S/FJ

NOT SO ANGRY WHITE MEN

Courtesy of Gord Fynes, a gesture I find touching and also a little maddening. Like, shouldn't someone hang themselves? I mean, be really, really sorry, if sorry is what they are? I am not, for the record, sorry. I don't experience this as in any way my fault. This may be a coping mechanism of another kind, I understand.

Ben kindly sends another Peel story from the Guardian. It is a long and very good rendering of Peel's rhythms and priorities. I am not getting tired of these. Send more, please. And also more of this kind of thing—a public intellectual who isn't retreating into either accomodationism or "it's all fucked" disengagement.

A lawyer friend in Maine, Richard Olson, sent this email last week. It is a variation on the newly-popular theme of "You thought you stuck it to us East Coast poodle-walkers, but you really just fucked yr neighbor," also known as "Reagan 84":

"Sadly, we, as white, straight, East Coast property-owning, child-having, non-abortion-needing, well-insured, 401K-owning, dividend-receiving, high-income-earning, past draft age people will probably have a pretty good four years in all material ways. Bush's base, the people who elected him (some of my poorer and pro bono clients), particularly the ones in the south, west and mountain states, will be having their retirement squandered and mortgaged, their budgets broken by uninsured medical expenses, their jobs outsourced and exported, their kids' educations compromised, more of their budget spent on gas, oil, electricity, their kids drafted or forced by economics into an ever more dangerous military while ours get deferments or spend time overseas, their parents losing their homes, their home values declining, their water and air poisoned. So let them eat their values amidst the chimera of a "war leader" who cannot shoot straight. Meanwhile, we'll get richer relative to them and next summer we'll be sitting on the deck of some waterfront restaurant sipping cocktails talking about the next Michael Moore movie. Our European friends will offer us tea and sympathy. The Republicans will have enough rope to hang themselves. The Tom Delay revelations are the tip of a massive corruption iceberg like the cancer on the Nixon presidency. I see this like 1972. I love the country too much to hope for disaster, but their could be a seismic shift in the midterms when people wake up with a huge Bush hangover. By then a Howard Dean-esque or Jennifer Granholm-esque candidate will be looking pretty good across the country."

Posted by Sasha at November 8, 2004 10:21 AM | TrackBack