November 7, 2008
The implications of Tuesday's elections will continue to cascade for months and years to come. There is no way to get in front of this; we're out run.
Because many of the changes have already occurred. Even if we refuse to see them.
In no particular order...
In Japan, Korea and Germany, auto manufacturers are already re-thinking their strategy of building cars in North America. It is a positive reflection on their employees as well as the companies' executives, that foreign plants throughout the South and West have never been unionized. Check card unionizing or the Freedom of Choice act would change everything. As a supporter of a decertification campaign, I know that choice would be replaced by two guys named Bruno. Lost also would be the discretion to train employees and build cars in a rational and flexible way that maximizes productivity and profit. Not to mention they only valid job security. Now a thoughtful yearning look toward the global South is more likely. An enthusiastic and able work force is difficult to maintain under a UAW labor monopoly in which entitlement blots merit. Handwringing over the loss of shrunken and debt-ridden Detroit automakers has blinded the government and the media to another threat to American manufacturing -- the potential loss of growing and profitable auto companies. But then we're witnessing the "death of capitalism." Blame Adam Smith and Fredrick Hayek.
If check card comes, I refuse to endure another campaign of intimidation. I will defend myself. Whatever it takes.
Magnanimity should be the collective benefit of this election and yet petty leftism continues. USA Today on Wednesday announced Sen. Obama's election to the office of President of the United States of America as the erasure of "a racial barrier." Look at that article again, "a" racial barrier. Really? Not the fall of "THE" racial barrier -- election of a black man to the highest office in what is still the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet? The sore winner is always a puzzle. Perhaps alone in the newsroom at night, a reporter or editor realizes that the Change to Come is already here in too many cities and states across the country. Michigan chief among them. But editorially, fairness outsells facts. Well, actually, no. American disgust with the media can now be measured in junk bonds. Will Detroit or Pontiac or Compton or Oakland or Baltimore look any better in the fall of 2012 than they do now? It's doubtful. Will the media notice. Even more unlikely. The most powerless of Black Americans have suffered this manic hope before. And, call me crazy, to quote Charlie Sheen, but the black folks I saw at the Royal Oak bus station or sitting in Macdonalds did not seem transformed. Middle and upper middle class blacks from Southfield, Birmingham, and Bloomfield Hills -- and union members -- seemed the primary beneficiaries of this discretionary hope. This transformational moment, as Gen. Powell has called it, transfigured only the well off. Not to mention Oprah's on-air orgasm this Wednesday (again, I mean it, don't mention it, don't even think it).
USA Today's sour grammatical quibbling cuts another way. It diminishes the change that has occurred across American over past decades. Millions of Catholics and Irish and Italians and Germans and Hispanics (not to mention white Southerners -- I mean it, don't mention them) made Sen. Obama's victory possible. Change of mind and heart is rarely accomplished by civic bullying from Washington or the ACLU, NOW, NARAL, NAACP, HRC, NBC, ABC, and CBS. This change took time. It is durable. And it was done mostly without the forced march through the institutions or your living room. At work, I joked that perhaps Sen. Obama will have Prince compose a new and singable national anthem. This was greeted by one young colleague with a look of pure hatred. Not the first time. Listening to the children of friends, I despair at the thoroughness of their indoctrination from kindergarten on. Me, I would have laughed at my dated pop reference. Although, at my age, knowledge of a more timely reference would have been as pathetic as dyeing my white hair back to red... Better to be humorless about the color of a president elect than say, the moral depravity of abortion or foster care.
Which raises another consequence of the election. The media's continued ignorance of America, especially the South and the suburbs. They wanted to have it both ways -- a clear, clean victory and someone to blame no matter who won. According to the media, the southern states which supported Obama did so because of northern migration. Yet, white Southerners have been voting for Black mayors, sheriffs, judges, legislators and senators for a generation. You figure it out; because your local newspaper editor is going to try.
Sen. Obama has lived a sheltered life. Private schools (courtesy of his affluent and accomplished grandmother who died just before election day); Columbia, Harvard, a white shoe Chicago law firm, Hiatt Hotel money, and twelve years teaching whatever they're teaching now in constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Punching your ticket in community activism distinguishes you from no one on the Upper East Side or the north Chicago coast of Lake Michigan. Worldwide travel has inflated Obama's sense of sophistication. The "merci beaucoup" moment may have been forgotten by the media, but not by many of the 80% of American who don't have a passport. The irony here, given the tangled demographics of this sprawling land, is that most Americans interact with more tribes and nationalities during the course of one day in the life of America than the average enlightened European or Canadian. You cannot live ANYWHERE in America and encounter exclusively "your own kind." Except, strangely, those areas whose inward gaze is encouraged by Rev. Wrights and Fr. Pflegers. I rarely hear anyone complain that it should be any another way. Perhaps, among other historical events, the senator has not heard of the 1965 immigration act. I'll bet his humiliated wife hasn't.
