Date: November 12, 2009 1:23:18 PM HST
Subject: Re: okee

More brilliance; thank you

I’ll have to read the TIME issue my sister brought home; the cover article is titled something like “The State of Hillary.”

On Nov 10, 2009, at 7:14 AM, GARY MAWYER wrote:

I agree with both of you. I have no feelings of outrage per se, but the points are well taken. The patriot act and the Volksamt Sicherheit are not only unconstitutional and somewhat dangerous, but also ridiculous, and also a literally crazy waste of resources and a budget drain that can only be described as jaw-dropping. As for detainees, Ted Rall is absolutely right: anybody can be tried for anything, ergo there is no such animal as a detainee who can’t be tried. The justice dept’s “truth & reconciliation” process about executive law violations went from a feeble start to apparent extinction and never had Obama’s support. Obama was posed as a candidate of great change, and I would still say we have had a great amount of positive change for a mere 12 month period, but as far as being radical, Obama is nowhere near as radical as the 99-year-old Sen. Robert Byrd, who really is a radical populist and constitutionalist. Obama is a centrist moderate and so far he has not used his executive authority to jawbone anyone.
Since the proof is in the pudding it is easy to see what Obama’s real priorities were. Iraq was his first priority. However, he left it to the army to design its own withdrawal at its own speed. This was the safest way and it led to the prompt end of the US combat role with no political splash of any kind.
A health care bill was his largest priority — and he handed the task to Congress, which as I argued months ago doomed the reform to incremental failure, at least in this phase. I think this is a terrible outcome even if it does put principle first, and the exact opposite of what Hillary would have done. (She would have handed congress the bill, assigned them to pass it and shattered anyone who squeaked about it. People would have then quite rightly complained about the Imperial Clinton strong-arming eveybody).
The Afghanistan priority was to sit tight and reckon up the best thing to say. It still is. The US can neither do nothing nor do anything. From today’s Daily Beast, yet another fresh insight into this:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-11-08/mcchrystals-fuzzy-math/
Every point in this link is spot on. The US strategic need in the region is eerily Victorian — Obama has to craft a script, call it a fantasy if you like, to go with the Pakistan war, where US ground forces will not be sent. For Americans the script has to read that the military occupation of parts of the Afghan plateau is a moral obligation that derives from the 2001 punitive raid (or liberation from Taliban tyranny — or Al Qaeda uprooting, or an important part of Afghan Health Care Reform or whatever). But that’s the hand Obama was dealt. It was vital to beat it out of Afghanistan before a Pakistan insurgency broke out, but the Neocons were in charge. Now the whole deployment is about “don’t jiggle anything and for God’s sake don’t strike a match.” A Paki nuclear exchange might easily kill a billion people. Think of the greenhouse gases that would release.
Fixing Patriot Act and security excesses and the DHS has not yet made it onto the agenda. In the face of the Great Depression II, arguably it really isn’t important enough. Two-thirds of New Orleans is still uninhabitable — it’s like the Detroit of the South — the United States is starting to generate ruins. Maybe FDR inherited this much mess — maybe not. It might be unprecedented. And yet I swear to God, I read an article a few days ago complaining that Obama had not come through on some implied gay-marriage promises. As vital matters of national importance go, on a scale of 1 to 10…
But I will join you in a heartfelt Obama complaint. It’s about linkage. Oftentimes, problem A can actually be used as part of the solution to problem B. It’s a good way to proceed. Clinton’s universal coverage plan would have liberated a tremendous amount of money into general circulation and would also have generated literally hundreds of thousands of jobs and an operating profit (as well as merely improving healthcare). It would have had the most immediate impact on the Depression of anything the government could have done. This could even have been “three birds with one stone” if the Volksamt Sicherheit had been dissolved on grounds of cost and mined for job transfers to the health coverage, FTC, FEC, JD and other severely underpowered agencies whose role in economic recovery is actually vital. This would have been a shakeout to remember and it’s an interesting example of how “moderate centrist” leanings aren’t necessarily always more pragmatic than radical ones.

Original Message
From: “pat matsueda” <pmatsued>
To: “TalZhan” <talzhan>
Sent: Monday, November 9, 2009 4:07:25 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: okee

Well, I’m afraid I have to agree with Mike, maybe not on every point but on most.

(BTW, Mike, riding side-saddle isn’t only for sissies, my friend. I know what you meant, though.)

The other day, I was going to respond to Gary and say something to the effect that the presidency has its limits, but we were looking for–hungry and desperate for–someone to expand the office’s powers, not stay within those limits. Coincidentally, on the day of or day after we started this discussion, an article on voter dissatisfaction appeared in the STAR-BULLETIN. In this case, the dissatisfied were Republican or Independent Iowans who had voted for O. in the hopes of finally ending business-as-usual politics. The accompanying picture really conveyed their sense of discouragement.

