An Apology or at least a Clarification

Yesterday’s piece generated a few comments. I thought a follow up useful.

Meaning is an elusive thing, and curiously, since I draw and paint, and am very much aware of how far a finished work may be from whatever was intended, still I find that meaning presents itself as more ambiguous in writing than in the visual arts, where we can be satisfied with the sense that a work is mere decoration. But with words, we are tempted to interpret them as an expression of the writers thoughts – as we read, we continue to ask what he or she means. Each reader pulls together his own meaning. For a lapsed catholic like myself who witnessed the Latin Mass before Vatican II pulled down the ancient order (actually not so old, dating from 1570, so pretty recent in Catholic reckoning) when I first read Joyce’s Ulysses, the meaning of Buck Mulligan’s placing of a razor across a shaving bowl and uttering “Introibo ad altare Dei” was obvious – a profanation of sacred liturgy. It was funny too. It helped that I had seen my father use a straight razor with what he called a shaving mug – not Joyce’s bowl. My son was not raised catholic or in fact in any religion, so when he studied Ulysses in college, the meaning of the opening lines was obscure. So too were the accoutrements of shaving from the era before the invention of the safety razor.

So, time to elaborate, but just a bit, on what I meant. I’ll start with Brian’s comments. The chip on America’s shoulder was meant only about the unwillingness of conservatives to acknowledge America’s imperfections.  You would think that our amazing success and power would grant us a more generous spirit.  It hasn’t.

From Carter to Obama, Democrats have been willing to admit to our faults. That may annoy conservatives, but once you become a great nation, you should be able to confront the flaws too. But modern conservatives have become an embarrassing bunch of flag wavers.

My comment about how artists have a tolerance for ambiguity was solely about how artists don’t always go from A to B. After all, Italian futurists supported the fascists, and French painters accepted the Vichy government with equanimity. Sorry, didn’t mean to aggrandize the artistic temperament.

Wayne Whitman’s comments are more a concern to me, and since I don’t know him, I’m never entirely sure which is irony and which straight up comment.

His comments were a reaction to my defining Republican voters as stupid, and smart voters as Democrats. But what if they are? (Ok that’s just rhetoric – but what if it is true that demographically, Republicans are getting their votes from those less educated, as long as they are white? and what if Democrats get their votes from those who have the advantages of money and education? – ok, for Democrats, I mean their white voters!)

With the exception of military officers who skew Republican and conservative, polls that track voting by profession or education suggest that the higher the education, the more likely it is that the voter will vote for a Democratic candidate. So medical doctors, lawyers, PhDs of all sorts as well as corporate managers and officers are more likely to vote for a Democratic candidate. In the wealthy suburbs that surround most large cities, those suburbs typically elect Democratic candidates. It’s not an absolute, but it is “generally” true. So there may be a subset or two of the educated classes who skew Republican (perhaps petroleum engineers) but the data is not easy to find.

This trend that started during the Reagan era, but was speeded up by Dick Cheney who, early after the election of the shrub, assembled a group of moderates (like NJ Congresswoman Marge Roukema) and told them that they would not be getting choice committee assignments or pretty much anything, and that they would best go off and fuck themselves. She elected to retire. Cheney’s attack, coupled with the growing importance of Conservative groups willing to use their out of town money to defeat moderates in primary elections has destroyed what was once a solidly moderate Republican backbone from NJ through Maine. NJ has only five Republicans in a delegation of 15, and I believe there are none in New England.

So, yes, I remain a Republican, as disappointed by the party as conservatives were with the liberal glamour boys who were popular in the mid 1960s (remember Chuck Percy and John Lindsey)?

What are my key Republican indicators? Well, mine are the tried and true ones:

• America’s wealth comes from private commerce
• We should only spend what we raise in revenue (with exceptions for wars and depression)
• Affirmative action is troubling
• Diversity has led to a curious political correctness that does not benefit the poor
• Environmental controls should be tweaked to make manufacturing, mining, and oil and gas drilling possible

But, let’s add what moderates know and the current crop of conservatives deny:

• America’s wealth comes from private commerce
But large corporations now dominate business and have an inordinate influence over policy and politics – this is not conducive to democracy, but to plutocracy. As an economy, we do better with some regulation over business processes, whether the regulations make banking less risky, or manufacturing less dangerous.
• We should only spend what we raise in revenue (with exceptions for wars and depression)
Conservatives love to talk about lowering expenses, but sometimes you need to raise revenue, and the word revenue is taxes. The estate tax that was mostly eliminated by the Bush agenda was the one tax that raised revenue without a serious impact upon consumption. And it is consumption that yields prosperity, not isolated wealth.
• People are by and large personally responsible for their own success or failure
The construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950 and 60s created a bounty of cheap land that became available for new enterprise and new housing. Sadly, this new land was almost entirely occupied by middle and upper class whites with cars and access to credit. The new jobs also went to whites by and large – middle class ones taking the professional jobs and poor whites from the collapsed agricultural communities taking the lower paid jobs. The urban aged and poor were left behind. In the cities, poor blacks from the South move up north to avail themselves of cheap apartments and somewhat better conditions than in the agricultural South. Thus we ended up with ghettos of isolated people who had no access to the new jobs that could only be gotten to by car – and who were not culturally prepared for the different needs of urban life.
• Diversity has led to a curious political correctness that does not benefit the poor
Diversity has its up-side. If we see how ethnic states in Europe have handled the integration of outsiders (mostly Muslims and many from the former colonies) we can see that, as hard as the diversity verbiage is to listen to, in fact, it may have helped prevent our more recent non white immigrants from being as isolated from American culture are Muslims are in Holland, France, Germany et al.
• Environmental controls should be tweaked to make manufacturing, mining, and oil and gas drilling possible
They should be tweaked but not abandoned. Before the EPA, the air in many of our downtowns was full of car, truck and bus exhaust, and our rivers smelled of sewage. The air is much improved, as are the rivers (though my beloved Passaic River below Paterson remains a troubled waterway). I favor nuclear power, and maybe some offshore drilling, but not in Alaska where frigid conditions compound the difficulties of working there. And I am especially worried about the way gas is extracted by fracturing rock underground. There have been many reports of groundwater contamination across the mountain west. And once groundwater is contaminated, its not easy to reverse it.

The conservative forces in the GOP seem unable to allow for the nuances. They prefer to scream drill baby drill, when what might be better is to develop genuine compromise positions. Of course, the democrats are not much better – but having been beaten down in the 1980s and after, they have allowed their moderates to remain.

Oh, one last thing, I don’t say, as Brian does, that party in not important.  I wish that were true, but partisanship – and in the US and ossified 2 party structure, remains the mechanism for political actions.    That’s just one more problems with our sad excuse for a functioning democracy.