The UnTexan

OBAMA AND THE HEART OF DARKNESS IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY

I just spent a few days on a ranch near Del Norte in southern Colorado. It is a beautiful place. There was snow on the mountains and there were fish in the river and the locals don't seem to like Barack Obama very much. But there is a real affinity for Sarah Palin. You get the idea that these are the people - just plain old middlin', hardworking white folks with guns - for whom Obama will never be the president (therefore they have every right to denigrate both the man and the office; in fact, they seem for all the world like folks who would deniggerate the presidency if they got the chance, just like lots of those people who show up at Fox/Bill O'Reilly/Glenn Beck-induced rallies and tea parties, people who prefer their African Americans in the woodpile not the White House and always will). But for them Palin always will be the chance America missed. I found this sign in the middle of town. The drawing is better than the spelling.

Meanwhile, read In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and keep reading the good stuff. Understanding the boogeyman helps keep him at bay.

JIMMY CARTER GETS IT RIGHT

Former President Jimmy Carter said that when South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson yelled "You lie!" at President Barack Obama, the comment was "based in racism." I agree. And it's about time somebody was willing to say it loud and proud. Carter also said, "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president." Right again. The people who didn't want their children to hear Obama's speech at school for fear of his "socialistic agenda" (as one Texas mama put it on national TV) are cut from the same stars-and-bars cloth as the ones who have tried so hard to link the words "nigger" and "nazi" (and they know "nigger-nazi" has a certain ugly appeal to it) over the past few weeks. Carter says correctly that this is not about health care or socialism or anything else, but is rooted in something far deeper, plain old dumbass racism, and comes straight from America's white trash heart. Carter is saying what needs to be said.

As for telling it like it is: Kanye West IS a jackass.

SARAH PALIN RESIGNING BECAUSE SHE'S A GUY?

From Alaska, the relative of a friend emails that the rumor among some folks on Sarah Palin's frozen  home turf is that Gov. Hockey Mom is resigning because she is having an affair with Texas Gov. Rick Perry. All well and good (and in line with recent Republican tradition). But in Texas there is a persistent rumor that Rick Perry is a "man's man," but not in the way Texans usually understand it. Not saying any of this is true, but, if we add one rumor plus one rumor, we come up with the answer to why Sarah Palin is resigning:

She is a guy.

In love with Rick Perry.

Face it. This as good an explanation as any Palin has come up with so far. More fun too. Besides, these are strange days, indeed, for Republican governors (the party of family values). As James Brown said, "This is a man's world."

PRAISE THE LORD AND F**K THE ARGENTINIAN!

The further adventures of Gov. Mark and Jilted Jenny (along with a woman named Maria, a spiritual adviser, the people of South Carolina and a bunch of snakebit Republicans who wish the God they claim to believe in could raise Strom Thurmond from the dead even if he was a babydaddy for all those years -- because he was decent enough to keep it mostly a secret until he was dead).

What kind of guy asks his wife for permission to go see his mistress (and I bet he had tears in his eyes and said please)? That would be Gov. Mark.

What kind of wife says "No mistress," then claims she believed it when told her he was going hiking in the mountains and was surprised when he WENT TO SEE THE MISTRESS anyway? That would be Jilted Jenny, who is allegedly smarter than that. Repeat after me: A guy who has been following his penis around for several years and calling it love is not interested going on a hike.

Of course, one time she did say yes when Gov. Mark pleaded with her to let him end his affair face to face. She sent him away to New York with a "trusted spiritual adviser" as a chaperone (praise Jesus). The Gov., his Argentinian love and the chaperone went to dinner, went to church and went their separate ways (at least that is how the story goes). But it wasn't really over.

Now news stories claim South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and his wife Jilted Jenny are trying to work things out, but I figure it's pretty hard to go slouching home to Mama with your pants around your ankles and an Argentinian woman dangling from your penis like the last bright and lonely ornament on last year's drooping Christmas tree.