These feelings shouldn’t be dismissed or glossed over or argued away. There is a real moral malaise that is causing people to either compromise or withdraw; neither is good for a democracy. A true one anyway.

On Nov 9, 2009, at 10:49 AM, TalZhan wrote:

Is Obama the “Man of the Hour”, or someone posed to look like the man of the hour? I’m pretty sure it is the latter, meant to mollify the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Actually, by his inaction in several key areas, Obama is effectively working to further the agenda of the sick far right, just recently retired from the center ring of American Politics. Where did the US Attorneys outrage go? Why is there no effective regulation of the Federal Electoral Commission? Why is there no reasoned repeal of the Patriot Act? Why are we still subject to the most intrusive surveillance, specifically counter to the fundamental Founding Documents? The hope appears to be superficial,and the change cosmetic. At least,this is how it looks to me, domestically. Internationally, it may still be wise to claim Canadian citizenship, but America is apparently regaining her cachet, somewhat…this too, may be appearance more than substance.

All of the above is not meant to be dismissive of BO’s work, just wondering why, when America was poised for BIG CHANGE, BO charges onto the scene, looking bold, and innovative, and commanding. And then, when he’s holding the bridles, he wants to ride side saddle? I don’t get it, and can only conclude that he was meant to be in the White House, wanted there by his masters. But he was not meant to act boldly, and innovatively, but supposed to act as a braking mechanism against the onslaught of radical change demanded by an Earth so far out of balance, it stuns when you finally realize the extent of imbalance.

Patricia T Matsueda wrote:

True. Why did we have to learn it so quickly in his case, though? Couldn’t he have at least waited till after Christmas?This is said tongue-in-cheek, of course. As I recall, Mike raised the red flag within weeks of the inauguration.

Original Message
From: alan <alanm112
Date: Tuesday, November 3, 2009 1:29 am
Subject: Re: okee
To: Patricia T Matsueda <pmatsued, mike reilly <talzhan

> No one ever is. > Original Message > From: Patricia T Matsueda > To: mike reilly > Cc: alan mawyer ; alex mawyer ; gary mawyer ; george > Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 12:24 AM > Subject: okee> > I’m finally ready to concede that President Obama may not be the person I thought we elected.

Shad River is a multigenerational story exploring the evolution of racial and family identity in the Appalachian South. The intertwined histories of three families, one white, one of Native American descent, and one African-American, are followed episodically from settlement times through November 2001. The best recent work of comparable scope may be Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. The setting and action of the middle part of the book would be most easily compared to Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. We believe that Shad River would complement the books on your list while distinguishing itself by its American perspective on racial issues and civil rights.

Says Canadian writer, critic, and scholar John Moss, who read the book and prepared a reader’s report:

Like all great books, Shad River is both a stunning surprise and inevitable. Once it has been read, one cannot imagine a world in which it did not exist. In a lifetime as a writer, literary critic, editor and academic,  I have experienced the thrill of discovering great books many times over, but I have read only a few, and never a manuscript, to match Gary Dale Mawyer’s unpublished chronicle about the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Here is an unlikely thought: imagine a conspiracy among Faulkner, James Mitchener, Tolstoy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, they come together, the living and the dead, joined by Samuel Clemens, Alex Haley and Stephen Crane, maybe Eric Idle and Erich Maria Remarque, and they invent Gary Dale Mawyer. Mawyer in his mature years writes a book of life that is also a book of the dead. He calls his book Shad River and puts it in a drawer. But it won’t stay there. The world is too much invested to let it lie.

Possibly the best descriptions of the Civil War ever written lie in these pages. Conflicts from before the Revolution that force people into the hill country of Virginia and conflicts that draw them out again, generation by generation, are opened to the reader as real people turn to memory and memory turns into myth, all in a context shaped by the intricacies of genealogy along the Shad and by History as it whirls each succeeding layer of consciousness to the surface, from then to now. What has passed is prologue, yes, but is perpetually revised; presence is antecedent to the past. The sweep and scope of Mawyer’s narrative is breathtaking. It thrums with details of authenticity. The sustained brilliance as a narrative of times and a place is comparable only to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Yet this book is as much a history of the western world from a wondrously conceived finite perspective as it is a fiction; it is as much a meditation among quarreling philosophies as it is a novel; as much the dream-vision of an astonishingly wise and irrepressibly witty raconteur as it is a chronicle. It is a confession of remembering blood articulated through infinite research, an exorcism and celebration of racial awareness, a guide among bullets and carnage through local gossip, regional politics and global imperatives. It is a novel about a small place in the world and about the world itself. It is a war novel, a pamimpsest of military memoirs, a documentary of race and religion, and it is American history. It is about living in the twenty-first century, and about the generations of men and women who gave us a place to stand on even as they fade to quirks of custom and genetic lore.

