Archive for the ‘General’ Category
What the ‘red hatters’ are thinking October 16th, 2008
Dayton, Tennessee
The Red Hatters vote for joy, and this time around joy is the McCain-Palin ticket
“I’m a red hatter”, says Mrs Karen Black, talking about a constituency that I had not heard of as we sip sweet tea in the Dayton coffee house. Then she explains.
“There is a poem that says ‘When I grow old I shall wear purple/ With red hats that do not match and do not go/ I’ll learn to spit on the sidewalk and send the grocery money for brandy/ And tell the family that we have no money for butter..’ And the poem goes on, all these things that we’re never allowed to do as proper ladies. And then at the end it says, ’so that my family won’t be too surprised, I think I’ll start practicing now.’
“And so–and you will see this throughout the United States–there are gatherings of ladies fifty and older, who, regardless of what life has thrown at them, whether it’s widowhood, cancer, loss of a child… Regardless of what life has done to them, they choose joy. The red hatters are all about choosing joy. And you will see them with feathers and glitters and red hats and purple outfits.”
Mrs Black is 58, she is wearing a green floral outfit, without any sort of hat, but I have no reason to believe she is not a red hatter. She has the primary requirements to be one: in this election, choosing joy, would mean going with the McCain Palin ticket; she’s also a good Christian.
I ask her what denomination she belongs to and she laughs and says: “I’m a ‘methabaptapristacostal’… just a Christain. Then, assuming the air of someone who’s about to say something really important. She looks me in the eye and says: “The main things are the plain things.”
She begins counting the main things on her fingers: “Was He born of a virgin; was He crucified; did He die; was He raised from the dead; has He ascended to the right hand of the father… the main things are the plaayne things. And you can put any label you want to put on it, but the main things are the plain things. And they are true. They are true.”
Faced with these profound, and totally sincere beliefs, I can’t help turn the conversation towards other countries and other faiths. We begin in Iraq, where it’s difficult to tell either main or plain.
Mrs Black pauses a bit to take in the question. “I think about the bigger picture, I think that politicians will come and go and do whatever it is that they have to do. I think the truth is that God is in control. And the truth is that this is going to play out how He wants it to play out.”
She continues: “Things that are meant for evil, God has a way of turning them into good in the bigger picture that we don’t even see. I do know that the end-time war, Armageddon in Revelation, is going to be somewhere in the east. Somewhere, Iraq, Iran… somewhere there. I think it’s a fool’s game not to keep that firmly in mind.”
Right there, I thought, in succinct, easy language, was Bush’s foreign policy. Had Mrs Black ghost-written it?
But what about good young American kids going out there and dying, I ask.
“Good young American kids died for the revolution. Good young American kids died in World War 1, for World War 2, for Vietnam. Do I like good young American kids going to die? Absolutely not.”
Wouldn’t you want to stop the war right now?
“All wars. ‘The-o-ret-ically.” She draws the word out deliberately. “In a perfect world… that would be wonderful.
“In a perfect world, there would be no sorrow. In a perfect world we wouldn’t have people trying to come over and kill us. In a perfect world we wouldn’t have to have a bigger stick than the other guy to make them… behave. In a perfect world…”
She was clearly not ghost-writing Dubya’s speeches: they had nothing of the lyrical quality of her extempore.
“People have died for the rights that we have. To go to the churches we go to–or not. To pray when and where we choose… people have died for these rights that we have to make this country what it is.
“We have more a sense of ‘I appreciate that’ and clearly the rest of the world thinks that because they’re pouring in our shores legally and illegally by the millions. Clearly, other people think, ‘we see that, we like that, we want a piece of that’. We think that’s good. And our boys think that’s worth dying for. And the mothers send them off… To die for it.”
Two teardrops roll down Mrs Black’s pink cheek as she says this. She looks away, her lips quivering. I ask if I’ve upset her.
“No, no, no, no, no! Honey I’m southern, we cry as easy as we laugh. We’ll probably hug when we’re through” she says, wiping her tears.