Meanwhile, Gov. Mark says in another interview he believes he can fall back in love with Jilted Jenny, but I wouldn't count on it. This is what the apparently grammatically challenged (watch those verb tenses, big guy) governor said of what he realized as he set out for Argentina: "I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate."

Let's settle back and see what happens next now.

(Don't you just love it when Republican Christian loudmouths get caught with their pants down?)

Here is a primer from The Daily Beast on sin in high places in South Carolina.

HOW DO THEY SPELL 'APPALACHIAN' IN SOUTH CAROLINA? 'A-R-G-E-N-T-I-N-A'

It was bad enough when North Carolina politician John Edwards messed around on the famously cancer-stricken Mrs. Edwards. Now South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford decides to leave the wife and kids at home and chase his piece of Argentinian ass all the way to Buenos Aires ON FATHER'S DAY. Sanford is one of those scripture-quoting Republican true believers, a self-described "person of faith" who said he believes in "moral absolutes" (and I'll bet he believes in all of the "Thou shalts" and "Thou shalt nots" in the convenient way most of those wealthy and overbred Low Country South Carolina types do). He set out saying he was taking a hike on the Appalachian Trail, but ended up in Argentina because he said he wanted to "do something exotic." A psychologist I know said lots of muddling middle-aged guys confuse sex with something exotic and never make it to the bottom of figuring out what their real problem is (probably something to do with age, work, their boss, their unresolved and -- suddenly, frighteningly rejuvenated on some deep dark level -- relationship with their mothers. It's not that these guys want to fuck their mothers, but they feel like they want to do something to somebody and it feels like wanting to fuck somebody in the worst sort of way). Who do you fuck when you can't fuck your mother? Somebody strange (as in "get some strange"). Somebody "exotic."  So Sanford's exotic Argentinian was another version of Edwards' exotic video artiste. In both cases the poor bastards confused sex with something exotic and look where it got them. (Bill Clinton doesn't figure into this discussion because he had his own somewhat-puzzling-but-mostly-unexotic-Dixie-fratboy-if-it-moves-fuck-it-Lewinsky-esque interpretation of what it means to "get some strange"). I bet Gov. Sanford could have bought a lot of therapy for what this is going to cost him and he would have ended up in a better place than Buenos Aires. Instead, he did go to Buenos Aires and could only say when he returned, "I spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina" and a bunch of other crap. (Do these dumbasses ever think about what they are saying?) Well, cry me a river, but don't expect any tears from anyone else. Then go shove Evita into your dvd player, drop your drawers, do what you apparently do best and shut up about it.

Oh, yeah. Farrah Fawcett finally died.

Can you believe The New York Times actually put this crap on page 1?

CARTER-IZED

Barack Obama was elected to the presidency and handed the congressional power by an unhappy nation. He hasn't used either very well so far. Given the problems he has had with his picks for Secretary of Commerce and other posts, the man has surrounded himself with idiots who need to get out their dictionaries and find the meaning of "vetting" and start vetting. He needs to fix that. Then he wasted lots of time trying to be a conciliatory team player with his stimulus package. Winners don't have to be so conciliatory. He wants to be the Un-Bush, but that will never be enough. He has to become the Obama. He needs to take as his mantra "fucka buncha Republicans" and get on with the business at hand. Otherwise he is going to find himself - as my wife said - as neutralized and ineffective as Jimmy Carter (a nice man who should not have been president). I don't want Obama to become another nice man who should not have been president. I don't want my president Carter-ized. I want him to measure up.

It doesn't take much to be the Un-Bush. Condi knows just how much it took to measure up in W's White House and sends her love.

POST-OP: OBAMA'S INAUGURATION AND THE LONG-AGO WAIL OF A SMALL, BLACK BOY

My thyroid has been replaced by tiny pills that I will take every morning for the rest of my life. The surgery went well. For a man who has learned to measure all other pain against the pain of gout attacks and kidney stones, it didn't even hurt very much. When the nurses asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten (ten, I've been there), it never measured up (and there was morphine to get me over the rough spots and even some spots that weren't all that rough). Even better was the news that after a thorough biopsy, nothing cancerous was found. The incision is healing. I am recovering and was ready for the inauguration of Barack Obama. Watching it made me feel good -- and made me feel American in ways I haven't at several points in my life. I especially liked the part of his speech where he said we are a young country, but that it is time "to set aside childish things." I liked the we-are-young-but-not-that-young tone of it, the oh-grow-upness of it.