Gary Mawyer in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, at the Mule Shoe—or Bloody Angle, as it was known by the Northern troops—on the Spotsylvania Court House battlefield.

Shad River is not always an easy book to read. The writing is superb; brilliantly  articulate and often hauntingly evocative. Exhaustively researched materials of the past are given flesh-and bone-intensity, yet never recede into anecdote or exemplary vignette; more recent recollections, for instance of Washington under siege in the 1970’s, achieve a gut-churning immediacy, tempered with wry cynicism. The characters, from Abraham Marr, a Pennsylvania Quaker whose progeny mix native, white, and black in an infinitely fascinating quilt of cousinage, to Lynn Marr, the divorced Episcopal minister from the west coast, home in the hills for Thanksgiving, 2002, all have brief and glowing narrative lives which, together cast Shad Crossing and the Shad River region into dazzling illumination. The pacing, the narrative tempo, is right on the mark; leisurely at times among the old men around the stove in Marr’s General Store, frenetic in the battle scenes (which are many and varied, as finely detailed as escutcheons on a prize musket, dents on a cop’s billie-club), solemn in the intellectually charged debates on eugenics and Jim Crow, while irreverent, even raucous, in enumerating the strange intricacies of color, race, and genealogy from a layered perspective. The writing is superb. What might have been a sprawling inchoate welter spun around a chronological axis holds together as the whirling visionary gift of a narrative voice that shows absolute confidence in its own judgment to make sense of it all, its own ability to make it all accessible. The reader, however, is not meant to be passive. There are no genealogical charts, no potted historical summaries. These would be a betrayal of its vision. Shad River is implicitly postmodern. It interrogates and subverts and exploits the distinctions among history and fiction, myth and genetics, memory and imagination. It declares, not sole was I born but entire genesis. As with Marquez, it does not give itself as a gift to be consumed but as a parallel world within which to better see our own.

Dear Mr. Bridgewater,

Someone has no doubt already proposed this, but I thought I’d write anyway.

The STAR-BULLETIN is now billing itself, as I saw from the newspaper stand this morning, as Hawaii’s first compact newspaper. It seems to me that the worth of this trendy phrase is lost on people who haven’t been following developments in the industry. Perhaps instead of focusing on this conversion, SB could create nodes of interest around which new readers would form.

Could, say, SB select two or three people in the community who would function as editors for a month? For argument’s sake, let’s say that I nominated my boss as an SB editor-for-a-month and he was selected. His site would be www.mystarbulletin.com/stewart. He would select the content that SB (1) gets from news sources and (2) generates itself, and then he would give it his particular slant. For example, his editorial page would consist of opinions he’d selected from those possible—or of opinions he wrote or solicited. His front page would consist of news that was of interest to him and his friends and associates.

His stint as editor would have to be preceded, of course, by some kind of course in SB’s editorial/publishing policy.

I like this idea because it would repackage SB content and resell it based on the strength of the reputation, or cachet let’s say, of the people selected to be editors every month. The banner, look, images, and so forth of SB would be consistent across these editions.

This idea formed as a result of (1) a HUFFINGTON POST article on newspapers that I just read and (2) a casual visit to a store in the heart of Chinatown. My sister, a friend, and I had had lunch at Mei Sum and then, because my friend needed to get a birthday gift for another friend, we went into the store called Into. Into, as you know, is a wonderful interior decorating store that imports stuff from all over the world. The man at the counter, who is one of the owners, told me that his store would be moving to Aina Haina because, as much as he loved the location, Into was losing money. I was very disappointed and said so, and he looked anguished and said he preferred to be in Chinatown and was even the president of the Downtown Merchants’ Association.

If someone such as he were able to create his own edition of SB, I think it would be intriguing, and, I predict, the edition would gain new readers for the paper. This would have to be a money-making proposition, of course. Perhaps SB could charge $10 for a month-long subscription to these special editions or have a special advertising section targeting each month’s set of readers.

In addition to considering individuals as editors, SB could consider groups, e.g., the Iolani (or Punahou) School newspaper staff, the Association of University Women, and so forth.

Thank you for reading this, and best of luck to SB, which I remain loyal to.

Aloha,
Pat

The following was written as a submission to the Star-Bulletin’s column “The Goddess Speaks.” Features editor Betty Shimabukuro wrote back to say that SB would need to contact Ocean Cablevision for a comment and that I might consider submitting the piece to “Kokua Line” or as a letter to the editor. I haven’t yet made a decision about this; in the interim, it appears here.

