Late Night Listening with the Bobby Fuller Four

Just because.

Later,

The Village Discovers Americans are Pretty Ticked

Dem operative Doug Sosnik has written a narrative that his publisher, Politico, is heralding as a must-read.

Ahem.

Mr. Sosnik’s thesis, compleate with charts, is that Americans are really angry and disappointed in government and their institutions generally. I’m sure this comes a quite a surprise to many.

Snark aside, this has been said many times before, and not just in recent years. The Tea Party didn’t patent outrage. He asserts that “An emerging movement in our country is calling for change to the status quo and to the leadership class.” He cites the usual polls and other data about how fed up Americans are with Congress, etc.

The guy has some laudable (from my perspective) thoughts, particularly his recognition of the central issue of economic inequality. However, if you get right down to it, Americans for the most part don’t want “change” as much as they want a return to a status quo that existed 50 years ago. They’re tired of the yelling and screaming, it’s true, and they’re justifiably pissed off that the people who wrecked the economy, destroying their jobs and futures, got off more than scott-free; they’re even richer than they were before.

But people are equally as angry and afraid that the economic security they enjoyed for several decades (yes, you can thank unions for that) is disappearing. They want “change” only to the extent that someone can come in a make everything right, the way it used to be.

Some Americans want “change” in recognition of the huge demographic and social upheaval that’s going on. In 30 years or fewer, we’ll be a white-minority nation, and the implications of that, down the road, are profound, and to some, terrifying. But most people want a job, a home, some money left over for vacations and a few nice things, as well as college for the kids, health care they can afford, and a secure retirement.

To be crude: they’re tired of getting fucked over.

One other point: Sosnik repeats the center-right/D.C. Establishment talking point that this is a center-right country. I distrust polls relying on people’s self-identification without more information about what they believe. Polling also shows Americans support a whole lot of the Progressive agenda.

Read the thing and see what you think. My overall reaction is, “where you been, Dude?”

Later,

Wouldn’t be Thanksgiving Without “Alice’s Restaurant”

Love and Peace.

Later,

James Marshall Hendrix, November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970

Thank you, sir.

Later,

November 27th, 1967 – Beatles Release “Magical Mystery Tour”

Later,

A Dark Day A Long Time Ago

Yes, I remember where I was: in Mr. McPhail’s homeroom at the end of the day. Seventh grade. The principal, Mr. Carson, came over the intercom to announce to the school President Kennedy had been shot. Then, a little while later, he announced Kennedy had died.

Tons of material – some of it ridiculous – has been produced about John Kennedy, his administration, and his murder. I am only adding a few thoughts, less about the event itself, but more about its ties to us Boomers. A fair bit has been written about that, too, mostly snark. NYT television writer and fellow Boomer Alessandra Stanley published a piece this past week, We Interrupt This Generation , , , that frames the event by musing on the impact it had on the television industry and, by turn, the impact television’s coverage of the event had on us.

She has a point–Kennedy was indeed the first television President. It’s well-known, for example, that people who watched the Nixon-Kennedy debates were so taken with the Senator’s good looks, energy and articulation they thought he won. People who listened on the radio, immune to the Kennedy visual charm, thought Nixon won.

More broadly, the assassination was the dawn of a decade in which television created an information and entertainment community that was, then, what the internet is now. The decade of often-violent change was brought into our homes every night by Walter Cronkite on CBS, Huntley/Brinkley on NBC, and Peter Jennings and Frank Reynolds on ABC. Civil rights demonstrations–and the violent response–Vietnam, riots in the cities, all of it was right their in front of you on your t.v. screen.

So, perhaps the medium was the message, but there’s still more to it.

As Stanley’s piece reminds us, Kennedy was able to project an image that made people feel a connection to him. He was inspiring; find me a single line in another Presidential inauguration address as powerful and well-remembered as, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Yes, part of the charm was clever media manipulation, but what was genuine was that his charm was put to service on behalf of the idea that government could and should do good, that there are higher aspirations to which people can strive. Fast-forward to 1981 and the next charming President, Ronald Reagan, of Kennedy’s generation, who put his skills to use for a darker agenda. Case in point: Kennedy, albeit belatedly, came to the cause of Civil Rights. Reagan held his first public appearance after his first nominating convention in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murders of three young civil rights workers during Freedom Summer and announced his support for “states’ rights,” clear code for the dark days of segregation.