I was raised among racists in North Carolina and around all of the formalized and enforced racism that involved. However, my people discouraged the use of the word "nigger" (most of them, most of the time) and felt pretty good about themselves for doing it, but they still drank from the "Whites Only" water fountains, rode at the front of the bus, etc. It was a word I knew and knew better than to utter. I still cannot say it or write it without squirming a little. And I never felt I needed to say it. From a very young age, I didn't get the point of the racism around me. I was exposed to it, schooled in it, baptized in it. Once when I was very young, my mother and I were in a department store. She heard a child crying, turned around and I was gone. I was a little boy, but I was bigger than the kid I had trapped behind a counter. It was a black kid. I wasn't hitting him or threatening him. I was rubbing his hair (at least that is how my mother described it later, laughing as she told the story; other people laughed too). Nobody in my family had hair like that. I had never been close enough to hair like that to touch it (I didn't know any black kids). Simple curiosity. But he was wailing because he was scared (he didn't know any white kids either) and I never heard my mother coming. Suddenly I was jerked up by my arm and hauled around the counter. She put her face close to mine and said in a forceful near whisper (my mother liked to whisper that way when she was upset enough to get intimate about it), "His mother will cut your heart out." (There had to be a relentless imparting of this sort of knowledge and information to make racism work from generation to generation.)  I have always wondered what that little boy's mother hissed at him, but no matter what was hissed, whispered, said calmly, jokingly or shouted at me then or later, the racism never took hold. Of course, people I grew up around never missed a chance to run down "niggers" in one way or another. I heard endlessly that they were, among other things, "worthless," "shiftless," "dumb" and "dirty." I heard they were armed and dangerous (apparently even when they took their children shopping downtown). By then I had seen lots of black people up close (the same people who called them names hired them for maids and gardeners, cooks and cleaners and we hired them too). I found none of those things to be true. Then I heard what was called "nigger" music and its niggerness sounded so good to me, it pretty much became my music. After that it didn't matter. I suppose black people set me free. I know I could not have escaped without their help. I left North Carolina, then left the South completely not too many years later. I am sure there were people who tagged me a "niggerlover" and I didn't want to live around people like that (or become like them). So I didn't.

But I don't mind living around all of those people who are glad Barack Obama is president (and some of them are back home in North Carolina, which Obama won). Things have changed some, and I am sure some of the people I grew up around have changed too (black people attended my mother's funeral a couple of years ago, so I suppose she changed too). Now I hope we really can set aside childish things like Obama says. Trapped and wailing children, trapped and hissing mothers. Maybe Obama will help all of us grow up. I hope so. I really do.

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Meanwhile, I listen to Otis Redding singing Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come (my favorite version from the album Otis Blue) and Sam Cooke singing it too. Bettye LaVette sang the hell out of it (with Jon Bon Jovi for some unfathomable reason) at the big shindig for Obama last Sunday. I wish I had that one too.

ELECTION DAY 2008: HISTORY, VOTES AND MASKS

I voted early. If anything can render the mounting political noise boring, it is voting early. But here we are. Election day 2008. McCain is looking frighteningly old and worn (maybe that is just the fear-of-Palin effect at work on my psyche, but I don't think so). Obama is looking surprisingly strong and it could be a very historic election. It depends on which America shows up at the polls. Will they hide behind the mask of history? Or will enough voters set it aside? 

(Post election) Now we know.

   

CALLING A SPADE A SPADE or CAN OBAMA BEAT THIS KIND OF STUFF?