Recent news reports about women being talked into letting strangers into their homes and then being robbed prompted me to write about my own experience.

The first week of March, I received a call from a man who said that he was an Oceanic Cablevision employee and that he had gotten my unlisted phone number from the security office of my downtown condominium. He explained that he needed access to my home because the resident in a unit above me was having trouble with his TV and the cable wiring in my unit might be the cause.

I was suspicious of this man for the following reasons. He had not made his request through the management office of my condominium; I assumed that the condo’s security office was not supposed to release the phone numbers of residents; the contact number he gave me did not resemble Oceanic’s listed numbers; and his explanation for needing access sounded like the sort of story a person with ulterior motives would fabricate.

Even though this man said he needed immediate access, I replied that I could not make any arrangements with him at that time. Some days later, on the morning of the fourteenth, my doorbell rang and I opened the door to find him and another man standing in the hallway.

In the interim, I had tried to contact Oceanic. I e-mailed the company via its website, describing the situation, but received no response. I was alarmed that the company was not concerned someone might be impersonating one of its employees, but I waited a day, then called Oceanic. I spoke to a woman, giving her the contact number the man had given me. She put me on hold for a few minutes, then returned, saying that she would talk to the man’s foreman because he should not have been contacting people this way. She did not, however, confirm that he was an Oceanic employee.

I also spoke to a woman in my condo’s management office and was told that the call was suspicious and that the security office and all other staff of the building are prohibited from giving out information about the residents. After a few hours, the woman called me back and said that the man was indeed an Oceanic employee and that I should make arrangements with him to let him into my home. I have no idea how she verified who he was, and I remained suspicious.

This urban tale has a happy ending, fortunately. After the two men entered my home, I stayed on guard, keeping a wary eye on them. They quickly got to work, however, and after several minutes, it became clear that their reason for being there was legitimate. The man I had spoken to was quick, efficient, and personable, and the two left after about twenty minutes.

Would I therefore let another stranger into my home? No, I wouldn’t. In fact, the next time I will be even more careful and vigilant than I was this time.

Posted 16 November. An abridged version of this news report appeared in today’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin. I’m including the piece in its entirety.

Election spurs ‘hundreds’ of race threats, crimes

By JESSE WASHINGTON – 1 day ago

Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting “Assassinate Obama.” Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.

Incidents around the country referring to President-elect Barack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.

From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders.

There have been “hundreds” of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

One was in Snellville, Ga., where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: “I hope Obama gets assassinated.” That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law’s front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door, Millner said.

She described her emotions as a combination of anger and fear.

“I can’t say that every white person in Snellville is evil and anti-Obama and willing to desecrate my property because one or two idiots did it,” said Millner, who is black. “But it definitely makes you look a little different at the people who you live with, and makes you wonder what they’re capable of and what they’re really thinking.”

Potok, who is white, said he believes there is “a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them.”

Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old white Georgia native, expressed similar sentiments: “I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change.

“If you had real change it would involve all the members of (Obama’s) church being deported,” he said.

Change in whatever form does not come easy, and a black president is “the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War,” said William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. “It’s shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries.”

“Someone once said racism is like cancer,” Ferris said. “It’s never totally wiped out, it’s in remission.”

If so, America’s remission lasted until the morning of Nov. 5.

The day after the vote hailed as a sign of a nation changed, black high school student Barbara Tyler of Marietta, Ga., said she heard hateful Obama comments from white students, and that teachers cut off discussion about Obama’s victory.

Tyler spoke at a press conference by the Georgia chapter of the NAACP calling for a town hall meeting to address complaints from across the state about hostility and resentment. Another student, from a Covington middle school, said he was suspended for wearing an Obama shirt to school Nov. 5 after the principal told students not to wear political paraphernalia.

The student’s mother, Eshe Riviears, said the principal told her: “Whether you like it or not, we’re in the South, and there are a lot of people who are not happy with this decision.”

Other incidents include:

• Four North Carolina State University students admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: “Let’s shoot that (N-word) in the head.” Obama has received more threats than any other president-elect, authorities say.
• At Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: “Osama Obama Shotgun Pool.” Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. “Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count,” the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written “Let’s hope someone wins.”
• Racist graffiti was found in places including New York’s Long Island, where two dozen cars were spray-painted; Kilgore, Texas, where the local high school and skate park were defaced; and the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and “Go Back To Africa” were spray painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.
• Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted “assassinate Obama,” a district official said.
• University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur. “It seems the election brought the racist rats out of the woodwork,” Houston said.
• Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported. The president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas said a rope found hanging from a campus tree was apparently an abandoned swing and not a noose.
• Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.
• A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted ‘Obama.’
• In the Pittsburgh suburb of Forest Hills, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his car windshield, saying “now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house.”