It was that inspirational image that causes us to attach such strong feelings to Kennedy’s death. Reagan survived an assassination attempt; does anyone actually think, if he had died, he would be remembered the same way as Kennedy?

I’ve heard some pundits claim the assassination was the Day American Lost Its Innocence. Bollocks. America, if it was ever innocent, had lost that a long time before. There were three presidential assassinations before Kennedy’s: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Several other presidents were the targets of would-be assassins. The country tolerated centuries of slavery and the extermination of Native Americans. It had been through a Civil War, several Depressions, and fits of violent social change, particularly the rise of the union movement, as well as social oppression. It wasn’t innocence we lost as much as idealism.

Kennedy’s murder was different because Kennedy represented something different. Although he was a pragmatic, center-to-slightly left Democrat, he created, largely because of his youth, an aura of idealism not really matched until Barack Obama came along. Clinton, for all his efforts to mimic Kennedy and create a connection to him in the public’s mind (that famous handshake photo), came close, more as a relief from 12 years of Reagan and Bush, but he didn’t quite have it. We were used to presidents who looked and acted like our grandfathers; Kennedy was the mature big brother. Clinton, by contrast, was the big brother who got away with stuff you couldn’t.

Some people have referred to Kennedy’s assassination as our Pearl Harbor, the event that defined the Boomers’ experience for the rest of their lives. That’s close, but not quite right. It ushered in a decade dominated by a cycle of hope and disillusionment, of possibilities of change dashed by the powerful forces of the status quo.

Fifty years later, and I think, while Kennedy and his death mark us Boomers deeply, what happened on November 22, 1963 also changed the course of the nation, and not to the better. With Kennedy, we thought we could win. Since then, it’s been a long holding action.

Later,

My, My, What Do We Have Here?

“Think tanks” are supposed to be quasi-academic (by that I mean, they don’t offer classes) institutions where intelligent people conduct research into social and economic policy issues to inform the public debate and, to an extent, influence the course of policy-making. I used to work at the oldest, largest and most prestigious of these, the Brookings Institution.

Most of these have a certain political bent (how can they not?), but still in all, they offer opinions and policy recommendations based on data, not ideology. However, some of them are just opinion mills, places where so-called researchers are paid by benefactors of a certain political stripe to crank out “policy” papers that are really just polemics (or diatribes).

The Heritage Foundation is one such, probably the biggest such. It was once a policy shoppe, but one dedicated to generating conservative ideas (hard righters like Joe Coors – money – and Paul Weyrich – ideas – were founders), although, as you may know already, the program that became Obamacare started there. It has now slid into hackdom, from my perspective, under the reign of former Sen. Jim DeMint.

There are actually a lot of bogus “think tanks” scattered across the country in a network of organizations intent upon winning political battles by providing academic window-dressing to ideological thought. The Center for Media and Democracy this month released a report, described in this piece in Salon about the network of state-level organizations funded by the Brothers Koch and their ilk whose intent is to press their agenda at the state legislative level, where they can work with less visibility than in D.C., hoping to create a platform for later action at the federal level.

The story and the report are well worth reading.

Later,

Late Night Listening with Billy Ward and the Dominoes

This is one of my favorite rock ‘n’ roll tracks:

Later,

New Organization/Blog You Should Pay Attention To

The Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a spinoff organization of John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, is bringing together smart people and resources to focus on what I consider to be the number one economic issue of our day, inequality.

Their blog is chock full of information “About Economic Growth with Equity that Washington Should Be Having.”

Doubtless, I’ll be passing many things along . . . .

Later,

This Should Not Come as a Surprise to Anyone

Six weeks after it became clear the administration couldn’t seem to build a decent website to make its signature policy achievement work correctly, the mainstream media has tried to turn it into Obama’s Katrina/Watergate.

Sigh.

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