“I was saying that if a ship is moving then God can turn the rudder change the direction of the ship, but if it’s just sitting there stagnant then ain’t nothing gonna happen. So we’re moving, and if we’ve made mistakes, then God can alter and change them. Whether its through who gets in office or whatever he uses.
“Yes I vote–but I also pray.”
Tags: Christian, Dayton Coffee House, Dayton+Tennessee, Faith, George W Bush, Iraq, John McCain, Red Hatters, Republican, Sarah Palin, US Elections 2008, US Foreign Policy, War
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Sen learns how to use a camera
October 13th, 2008
Sen learns how to use a camera
Sad bears during hunting season
Sen learns how to use a camera
Sad bears during hunting season
Fall
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What Tennessee is teaching … October 10th, 2008
Dayton, Tennessee
Miss Eleanor would have been 3 when the ‘Monkey Trial’ trial took place here. She spent here life as a math teacher. One math problem that she or the several generations of teachers in Tennessee (including the present one) haven’t posed to their students is: If a boat were to accommodate a pair of animals of every species, how big would it need to be?
It’d have to be a little bigger than Dayton (10,000 people), and, in fact, all of the Bible Belt, I suspect. But why recalculate when Noah’s done all of that already?
Miss Eleanor will vote Republican. This is not a given with everyone who shares her beliefs–and everyone in Tennessee, give or take a few confused liberals, does. Religion is the superset here, two of its subsets happen to be republican and democrat.
Miss Eleanor’s decision has a lot to do with John McCain’s vice-preidential choice. “Long before she became a running mate. When everybody wanted her to have that abortion (Palin’s fifth Down syndrome, a condition that affects both physical and intellectual growth)… and she said that the Lord had given her this baby and she certainly wasn’t going to get rid of it… Oh I hope she wins this election.”
And with that she left the Dayton Coffee shop. It was her birthday, she had come in for lunch. As she does often, sitting at a table from where you can read the Ten Commandments on the wall.
People wear badges here saying: ‘I’m voting for Sarah Palin… Oh yeah, and that old guy too’. The Alaska governor is anti-abortion; her views on gay marriage are that the only union sanctioned by God is one between man and woman; and she is a believer in the biblical version of the origin of man and the world (created in a week). What more proof does Dayton need that she will make a fine vice-president? Even the dominant baptists grudgingly set aside their belief that the woman’s place is in the home for Sarah’s sake.
According to state law, and this applies to all public schools, creationism can’t just not be taught, teachers could get sued for even mentioning it. Darwin is an integral part of the curriculum and has to be taught as a theory (as opposed to a fact), because even though the evidence is overwhelming, it is still a theory, unlike, say, the laws of motion. People like Sarah Palin would prefer if creationism was taught alongside Darwin’s theory as an alternative theory, but tough luck to them.
In practice, though, schools and teachers in places with the same beliefs as Dayton have gotten around the problem quite easily: they simply make an error of omission, by not teaching evolution. Result: kids who have never heard of Darwin, leave alone the Galapagos islands.
There is one cost that these towns incur for doing this that they refuse to take into account. The Advanced Placement exam that high-schoolers take to go to college has a curriculum where evolution is a central theme. If you fail the test because you haven’t heard of natural selection or cannot answer questions on the evidence in support of evolution, your chances of going to college are greatly reduced.
Moreover, if you do well on these tests, you get credits to take with you to college. Which means you can graduate in less than four years. For parents who have to pay huge fees, every semester gained is several thousand dollars saved. One would have thought that Dayton, which so cleverly brought money back into town with the Scopes trial, wouldn’t mind sitting through a few evolution lessons if it saved a few thousand bucks. But no, that’s asking too much.
Judge McKenzie, who presides over the court in Dayton nowadays comes from a family that was involved in the trial that made Dayton famous–on the prosecution side. He says his favourite word is ‘jail’ and his least favourite word is ‘atheist’. Neither he nor his kids have read anything about evolution. Nor have the two young convicted felons I speak to next. ‘Do you think all the world’s animals would fit on one boat?’ I ask. ‘Sure’ says one, ‘if you took just two of each.’