Emotions are often raw after a hard-fought political campaign, but now those on the losing side have an easy target for their anger.

“The principle is very simple,” said BJ Gallagher, a sociologist and co-author of the diversity book “A Peacock in the Land of Penguins.” “If I can’t hurt the person I’m angry at, then I’ll vent my anger on a substitute, i.e., someone of the same race.”

“We saw the same thing happen after the 9-11 attacks, as a wave of anti-Muslim violence swept the country. We saw it happen after the Rodney King verdict, when Los Angeles blacks erupted in rage at the injustice perpetrated by ‘the white man.’”

“It’s as stupid and ineffectual as kicking your dog when you’ve had a bad day at the office,” Gallagher said. “But it happens a lot.”

Associated Press writers Errin Haines, Jerry Harkavy, Jay Reeves, Johnny Taylor and researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report.

Posted 10 November

From Barack As President.

Wikipedia makes a distinction between desegregation and integration. One can argue that it is correct, given Wikipedia’s definitions and arguments, to say that the presidency has been integrated. But it seems to me more correct to say that the nation’s highest political office has been desegregated. The legal aspect of desegregation is probably what many Republicans and people who voted Republican have mistaken the majority will for. They seem to regard Obama’s election as a de facto desegregation that has taken place without their participation or permission.

Response from Mike:

Hi! Yes we can, Yes we will, Yes we did!!! I would like to think that at this stage in our nation’s racial development, the process we are undergoing is integration, which is organic, as opposed to desegregation, which is a deliberate intervention in a social system. The South was desegregated by law and writ, but it started integrating when enough people realized that equality of worth was not based on race, but on human commonality. That is, a realization that that which makes us different is so trivial when compared to that which we all have in common. As for majority rule, if we were going to have to live through 4 or 8 years more of stupid government…

The title of this post is from an e-mail message sent by Mike, Molly’s human companion. Starting on Friday, 5 Nov., a group of us pondered the role this little lady had to play in national politics.

Me: Dogs can’t vote either. Sorry, Mike, Maryland’s elections office had to discard Molly’s ballot. They asked me to break the news to you.

Mike: Well, that’s downright diabolical, cuz I was told she was eligible. I guess not, huh? Oh well, I hung up posters all over town for Mollyo, and she didn’t get one single vote! It hasn’t affected her, though, she still puts her stockings on one leg at a time.

Gary: Oh yeah, well that’s not what I heard. I heard on Fox & Fiends that Molly went on a crazed spending spree in Nieman and Saks and also at La Pooche Coutierier and ran up bills totalling about half a million bucks, including a diamond-studded collar and leash and a free outfit for all her friends, and that half the stuff is missing, and that she answered the door to her staff members wearing nothing but some strategically placed fur.

Mike: oh…you got that, huh?

well, we gotta get back to our mooser an hockey luvvin con stitch warrants, course, there’s the idittorod coming soon, we always run in that…

c you in 2012!!!

Me: As Molly knows, a well-dressed, well-accessorized dog is worth a dozen Sarah Palins.

Anybody read “A Political Manners Manual” at the NYT site? It includes these good paragraphs:

The Republicans are being way more nasty to Sarah Palin than the Democrats are to Lieberman. They’ve been portraying her as both a shopaholic and a woman who walks around in nothing but a bath towel, a hillbilly who’s also a prima donna. The leakathon climaxed this week when Fox News’s Carl Cameron announced that Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Palin says this is untrue. But the worst part is that if these people get any meaner, we’re going to wind up feeling sorry for her. This is not something we are looking forward to, Republicans, and we will resent you for it.

Alan: I’ve been told I got one write-in vote but I don’t believe it. Don’t tell Molly.

On Thursday, 6 Nov., our friend Mike asked in an e-mail message, “What’s going on in Alaska? Somethings not right!” and provided a link to Something Smells Fishy in Alaska, a post written by Shannyn Moore for The Brad Blog. Verrry interesting. I subsequently found Crunching the Numbers in Alaska, a post at Mudflats, a blog maintained by “AKMuckraker.”

In response to these postings, Gary said:

I know there are a lot of theories about how the Diebold rig works. I don’t really claim to know what they do but I don’t have any doubt that they do something. That said, after being utterly convinced that Kerry won Virginia in 2004, the VA vote count as announced looks really plausible this year. If somebody came along & said the Obama victory margin was trimmed by 6 to 10%, I would wonder, out of natural suspicion, but the local tallies matched the local polls completely. Local polls showed O. ahead 5 to 1 in town and 2 to 1 in the county and that’s what we got. More to the point, the O. vote matches the Perriello vote with P. beating the noxious Goode in Nelson as well as Alb & Duckville and being all over him in the other surrounding counties. This is how it was supposed to be. Though I don’t think the rural counties experienced a sudden outbreak of progressivism, I think they did revert to their historical baseline of agrarian Readjusterism, which has been kind to black candidates all across the state whenever there were any black candidates, which is not often. In short, looking at the riskier parts of rural VA, it looks to me like Obama got a higher vote there than I would have thought possible, while, on balance, urban NOVA voted less blue that I thought they were going to.

