The utter fucking defiance on his face was quite something. This man-child has been dreaming of vengeance all his life and now he’s bought his turn. I just hope there’s enough of a judicial system left to slow this shit down and tie it up for as much of the next four years as possible.
In the meantime, something – racism, perceived incompetence and/or just aggravating annoyance – seems to have short-circuited Ramaswamy’s federal ambitions and he’s been sent packing back here to Ohio. He asked DeWine about Vance’s senate seat, but there are more competent evildoers in my state, so that was gifted to Husted and Ramasmarmy was pissy enough to then declare for the next Gov race. Amy Acton – who was our Chief of Public Health during the start of the pandemic, who worked with DeWine to actually do the right thing until the leg took that ability away, and who faced armed goons patrolling the sidewalks in front of her house for months as a result – has also declared. But unless she gets lucky enough for him to win the primary – something that won’t happen in this state – she probably doesn’t have much of a chance. A shame. It would be so nice to have someone in charge like her when the inevitable happens with H5N1.
Reminds me of an encounter from my own impolitic past. One of my best friend’s Oklahoma cousins had come to visit over the Christmas holidays in 2000, and we were sitting around my friend’s living room, having a drink and shooting the shit while their wives were somewhere well out of earshot, avoiding the testosterone haze. “Well,” said the cousin, “what d’yall think about these power outages?” (This was at the height of the Enron market manipulations, before the rest of the country found out what we Californians already damned well knew.)
Before I had any thought of the probable effect on my friend’s family relationships, I piped up: “I think California oughta declare war on Oklahoma and Texas. We’d be in OKC in 48 hours, and Austin in a week.” Dead silence for a beat or two (we were doing 4/4 time, I reckon, like all good Americans whatever their politics) and then the embarrassed hahas led directly into another round of whatever. Truth be told, if I were 60 years younger, I’d move back to Santa Barbara today and enlist in the National Guard before the red hat triumphalists try exercising anything but their mouths on my favorite state.
If I’m reading things correctly, OH isn’t as irretrievably red as my current resting place AZ is, but the Democrats’ indifference to offshoring and the resulting rustbelt deserves to live in infamy along with the rest of their miscalculations. I should feel much worse about what’s happening there than I do, but then, alas, I’m living in AZ, which is far more of a political hellhole than OH is ever likely to become.
Our mutual disappointments aside, I’m well, and hope you and yours are likewise. Warm is proving, as always, a hostage to the whims of meteorology. Here the lowest we’ve seen so far is 19º F. I feel for you guys, though, at least from what I’ve been reading in the national weather reports. Spring will be welcome when it finally gets here, that’s for sure.
PedinskaJanuary 22, 2025 / 6:47 pm
I think of Ohio as reddish-purple. The state went for Obama twice but once he made his 2nd term the dems left the state behind. I guess they didn’t want to take on the gerrymandering fight. Figured they could make up the electoral deficit elsewhere. Those calculations haven’t exactly panned out well.
The outright defiance/ignoring of legal outcomes that Trump seems ready to exercise to his fullest capacity was something pioneered – or maybe just refined – here. The state has been ignoring (state) SC rulings on education funding for decades. Literally just thumbing their noses while crowing “Make me!”.
Speaking of familial political faux pas, the pandemic turned out to have one small blessing for us, it broke the family tradition of spending every Thanksgiving and Christmas at my brother’s house. I don’t have the stomach to argue with people who don’t actually listen to what I say before telling me what they think they heard. And it only gets worse the more alcohol is consumed.
We’re in one of those periods of transition, when everything is being called into question by everyone, and civilized standards seem to many like more of a threat than a protection—with good reason, as is already becoming plain enough to anyone with eyes to see. Think of the revelations that came to Gramsci in prison, or to Yeats at the end of the Great War. One thing we can be sure of: what happens in Ohio or Arizona isn’t going to stay in Ohio or Arizona.
If the worst at the family holiday table are full of passionate intensity, it’s probably best just to avoid them now and in the future. They have no way, really, to understand or cope with what’s coming. They want to get mad and break things—but there’s no reason we should feel compelled to offer ourselves up to be broken. We have work to do.
(A personal apologia is relevant here, I think: I learned this the hard way during the Vietnam War. My father was a colonel in the army, I was an antiwar activist. I came out of that transition without my family, but otherwise intact in mind and body, which is more than many of my contemporaries who trusted the authority figures of the time were able to manage. I’m sorry to this day for what happened to them and their counterparts on the other side, but I’ve never otherwise regretted my decision, nor the freedom it gave me to think my own thoughts.)