John McCain loves gimmicks. Sarah Palin, a gimmick. And yesterday's decision to return to Washington, D.C. (and put off the debate scheduled for Friday night) to help solve the nation's financial disaster (this man who has admitted economics is not his best subject), another gimmick. I suppose we can look forward to a gimmick presidency. (He and Obama were to meet with Bush in D.C. today. What could Bush say? "Sorry fellas. I really fucked things up again, didn't I?" Imagine Bush saying it with that little smirk of insincerety (insecurity, inability, whatever it is ). But Americans love gimmicks (the Republicans seem to have a better grasp of this than the Democrats), so they probably don't care. They love gimmicks (partly because they have lost the ability to discern between a gimmick and the real thing) and they don't like black people. In fact, I'll bet Americans don't like black people so much that they are willing to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency on election day (and that is a terrifying thought).

Most Americans like to hide their racism behind words like "undecided" when the presidential pollsters come around. But perhaps they have found a voice in the person of Fernando C de Baca, Republican Party chairman of Bernalillo County in New Mexico. According to my friend Steve's article in todays Santa Fe New Mexican, C de Baca is in hot water because he said (in an interview with the BBC of all places):

"The truth is that Hispanics came as conquerors. African Americans came here as slaves. Hispanics consider themselves above blacks. They won't vote for a black president."

And he didn't stop there. He added that older Hispanics will not support Obama, "primarily because there is a strong feeling that African Americans during the civil rights movement took advantage, full advantage, of all the benefits and programs the government offered, that were supposed to be offered to all minorities. But we were left behind. We were left sucking air. And we resented that ever since the '60s, and I don't see how a black president is going to change that."

Of course, New Mexico Republicans are in a tizzy. But you have to wonder. Is it because of what he said? Or is it because (to be really politically incorrect about it) he was willing to call a spade a spade? I suspect that some version of what Fernando C de Baca said hides in lots of American hearts and that the "undecided" really have decided.

Racism is likely to be the American gimmick McCain will use to defeat Obama. I'll bet in his tired old Republican heart of hearts he counts on it

I like Barack Obama. Honest. I do. I never have been able to work up much enthusiasm for him, but I am not among the undecided. And the thought of Sarah Palin anywhere near the presidency has made me feel downright enthusiastic about Obama.

Setting aside the fact that Obama sometimes seems more like a gimmick than a black guy to me (maybe something Karl Rove thought up as another Republican gimmick to help McCain win), it will be interesting to see what happens now that the unspoken has been spoken.

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How much do Americans love gimmicks? 

So many women have been buying glasses like Sarah Palin's that they are growing scarce on the market. And that is at about $375 a pair. She might not know anything about anything, but she wears really cool glasses. Doesn't it scare the hell out of you that so many of your fellow Americans think -- and vote -- that way? It scares me.

SARAH PALIN: THE REPUBLICAN SNATCH

The words "Sarah Palin" and "snatched" appeared in the same sentence in the local political column today.

Under the headline, "At GOP gathering, Palin snatches Obama's radiance," there was the sentence, "What Barack Obama had, Sarah Palin may have snatched away."

Those Republicans are very protective of their girl and the GOP language police are likely to accuse columnist W. Gardner Selby of using a form of the word "snatch" (the vulgarity) with "Sarah Palin" (the hockey mom)in the same sentence and thus making an ugly sexist remark. Or at least hinting at an ugly sexist remark. The Republicans are looking for ugly sexist things everywhere, just like they looked for Commies in Joe McCarthy's day. They are very sensitive about this stuff (and Republicans just don't get that many chances to show their sensitive side about anything). McCain may, in fact, be using Palin to snatch (in every sense of the word) votes from Obama, but nobody in the GOP can afford for it to look that way. And they are going to make sure it doesn't. Just look at what they did with "pig" and "lipstick" and "Obama" yesterday.

As for Palin herself? So she's a hockey mom? So what! I knew some hockey moms when I coached kids hockey in Minnesota. They tended to be crude loudmouths rather than VP material. Put lipstick on a hockey mom and she's still nothing but a hockey mom.

But Sarah Palin IS the Republican snatch. And they are going to use her to pussywhip Obama and anyone else who dares say something -- anything -- about her. That's the point of picking her, right?