Meanwhile, as to Alaska, if these blogistas are quoting the authorized numbers correctly, then the suggestion that 50,000 or so votes are weirdly missing seems very logical to me.

An article in the 8 Nov. Anchorage Daily News also said the size of Alaska’s turnout was puzzling, given that “the lead-in for the 2008 election was extraordinary.” The article begins:

Did a huge chunk of Alaska voters really stay home for what was likely the most exciting election in a generation?

That’s what turnout numbers are suggesting, though absentee ballots are still arriving in the mail and, if coming from overseas, have until Nov. 19 to straggle in.

The reported turnout has prompted commentary in the progressive blogosphere questioning the validity of the results. And Anchorage pollster Ivan Moore, who usually works with Democrats, said Friday that “something smells fishy,” though he said it was premature to suggest that the conduct of the election itself was suspect.

With 81,000 uncounted absentee and questioned ballots, some of which will be disqualified, the total vote cast so far is 305,281–8,311 fewer than the last presidential election of 2004, which saw the largest turnout in Alaska history.

As it stands now, the numbers for the most closely watched races are as follows:

Race	Republican	Democrat
U.S. Senate	Ted Stevens: 106,594	Mark Begich: 103,337
U.S. House	Don Young: 114,043	Ethan Berkowitz: 97,104

Palling around with errorists

The kind of distortion, lying, and rumormongering that Palin now accuses reporters of is the very kind she was engaging in when she was McCain’s running mate. Now that the (Republican) party is over, she is expressing indignation and hurt. I have to admit that when I watch and listen to her, I feel sorry for her: sorry that she is not better equipped–intellectually and morally–to press her charges. If she had been against character assassination all along–that is, when it was being directed at others as well as herself–she would have some moral ground on which to attack the ethics of reporters.

A Letter from Alaska

John Luther Adams, an acquaintance in Alaska, sent me some weeks ago the letter that appears at this blog. I corresponded with him a bit about his letter, and he brought up the fact that Hawai‘i senator Dan Inouye was speaking in defense of Stevens at the trial. This made me feel ashamed and reminded me of Hawai‘i’s political ties to Alaska, including the support of both of our U.S. senators for drilling in the ANWR.

Here’s a bright note to follow that darkness. The election-day edition of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin had a picture of a memorial to Obama’s grandmother with a caption that stated, in part:

Though [Madelyn Payne] Dunham died two nights before the election, state elections officials say they will count her vote. Kevin Cronin, the state’s chief elections officer, said yesterday that state law requires absentee ballots cast by someone who dies before Election Day to be discarded, but only if Health Department certification of the death is received before the election. Dunham’s absentee ballot was received by the elections office on Oct. 27, Cronin said.

3 Nov 7:26 pm

I’m not as confident as some of the people around me are that Obama will win. When I read [Frank] Schaeffer’s piece, I wondered if I’d been unwilling to hope and believe that a miracle could occur.

My friend George, who lives in Philadelphia and is a newspaper editor, is a big fan of the Phillies. He’d been writing me now and then about Shane Victorino, and when the Phillies won the World Series, he sent me a picture of Shane wearing a lei and hugging the trophy.

Obama’s win would be a miracle of an entirely different magnitude, of course; yet nothing else is acceptable to millions of people all over the world. They have to believe that it is possible and will happen. I have to believe too.

4 Nov 10:17 am

Proudly wearing my Obama T-shirt from Moveon.org.

I voted at around 7:30 this morning. Rainy, gray day in Honolulu, but humid. I walked the three blocks to the cafeteria of a school I went to as a teenager (a horrible period of my life, though not as horrible as the years to come) and voted for the Obama/Biden ticket. The cafeteria wasn’t crowded, but almost every voting booth was taken, and there was a longish line to the tabulating machine. Afterward, I walked to one of my favorite breakfast places and had two eggs over easy, a couple of pancakes, and two pieces of bacon (I’m trying to stop eating meat, but still haven’t quite made it).

5 Nov (throughout the day)

Gary: I know it was spiteful of me but I could not help thoroughly enjoying the local coverage of the GOP victory room, from the early returns where the utterly mean-spirited and vicious 5th Dist congressman, Virgil Goode–who used face-morphing technology in his endlessly repeated attack ads to make his opponent appear to be African-American–appeared to be ahead by 40%, to the hushed environment where it was Perriello 48, Goode 52, to the dead tie, to the final recount where Perriello was ahead by about 800 to 1000 votes, Virginia had gone for Obama, and the bar was empty with just the reporter and a couple of amused waiters sweeping up.