PedinskaJanuary 23, 2025 / 6:16 am
I can’t imagine what it must have been like to go through the Vietnam War under those circumstances. I’m sure similar ruptures have been occurring in families with disparate views on the devastation of Gaza, though I wonder if there are as many here now embracing humanity over barbarity as there were then, when every family literally had skin in the game as opposed to watching from afar.
Re: Things not staying in OH or AZ, I predict the ability to put citizen initiatives on ballots will be eliminated, or altered enough to make meaningless, next. In Columbus we have democrats in charge of city council. Their technique for avoiding what citizens want is to just ignore/deny the petitions/signatures/rules when they come before them. Thus far the Rs – though they fiddled with every other aspect they could – were not quite able to keep abortion and marijuana off the ballot. Their attempt to raise passage to a 60% supermajority, had they had it in place, would have defeated both those issues, so I suspect changes will be coming retroactively to do what has tied citizen hands in other states. Because nothing enrages them more than being slapped in the faces by the very voters they so carefully manipulated into districts shaped like ducks so they could pretend to be everybody’s Daddy.
Yes, the agony of Jewish families over the failed promise of Israel, of watching their relatives slowly becoming the monsters they’d been fleeing from, is going to take decades to unravel. Irony in the eyes of those who were once their moral allies can’t be much help to them either. One of the reasons I haven’t written about the crucible of Palestine even though I feel being an honest commentator on things political obliges me to, is that the tragedy is just so enormous and eloquent in and of itself that I can’t think of anything simultaneously just and merciful to say about it.
As far as our own crucible here in the US is concerned, yes, there are still hopeful signs. What we lack, though, we 49% who stand in opposition the coming atrocities, is a coherent politics, a clear image of the world we want to see emerge at the end of this. Moral clarity we have aplenty, but that can’t help us proselytize our way to a parliamentary majority anywhere, or even write a manifesto that all 49% of us can sign on to. That bothers me, I admit, but maybe in the end it’ll prove to be a good thing. Once upon a time the Marxists were absolutely certain they knew what was going on, and what was to be done about it, and they wound up with Stalin for their pains. Can we do better? I sure as hell hope so, and if a diversity of opinion helps us get there, then all I can say is bring on the petitions. I promise to read every one of them….
The utter fucking defiance on his face was quite something. This man-child has been dreaming of vengeance all his life and now he’s bought his turn. I just hope there’s enough of a judicial system left to slow this shit down and tie it up for as much of the next four years as possible.
In the meantime, something – racism, perceived incompetence and/or just aggravating annoyance – seems to have short-circuited Ramaswamy’s federal ambitions and he’s been sent packing back here to Ohio. He asked DeWine about Vance’s senate seat, but there are more competent evildoers in my state, so that was gifted to Husted and Ramasmarmy was pissy enough to then declare for the next Gov race. Amy Acton – who was our Chief of Public Health during the start of the pandemic, who worked with DeWine to actually do the right thing until the leg took that ability away, and who faced armed goons patrolling the sidewalks in front of her house for months as a result – has also declared. But unless she gets lucky enough for him to win the primary – something that won’t happen in this state – she probably doesn’t have much of a chance. A shame. It would be so nice to have someone in charge like her when the inevitable happens with H5N1.
Hope you are staying healthy and warm.
P
Reminds me of an encounter from my own impolitic past. One of my best friend’s Oklahoma cousins had come to visit over the Christmas holidays in 2000, and we were sitting around my friend’s living room, having a drink and shooting the shit while their wives were somewhere well out of earshot, avoiding the testosterone haze. “Well,” said the cousin, “what d’yall think about these power outages?” (This was at the height of the Enron market manipulations, before the rest of the country found out what we Californians already damned well knew.)
Before I had any thought of the probable effect on my friend’s family relationships, I piped up: “I think California oughta declare war on Oklahoma and Texas. We’d be in OKC in 48 hours, and Austin in a week.” Dead silence for a beat or two (we were doing 4/4 time, I reckon, like all good Americans whatever their politics) and then the embarrassed hahas led directly into another round of whatever. Truth be told, if I were 60 years younger, I’d move back to Santa Barbara today and enlist in the National Guard before the red hat triumphalists try exercising anything but their mouths on my favorite state.
If I’m reading things correctly, OH isn’t as irretrievably red as my current resting place AZ is, but the Democrats’ indifference to offshoring and the resulting rustbelt deserves to live in infamy along with the rest of their miscalculations. I should feel much worse about what’s happening there than I do, but then, alas, I’m living in AZ, which is far more of a political hellhole than OH is ever likely to become.
