(Ms Maureen Bridgid Dowd, 60, in 2008. Photo Denise Williams.)
I have no sense of what Mr. Boehner and Mr. Obama discussed yesterday behind closed doors. I hope something is happening that will enable cooler heads to prevail, and some compromise can be found to accommodate something short of complete disaster, but I have no particular optimism on that score. I did my due diligence, though, with a certain morbid fascination.
It could go better or much worse, of course. One thing is for sure: this is all quite expensive and we are all going to pay more. That is not an observation about politics as much as it is a sober assessment of state of the defense industry. That may be one of the things Maureen Brigid Dowd could do without, or at least much less of it.
That led me, in a roundabout fashion, to read her latest venomous and entertaining post: “A Lost Civilization.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-lost-civilization.html
I like her. She is one of the stars of the NY Times OpEd pages: the Gray Lady’s gray lady. I like the way she writes- I have been impressed for years with the craft she bestows on her various screeds. She does have a way with words. She won a Pulitzer back in the last century for distinguished commentary, and is an authentic inside-the-Beltway muse, having been here since her college days at Catholic University.
(Maureen’s provocative dismissal of the other half of the race.)
She is uncertain about whether men are necessary- which would be incorrect uttered the other way- but I take her point.
Her Sunday column she artfully commingled the Mayan end-of-the-world calendar with the eclipse of white males in our society. It was a grand romp- and had a couple elements of truth that I had to contemplate during the drive back up north in the rain from Refuge Farm.
“The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys. Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history.”
She scourges Mitt, of course, with the famous 47% comment about those dependent on the government, which will surely swell to over 50% in this Obama second term. But she also makes the fine point about why the victory happened, noting ” …the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.”
Fair enough, I say. Hispanics tend to be Catholics, and social conservatives to boot. It is entirely possible that once the GOP gets over the hysteria about being overwhelmed at today’s version of the Alamo, things may even out.
A pal noted the other day that there has been a net decline in the tide of legal and illegal immigration, and the birthrate for Hispanic women is plummeting. The predicted dramatic demographic changes may have already hit a watershed. It will not matter to me much, I don’t think, since I will be in the ground before the greater trends are revealed in some future census. But Maureen’s castigation of the Republicans went on to note this from historian Will Durant:
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
I can get behind that, possibly not quite the way she may have intended.
After some extended disparagement of Mr. Romney, and allusion to the concluding quote from “Gone With the Wind,” (Margaret Mitchell, to my knowledge, was not an angry white male) she characterizes the superfluous males directly: “Gun sales have burgeoned since the president’s re-election, with Black Friday weapons purchases setting records as the dead-enders rush to arm themselves.”
That is a most curious sort of thing, since I tend to agree with her completely on this point- though “Dead Ender” is not precisely the way I would characterize it.
She does think that the hand-off from Mr. Obama to Ms. Clinton, augmented by the redoubtable Mr. Bill, will solidify the Progressive hegemony for the next dozen years, and perhaps forever.
I don’t know about that. I can take another lesson from all this. We have had trouble before in this nation, and put a lid on simmering resentment regarding the notion of rulers and ruled- and the position of the several states in the construct of governance.
I mentioned the other day how strange it seems that the national government is lurching left as the states appear to be lurching right.
Should the oil and gas boom play out as has been predicted- with no spirit in the divided Congress to actually address the cost-benefit of massive extraction of fossil fuel and the possible transformation of oil-thirsty importer to net exporter- the EPA will attempt to clamp down on the industry through executive fiat.
The temptation of the windfall profits to the largely Red State exchequers will be powerful. It appears there is an increasing tendency for the States to nullify what they perceive as Federal interference in their affairs. It is similar to the Executive Branch ruling through executive order, sidestepping the legislative process altogether. The states have responded by refusing to set up health insurance exchanges.
That is really quite remarkable. As many as 30 states are in some form of denial about implementing the basic mechanism that supports the Affordable Care Act, either refusing to participate altogether or deferring to some sort of partnership with the Feds.
I had thought that this was all settled a long time ago.
But maybe it is not. It could mean the stars are aligning for another tectonic shift in the body politic as fundamental as the one that killed the Whigs.
Me? I am no dead ender. For the record, I view rape as a violent and horrific crime. I oppose transvaginal ultrasound, favor medical marijuana, have no opposition to same-sex marriage, and welcome hardworking immigrants to America’s big tent.
To that end, I am hedging my bets. I have been working on my pigeon Spanish, just in case, but also purchased a new Remington Wingmaster 870 pump shotgun. It has some fancy engraving on it celebrating the 2nd Amendment.
We will see how it goes, won’t we?
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com