George: I think Obama’s top two challenges are disengagement from Iraq and the economy. The mess that Bush made will not easily be undone, but I think Barak will take a methodical approach to both. There’s another big challenge, perhaps bigger than the other two, which is the polarization of the country. Neocons’ reaction, I’m hearing, is vituperative, with buying more guns a prominent feature. They can’t very well leave the country unless they give up their guns, so it will be interesting to say the least.

If he can get a handle on those three issues, the rest of the mess will be relatively easy to deal with. Environmental issues, energy, infrastructure, health care, and restoring the graduated income tax will be easier to resolve, but by no means slam dunks. Restoring our reputation abroad will be the easiest thing to resolve. After he takes the oath of office, that will be his first fait accompli.

Neither the Phillies winning the World Series nor Obama’s victory has totally sunken in yet. I spent so much time and effort wishing for those two things that when the event happened a sense of disbelief set in. But the Phillies are the world champs and Obama is president-elect. The days of Junior and his demented Uncle are dwindling. High-fives and much rejoicing.

George: In West Virginia’s 2nd District, incumbent Republican Shelly Moore Capito narrowly defeated Democratic challenger Ann Barth. Capito torpedoed the proposed Seneca Creek Wilderness, so I was hoping she would be put out to pasture.

Me: Yes, that’s a shame. Maybe with a Democratic president and majorities in both houses, she’ll have to be more respectful of an environment-focused agenda, though.

Too bad the D.s didn’t get a [larger] majority in the Senate.

You might recall that our Republican governor predicted that HI would be for McCain. The final numbers, according to the BBC News site: 71.8% (298,621) for O.; 26.6% (110,848) for M.; 1.5% (6,526) for others.

Governor Linda can commiserate with her counterpart in Alaska.

George: I don’t think a Democrat administration will have any effect on Capito, or for that matter, any other Repugnican congresstwit. She did back Dolly Sods North, so that is one positive outcome. We just hoped she would lead on the issue and not follow the flock.

Me: One of the highlights of the evening for me was when the head of the BBC news team in D.C. interviewed Gore Vidal, who is now, it appears, nasty, uncooperative, and addled beyond help. When some minutes of this meandering unpleasantness had gone by and the newsman asked V.–pointing out that he had been close to the Kennedys–what he thought of Obama’s victory, V. said he couldn’t answer the newsman’s question because he didn’t know who he was. I should add that V.’s nice suit was too big for him, and his large head seemed to be nodding right, toward the floor, as if he couldn’t hold it up; he kind of looked like an aardvark, actually. The newsman then said to those seated around the table–which included Larry Sabato, of UVA–that maybe they should quit while they were ahead. Then he muttered, “That was interesting–not quite what we expected.” Har-har, that was a good laugh, and I laughed liberally!

Gary: It bears out what I always said–When you go to interview an aardvark, things are going to get awkward. Or as my old pal Andy Anteater used to say, “You can suit an aardvark, but it’ll be a cold day on the veldt when an aardvark suits you.”

Sabato’s on Cloud 9 because he actually called the electoral vote — exactly. It was a direct hit. The Polysci Dept also had Perriello within a few hundred of Goode one way or the other. Which was a much easier call than the electoral college.

Me: Sabato seems like a good egg.

After the BBC newsman returned to the people at the table, he asked S. a question, and S. started his answer by saying HE knew who the newsman was. Triggered a round of chuckles…

George: I have to say that when Obama delivered the keynote address at the convention four years ago, I realized that he would not only win the senate seat, but be a positive force in the party in the future. As the primary season unfolded, I realized that his vision was powerful, and it seemed to me that his time had arrived. I was on the bandwagon from the get-go, but the primaries were my primary (pun not intended, but cheerfully embraced) concern. I believed if he got the nomination he would go all the way.

I felt the nation was in deep need of a sea change or a course correction and he was the man to make it happen. Nothing that happened changed my belief. I was very confident that he would win, but I have to say that the McPalin street theater of the absurd made the win even bigger. I expected a much narrower margin. But in the electoral-college pool at work yesterday, I said he would take 325 electoral votes. I was too conservative. Somebody else picked a higher number, damn him.

Me: I did think, watching M. give his concession speech, that he was a good, honorable man. As one commentator said, though, it’s too bad he stopped being that person while he was campaigning.

6 Nov (throughout the day)

George: You’ve got that right. McCain was like bad theater. I forget where he was at the time, but he was making his speech in front of a very sparse audience and acting as though he was spotting friends in the audience, pointing out and giving thumbs-up as though he recognized someone. I thought to myself, okay John, you’ve now made more gestures than there are people in the audience. Get it over with so the sanitation workers can clean up the site and get home at a decent hour.

