Waving Hello

[mallorys_camera]

Thirty thousand people showed up to apply for Section 8 housing in East Point near Atlanta day before yesterday. Thirty thousand people. Wow. Just… wow.

I’m still alive but in Deep Hunker mode. Feel like Sara Crewe in the attic. Trying to come up with a plan. Rewrote the Decennium story so it’s now about art. Covered with mosquito bites; trying not to scratch. Agonizing over money but probably not as much as those thirty thousand people in East Point.

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“I hear these people saying [Obama]’s like George Bush”, says Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary. “Those people ought to be drug tested.”

Mi orina es la orina, Bobby.

wlotus advances the very interesting and original theory that Obama is the political equivalent of one of those black Pentecostal ministers whose sonorous catchphrases have the hat ladies fainting in the aisles.

(Is it racist of me to qualify “black” there? wlotus said "black", she is black.)

This is such a pivotal time. Mike K-L – a man I admire immensely – signs every email with a quote from Gandhi: We must become the change we seek.

But I don’t even know what change I seek, let alone how to become it.

Comments

[wlotus.livejournal.com]

I thought of another part of that analogy, one I have experienced in the black Pentecostal and the Evangelical church:

When the people start asking tough questions, rather than answering with compassion, patience, and transparency, the ministers and his supporters reprimand them for their "lack of faith".

[nokomisjeff.livejournal.com]

You are so right, the tactic is to personally attack anyone who disagrees. The politics of personal destruction on steroids.

[jdquintette.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you noticed, but Obama's press secretary recently dumped all over "the professional left" for not clapping loud enough and being critical of Obama's policies. Aparently we're not supportive enough. If Bush's people ever pissed all over their own base like that I must have been asleep that day.

I'm sure there are plenty of Obama-bots out there who are happy to applaud everything his administration does, but frankly I associate that kind of blind obedience with the republicans, who spent most of Bush's two terms talking about him like he was Winston Churchill. It was only when his popularity ratings got down below dogcatcher that people started jumping ship.

Democrats like to argue amongst themselves about policy and nuance. Republicans view that as a sign of weakness.

[jdquintette.livejournal.com]

“I hear these people saying [Obama]’s like George Bush”, says Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary. “Those people ought to be drug tested.”

Oops, I see you've got one of the quotes up.

I'm not sure why this is somehow not legitimate criticism. In many respects (Guantanamo, much of foreign policy etc.) Obama has continued along Bush's path. Maybe the guy means he's "not like Bush" because he doesn't have a ranch, or wasn't a cheerleader at Harvard or didn't sit out Vietnam in the National Guard or bankrupt a bunch of businesses or something. Who knows?

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Has there ever been a President who squandered so much good will in such a short time? Well, yes, one: George W. Bush...

We'll leave out Robert Gibbs for the moment -- he's a paid mouthpiece and he probably can't wait to get back to the BeeGees, Even Obama's most fervent supporters must realize by now that he's been an absolute failure in office. Has he ever faced failure before in his life? I doubt it. So his way of dealing with it seems to be by growing more and more arrogant. Compare him to Bill Clinton -- who, except for NAFTA, is lookin' real good to me these days: Clinton failed a lot. So he'd learned how to pick himself up and get back on hte horse.

I guess the thing about capitalism is that it's great until it isn't - and it isn't every 80 years or so. What's happening now is a lot like what happened in the '30s. The regulations that were implemented in the '30s were supposed to keep it from happening again, except Reagan threw them out.

I was having a conversation with somebody today about economics -- one of my favorite topics -- and all of a sudden, I burst into tears. It had finally hit me that I'm like one of those footnotes you read about in those biographies of Cornelius Vanderbilt -- Millions of people lost their livelihoods and homes in the Panic of 1873... Except it's the Panic of 2010 and I'm one of those faceless, forgotten millions.

[jdquintette.livejournal.com]

I watched Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" the other night. It was the usual moore movie, sloppy, sentimental, intellectually dishonest. But the picture he drew of the comfortable, middle class world we came into in the 50s was quite telling, when you contrast it to the dog-eat-dog one we live in now.

I guess the thing about capitalism is that it's great until it isn't - and it isn't every 80 years or so.

Actually I think the mid 20th century was an anomaly, and what we're in now is the norm. Human history is mostly a story of very few rich and very many poor. Then after WWII you get the rise of this new thing, the 'middle class' which is now going back to whence it came. Our mistake was in thinking it was 'normal' when in fact it was a blip.

In a way, you got a much shittier deal in this than I did. I've never made more money than I do now (around 45-50 thousand in an average year, from all sources) and I've mostly, my whole life, been what most people like you would call 'poor,' so I'm used to it. I don't LIKE it, but I don't feel like I've 'lost' a way of life in this crash. It sounds to me like you used to do pretty well for a while, so landing down here among us trailer trash must be a very bitter pill.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

landing down here among us trailer trash must be a very bitter pill

Would you really describe yourself as trailer trash? I wouldn't.

The money bought me time. I didn't buy anything with it. I've never really gotten over living my life like a graduate student. I just arranged my life so there was downtime -- it was the only time I could write.

It's the time I miss more than anything else. Although yes, of course, it would be nice to have five thousand dollars so I could move my furniture from California.

No,I was crying because all of a sudden it hit me: I don't matter. For a while people like me who've been rendered obsolete are the conscience of our culture. But after a while we're just annoying. And it's always been that way.

[jdquintette.livejournal.com]

e money bought me time. I didn't buy anything with it.

Well, that's what I'd buy, if I had money. I've got no use for 'stuff' for the most part.

The only time in my life I've ever had 'money' was after my dad died. For a while, I had $50,000 in my checking account. What I noticed right away was the abscence of something I'd never really been concious of, a constant, low level anxiety about money. Not the acute anxiety that ratchets up when checks bounce or the rent comes due and you don't have it. This is different, just a constant, low-level hum of anxiety that has been there literally all of my life. And it was gone. It was the most incredible feeling. I thought "this is what it's like to be financially 'comfortable.' Not 'rich," but just confident that your obligations are going to be met, and if you want, every once in a while you can buy yourself a treat, like a nice vacation or a new car."

A few months went by. I paid off my credit card debt, bought a couple of sports jackets and a pair of shoes. Lent my wife $10,000 to clear up a tax issue from when her business went bankrupt. And it was gone. And I'll probably never know that feeling again. I almost wish it had never happened, because how can you miss what you've never had.

Would you really describe yourself as trailer trash? I wouldn't.

I would. My dad and I were the only people in his family who ever went to college. Most of my relatives are blue collar, or if they're not, they're people like my uncle Bud, who owned a small 6 truck towing company. And in terms of money, I'm well below the 'national average' now and used to be even further. I made consistantly less than $30,000 a year up until I started teaching at Tulane. My dad retired at $42,500 after 30 years as an English prof. He would have done much better if he'd stuck with his job as a cargo handler at Boeing Field.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Trailer trash is not synonymous with blue collar for me. Trailer trash is synonymous with ignorance and a willingness to be programmed -- be it by Rush Limbaugh, the NBC Thursday night TV lineup, or even -- gasp -- by Barack Obama. Trailer trash are the living compost of totalitarianism. (Somewhere the ghost of George Orwell is vomiting quietly in a corner over that metaphore.)

If you read books and think, you're not trailer trash.