All of this demographic kneading promises the continued assault on the individual experience, the individual accomplishment, the individual conscience. The obsession with "our own kind" is a leftist one. Its public face -- affirmative action -- denies the possibility of the future. The future is unknowable and admitting ignorance does not square with the omniscience of diversity. Complacency and self-satisfaction with the present is often the results and the results of that is often decline. Again, welcome to Michigan.
Sen. Obama and his party have played American Christians well in this election. Notably Catholics and mainstream Protestants. I knew it was over for Sen. McCain on Sunday morning. During a break in a Catholic catechism class, a woman came up to me to brag that she and her husband were "working for Obama." My mood -- already fragile from a week-long bout with the flu -- slumped further. Sen. Obama and his party are hyper rationalists and materialists. They are sure of cause and effect. Especially when the one term of the equation is consistently left out -- the individual. Despite the history of Black Americans, the sense of tragedy is missing. This absence can cut like a Venice Beach wave toward complacency or an urgent sense of fulfilling the future. Unfortunately, in this election, a 150 million dollars of union dues buys a lot of satisfaction with the present. And it may well have purchased a law to compell growing the ranks of the self-satisfied. It must be what they mean by "social justice."
Not all was peace and social justice this week. Despite a tail-whipping of the Republicans in California, Proposition Eight passed, constitutionalizing the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman and daring Sen. Obama and liberal judges to defy citizen will yet again. Since Wednesday, the streets of the Golden State have filled with near-riots and attacks on motorists trying to get home or to work or to pick up their kids from school. Signs warned that "your rights are next" accompanied by swastikas. No surpise then that only Catholic were fooled by the Obama campaign's courting of Christians -- they have jettisoned their Thomist tradition even as evangelicals begin to discover their own. Evangelicals voted their conscience and their faith. Meanwhile Mormons were targeted by Human Rights Campaign ads portraying them as secret police knocking on the door of a lesbian couple in the middle of the night. The Mormon's sin? Doing what the unions did, putting their money where their values are.
Most friends and acquaintances beieve I've become "homophobic." Completing the troika of bigotry -- at work I'm accused of racism and sexism while managers stand by, their arms folded, their heads nodding. At work, I shocked someone when I admitted -- after confessing that I supported Sen. McCain -- that in 1972 I voted for both Sen. McGovern and the late Coleman Young. I didn't say that I am ashamed of those votes now. And my journey from McGovern to McCain, since it is merely the journey of one man, and not a Struggle of millions, was of no interest and invalid on its face. I could have also admitted that I once supported gay marriage and abortion. Not out of any thoughtful consideration -- just going along to get along. Predator priests and having someone spit on your neck for a hundred miles can change a man. Years ago, the president of HarperCollins sent a bus full of editors to the company's warehouse to show them what happens to books that don't sell. They come back by the truckload, get mulched, or sold off for pennies on the pound. On the way home, a puffy, aging homosexual editor spent the ride wetly vilifying me and people like me. Wrong schools, wrong ideas, wrong background, wrong parents. The mid-town Manhattan usual. The irony ended there. That he edited Tony Hillerman -- a genre writer who specialized in the Navajo and the general despair of reservation life -- was entirely consistent. No contradiction when tribal conformity is elevated above one person's too American life. And, perhaps ironically, the late Mr. Hillerman never seemed to understand why, as with our large cities, things never get better on our larger reservations.
On Wednesday, California Republican went back to work, to their familes, to raising their children. They had neither the free time nor the discretionary income of community organizers to spend the afternoon obstructing "fascists" trying to get on with their lives and families.
The rude remarks, the hateful looks, and the cold shoulders must have been a common experience for many this week all over America. Admittedly worse for someone like myself who works in a business dominated by feminists and homosexual activists (at least one of my supervisors was featured on the cover of a local gay paper as a political activist -- I doubt he would have been promoted if he were merely a hardworking, experienced white male).
And that may be the most immediate and debilitating consequence of this election. It was more a controlled and channeled mania than a political campaign. The Obama Volk intimidated the individual. Voting one's conscience meant passing on the opportunity to participate in history. Unacceptable. I dread returning the catechism class this Sunday. That 55% of American Catholic voters who supported Obama represents another failure by the Church. Perhaps more toxic in its fallout than the unwillingness to follow the Boy Scouts' example and put the protection of young boys before the political activism of out of control religious and lay people.
Voting my conscience prohibited a small contribution to history. I quipped the other day that I may very well go to hell. But it won't be for promoting abortion or contributing to the moral numbness that is now the default legacy of too many young Americans.
I've been in the minority before. Apparently as an aspiring Catholic, I was in the minority again on November 4th.
Sam Macomb
PS A couple of years ago, I wrote that the primary reason some Americans were ashamed of President Bush and "his war" and "his policy of torturing" was because they ruined their travel plans. Being American made shopping in Paris occasionally uncomfortable. Recent statements by the poetaster Maya Angelou and just plain upper class folks in Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills confirms that. They are "no longer ashamed" of their country when they travel abroad. Or, as Ms. Angelou put it -- "no longer oppressed" by her country while dining in the better bistros of Europe. Discomfort in Paris and London is discretionary oppresson indeed...
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