Tags: Dayton, Dayton Tennessee, John McCain, Noah's Ark, Sarah Palin, Scopes Trial, US Elections 2008
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Wear a smilette, happy days are ahead… but when? October 8th, 2008
Roanoke, Texas
There’s an uncanny similarity between the great depression and the present crisis, not just in the events but in Washington’s response. The republican president at the time, Herbert Hoover woke up late, as did the American people. They bought his line of ‘a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage’ (now they’re talking cycles!), electing him in 1928 only to quickly turn him into a universal hate figure (like Dubya, in the current polls).
But republicans carried on gamely at that time, trying to spread a message of hope and exhorting people to take responsibility. Much the way Sarah Palin did in the vice-presidential debate–even though she seems to know as much about the economy as she does about Alaska-Russia relations.
One of the better ripostes to this ‘hope; spend within your means’ line, appeared in a 1930s cartoon which said that prosperity was around the corner and if you cannot afford a smile, if you should wear a ’smilette’. This is precisely what kitchen table republicans are now advocating, though we are short of a good cartoon in response.
I met someone who lost his job last month. He would have been okay about wearing a ’smilette’. I suspect the disincentive is that if you wore it too long, you’d end up looking like a stewardess on a micro-light aircraft.
The ‘new direction’ that Washington is talking about has a word in common with FDR’s 1932 ‘new deal’ in the literal sense, but really, the steps being proposed are very much like the ones in the 30s. At a fundamental level will take taxpayers’ money. This is difficult to sell, politically, which is why the first attempt at getting the bill passed in the Congress failed.
FDR’s plans kicked in when unemployment was breaking America’s back and included things like soup kitchens, and (generally non-productive) government employment schemes. But he also set up the Home Owners Loan Corporation which lent money to about a million possible defaulters. This is very much on the table now, because apart from the from all the foreclosures, there are between 6 and 10 million people who have an incentive to walk away from their mortgage payments.
The most important response common to that time and now, however, is more regulation. The Securities Exchange Commission was set up in 1934 to prevent a repeat of 1929. One of the main changes it made was to stop margin buying. If you wanted a stock, you had to show about half the money.
In the present scenario, the financial markets will have to say goodbye to many of its unsupervised activities. The first in line will probably be the clandestine, and catastrophic, credit swaps (I lend you money, and then insure myself against a default with a third person, because i know you cannot repay; if, as i expect, you don’t pay me, he has to. this was the baby AIG was left holding.)
Regulation has been a bad word in America for the longest time, and the changes in the offing are likely to be profound: there’s a realisation that America has been a little too free and much too brave for its own good. Republican or democrat, this translates to ‘we always sort of knew that the market couldn’t take care of all our problems, but now we’re willing to admit it and do something about it’.
Deeper down, the crisis doesn’t just affect main street, or John McCain road. During the Great Depression, it entered people’s homes. in 1940, 14 years after the realty bubble burst in Florida and and pinged America into a downward spiral, a survey found that 1.5 million jobless, depressed, American men had abandoned their families.
The first reports of marriages breaking up over who’ll pay the mortgage bill are already coming in this year.
Tags: Barack Obama, Depression, FDR, Financial Crisis, John McCain, Main Street, Marraiges breaking up, Regulation, Roanoke Texas, Sarah Palin, Sub prime crisis, US Elections 2008
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Hello world! October 5th, 2008
Right, we’re off. The Economic Times has a page one pointer about what I’m up to:
WITH just a month to go for the presidential elections, Avirook Sen will travel coast-to-coast in the USA for ET. He will talk to unlikely people and report from improbable datelines, describing life in America at a time when it seeks both stability and change, when it has to choose between black and white, and worry about fuel, food and Wall Street to boot. Sen’s travels will take him from the centres of the civil rights movement to where Sarah Palin was born, with many stops in between. We invite you to join ET on this journey.
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