Gary: That McCain allowed the old Bush handlers to stage most all of his events as Potemkin rallies, script him up for Bushite attack speeches, and string Palin around his next like an albatross, basically demonstrated that he was a desperately bad choice for president. He had to actively let all that happen, and the inside story of it is going to be fascinating.

George: Bits and pieces are leaking out around the edges as we speak. Here’s the NY Times story about the schism between the McCain and Palin camps. It’s an interesting look.

Me: A paragraph from a Huffington Post article:

NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin’s shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain’s top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family–clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent “tens of thousands” more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,” and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

Me: Here’s something about Joe the P.:

Joe the Plumber has spoken. It seems he regrets the level of exposure he had from the McCain campaign. He tells the Guardian newspaper: “You know, fame is fleeting, leaves you hungry, leaves you cold, leaves you tired. Fortune never comes with it.”

The following is from a 5 Nov. message written by me to another good friend; I’m putting it at the end because it captures the intensity of my feelings on election day and the strength of my hopes for the future. I didn’t say in the text above that I cried frequently while watching BBC News, tears streaming down my face.

I was thinking about you yesterday, wondering if you were working or able to catch any news of the election. All sorts of things ran through my mind as I saw the numbers change on my computer screen, listened to the BBC News commentators, and watched the various events being filmed live. I saw all of McCain’s concession speech and Obama’s acceptance speech and got to listen to people like Ted Koppel and John Bolton, as I mentioned to you.

It seemed to me that the news commentators were trying to be objective while trying to rein in their excitement about what was happening. I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed this.

It seems to me that Obama is not only a great political leader but a great spiritual leader, someone worthy of following in the steps of Martin Luther King.

When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane’s
Ethnography of the Other World

Religious reformation and nation-building are frequent bedfellows. Culturally speaking, few things are more useful to a rising nation than the resurrection of some lost age of traditional spiritual purity, whether it ever existed or not. On the eve of the Meiji Restoration, Hirata Atsutane came to prominence as a proponent of Japanese cultural uniqueness and superiority, based on the singular spirituality of the island nation as the land of the Kami. He wanted to distinguish the sources of Japan’s traditional spiritual purity from invasive foreign (mainly Buddhist) contamination, with the goal of reviving the true religion of ancient times. But where was he to find the true religion of ancient times in anything like a living form?

Atsutane believed deeply, and complexly, in ancient mountain spirits and forest wizards who wielded the power of the Kami. So when word came that a human disciple of these magical beings was actually living in his neighborhood, he pulled every string he knew to capture the tengu’s disciple, a slum lad named Torakichi, and add him to his household as a new didactic weapon in the seminars and soirees where he fought his intellectual war for religious reform.

Wilburn Hansen takes up this story in When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane’s Ethnography of the Other World. The core question of When Tengu Talk is how a brilliant scholar like Atsutane could believe Torakichi was not a fraud, and how a street con like Torakichi could successfully convince Atsutane and quite a few others that he was a disciple in the kingdom of the Gods. Hansen treats this mystery with the seriousness it deserves. Neither Atsutane nor Torakichi was naïve. The elder needed the younger as a witness from the Other World but understood that the younger man needed leading questions to cue him what to say. Torakichi’s goal was more closely related to escaping from beggary but his methods, by a fantastic stroke of luck, were useful to one of the leading thinkers in Japan.

Atsutane, though on a different level, was no stranger to the kind of intellectual jugglery Torakichi practiced and he did not despise it. He could not resurrect a “pure” Japanese religion without falling back on the concepts that were in play around him. Atsutane was compromised by the Buddhist social religion of his day even as he fought against it. Torakichi was compromised by poverty. Both responded with a degree of cunning. In a way, Atsutane and Torakichi were simultaneously mentor and disciple to each other.

When Tengu Talk is of interest for students of Japanese religion and the emergence of Japanese modernity. It is also a fine anthropological case study and a fascinating pair of psychological portraits. I would add that anyone who loves irony for its own sake could hardly help being charmed. To the irony of the sage who inadvertently hosts a con man, we must add the larger irony that Shinto revivalism in the Meiji Restoration soon required the suppression of local mountain cults and belief in rural demons, in the name of state religion (described by Gerald Figal in Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan). Religious revivalism often has unintended consequences like that. Best of all is the happy detail that Atsutane and Torakichi went on to other things, Atsutane one of the great scholars of his age, Torakichi either a Buddhist monk or the operator of a public bath called the “Tengu Hot Springs.” I prefer to believe the latter.

Gary Mawyer