private conversation in the context of supporting him (Reid) and saying something (unintentionally) offensive about Obama on television in the context of running against him (Biden). I could have explained that there is a much bigger difference between either of those and saying something (intentionally) offensive about Obama in the context of demonizing him as a cynical manipulator of racial division (Limbaugh). I could have noted that Limbaugh’s use of Reid’s private gaffe was more, not less, disingenuous than his use of Biden’s public one. And I could have pointed out that his use of both was a characteristically clever (and disingenuous) way of giving himself cover for his own unsubtle (and habitual) racial ridicule.

What's with that argument in the form of saying what he could have argued? If I were going to respond to that I would (intentionally, unintentionally, habitually, disingenously) say....

IN THE COMMENTS: Balfegor said:

I'm not sure how saying offensive and/or racist things unintentionally is better than saying them intentionally. If you say them intentionally, there's an element of artifice involved, and the possibility of conscious ironic distance. Doesn't unintentionality suggest someone unwittingly offering us a glimpse into his messy inner self?

DADvocate said:

The person making the (unintentional) racially offensive remarks stands as the greater racist because their racist thinking is ingrained in their psyche. Accusing Obama of being a "cynical manipulator of racial division" isn't a racist remark at all whether or not you find it offensive.

mrs whatsit said:

Let me see if I have this straight.

All this fuss is about what Hertzberg said about what Althouse said about what Hertzberg said about what Limbaugh said about what Reid said about Obama.

Oh, and also what Hertzberg said about what Althouse said about what Hertzberg said about what Biden said about Obama.

Oh cripes, and also about what Liberman said about what Althouse said about what Hertzberg said about what Limbaugh said about what Reid said about Obama, and about what Hertzberg said about what Althouse said about what Hertzberg said about what Biden said about Obama.

It's a vortex!!!

After all that, why didn't Doug Hoffman win?

That's the first question of the morning. I think it must be resolved before we can move on to the big question: What do the Election 2009 results mean for Obama (and the congressional Democrats)?

Here's something mrs whatsit wrote in the comments to last night's election post. (I found the photos to illustrate her painful observations about the appearance of the 2 men, and I corrected her misspelling of "Scozzafava.")

A few points about the Congressional race from someone who lives in upstate NY (not in district 23, but nearby.)

1) We have been inundated with TV commercials here. On TV, Hoffman comes across as exceedingly weird, skinny and overeager with googly eyes, bright yellow teeth, and an odd, halting way of speaking.



He kept repeating a slogan that he was a common-sense Reagan conservative and common sense isn't so common any more. It got annoying.

Owens, by contrast, is big and rugged-looking. He's an Air Force veteran and he has that military solidity, calm and self-possession.



He seems like a country guy, and this is a rural district. He presented himself as a centrist. On the human level, Owens is the kind of person voters around here feel comfortable with. Hoffman's not. Neither was Scozzafava.

2) On the numbers -- as of this morning, with 93 percent of the vote counted, the math-challenged local newspaper is reporting that the split is 46 percent Hoffman, 49 percent Owens, and 6 percent Scozzafava, who was still on the ballot, not having quit until Saturday. (Adds up to 101 percent, but who's counting?) In any event, Scozzafava's vote is bigger than the split, which seems to put most attempts to diagnose the Owens/Hoffman outcome into guesswork territory.

Owens came across as to the right of Ms. Scozzafava, whose ads emphasized her support for such lefty favorites as card check. Hoffman, by contrast, seemed to belong pretty far over on the right. Upstate NY has traditionally been rock-ribbed Republican but has been trending Democratic recently, with the result that Blue Dog Democrats and other center-tending politicos have been doing well. I don't think the Owens win has as much to do with the candidates' political parties, though, as it does with who they are personally and with their ad presentations.