Our mutual disappointments aside, I’m well, and hope you and yours are likewise. Warm is proving, as always, a hostage to the whims of meteorology. Here the lowest we’ve seen so far is 19º F. I feel for you guys, though, at least from what I’ve been reading in the national weather reports. Spring will be welcome when it finally gets here, that’s for sure.
I think of Ohio as reddish-purple. The state went for Obama twice but once he made his 2nd term the dems left the state behind. I guess they didn’t want to take on the gerrymandering fight. Figured they could make up the electoral deficit elsewhere. Those calculations haven’t exactly panned out well.
The outright defiance/ignoring of legal outcomes that Trump seems ready to exercise to his fullest capacity was something pioneered – or maybe just refined – here. The state has been ignoring (state) SC rulings on education funding for decades. Literally just thumbing their noses while crowing “Make me!”.
Speaking of familial political faux pas, the pandemic turned out to have one small blessing for us, it broke the family tradition of spending every Thanksgiving and Christmas at my brother’s house. I don’t have the stomach to argue with people who don’t actually listen to what I say before telling me what they think they heard. And it only gets worse the more alcohol is consumed.
We’re in one of those periods of transition, when everything is being called into question by everyone, and civilized standards seem to many like more of a threat than a protection—with good reason, as is already becoming plain enough to anyone with eyes to see. Think of the revelations that came to Gramsci in prison, or to Yeats at the end of the Great War. One thing we can be sure of: what happens in Ohio or Arizona isn’t going to stay in Ohio or Arizona.
If the worst at the family holiday table are full of passionate intensity, it’s probably best just to avoid them now and in the future. They have no way, really, to understand or cope with what’s coming. They want to get mad and break things—but there’s no reason we should feel compelled to offer ourselves up to be broken. We have work to do.
(A personal apologia is relevant here, I think: I learned this the hard way during the Vietnam War. My father was a colonel in the army, I was an antiwar activist. I came out of that transition without my family, but otherwise intact in mind and body, which is more than many of my contemporaries who trusted the authority figures of the time were able to manage. I’m sorry to this day for what happened to them and their counterparts on the other side, but I’ve never otherwise regretted my decision, nor the freedom it gave me to think my own thoughts.)
I can’t imagine what it must have been like to go through the Vietnam War under those circumstances. I’m sure similar ruptures have been occurring in families with disparate views on the devastation of Gaza, though I wonder if there are as many here now embracing humanity over barbarity as there were then, when every family literally had skin in the game as opposed to watching from afar.
Re: Things not staying in OH or AZ, I predict the ability to put citizen initiatives on ballots will be eliminated, or altered enough to make meaningless, next. In Columbus we have democrats in charge of city council. Their technique for avoiding what citizens want is to just ignore/deny the petitions/signatures/rules when they come before them. Thus far the Rs – though they fiddled with every other aspect they could – were not quite able to keep abortion and marijuana off the ballot. Their attempt to raise passage to a 60% supermajority, had they had it in place, would have defeated both those issues, so I suspect changes will be coming retroactively to do what has tied citizen hands in other states. Because nothing enrages them more than being slapped in the faces by the very voters they so carefully manipulated into districts shaped like ducks so they could pretend to be everybody’s Daddy.
Yes, the agony of Jewish families over the failed promise of Israel, of watching their relatives slowly becoming the monsters they’d been fleeing from, is going to take decades to unravel. Irony in the eyes of those who were once their moral allies can’t be much help to them either. One of the reasons I haven’t written about the crucible of Palestine even though I feel being an honest commentator on things political obliges me to, is that the tragedy is just so enormous and eloquent in and of itself that I can’t think of anything simultaneously just and merciful to say about it.
As far as our own crucible here in the US is concerned, yes, there are still hopeful signs. What we lack, though, we 49% who stand in opposition the coming atrocities, is a coherent politics, a clear image of the world we want to see emerge at the end of this. Moral clarity we have aplenty, but that can’t help us proselytize our way to a parliamentary majority anywhere, or even write a manifesto that all 49% of us can sign on to. That bothers me, I admit, but maybe in the end it’ll prove to be a good thing. Once upon a time the Marxists were absolutely certain they knew what was going on, and what was to be done about it, and they wound up with Stalin for their pains. Can we do better? I sure as hell hope so, and if a diversity of opinion helps us get there, then all I can say is bring on the petitions. I promise to read every one of them….