Disturbing blog post about how white blue-collar workers supposedly won’t vote for Obama if HRC doesn’t get the nomination.

There is absolutely no reason for white blue-collar workers to vote for McCain except for the fact that he’s white and Obama isn’t. Since McCain is simply going to be a continuation of W’s failed policies that will continue to foster economic decay, voting Republican is tantamount to economic suicide.

The sad fact of the matter is that, if we keep outsourcing their jobs to India and China, white blue-collar workers will eventually disappear.

We should really learn a lesson from the Republican Party this election. They know the jig is up, and that they’ve got to retrench if they don’t want to become completely irrelevant and go the way of the Whigs. So what do they do? They select the candidate that has the best chance—however remote—of appealing to independents and conservative Democrats. As a result, this move basically repudiates a significant segment of their base. Make no mistake, selecting McCain is a big middle-finger to the religious right.

I would argue that McCain will have a much harder time getting the religious right to back him up than Obama will getting white blue-collar workers to back him up. After all, McCain’s record shows that he really doesn’t care too much about the religious right’s agenda. McCain takes a libertarian stance to things like abortion, gay marriage, sex ed in schools, and the teaching of evolution. In contrast, Obama has been an organizer, for God’s sake. This is the precise demographics that he cares about: the worker that is getting shafted by corporate greed and uncontrolled globalization. Remember that he is of a new generation that simply doesn’t care about race the way that the older generations do.

As a person-of-color, it’s really hard to see the supposed appeal to the white blue-collar worker of HRC as someone who has their best interests in mind. All I can see is a call to white solidarity.

Suck on it, Clintstones. And note to the rest of America — we may not be as sexy as Hollywood or Wall Street, but you know what? We’ve got a shitload of money, and we know how to organize. We’re a powerful bunch of khaki-wearing, gay-marriage-supporting, arugula-eating, Mac-using elitist nerds out here. To all of you racist homophobic non-Californian dumb fucks who find that annoying? Tough shit. We outsmarted you. We out-spent you. And now for the next eight years we’re going to be running this country. We’re going to give equal rights to gay people, fund stem-cell research, teach evolution, take down the fence on the Mexican border, and make sure abortion stays safe and legal. We’re going to pull out of Iraq, shut down Gitmo, and stop torturing people. And yeah. A black dude with a Muslim-sounding name and degrees from Columbia and Harvard is going to be in charge. So sit back down, strap yourself in, and shut the fuck up, crackers.“ — The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: How the Valley put Obama over the top, via hellofriend, via cajunboy, via caro, via claudia, via britticisms, via soupsoup, via seriouslythough, via poortaste, via ayşe.

XVII

the best leaders, no one has ever heard of them, they are scarcely known
while those who end up with the mantle of leadership may be famous and loved by all,
or probably feared,
or probably despised.

if you can’t trust, then you can’t be trusted

when things get done
without the pundits and the critics exchanging empty words
the ordinary people will look back and say, “We did it.”

His opponents on both sides of the aisle are trying to make hay with Obama’s comment about the ”typical white person” who is afraid of black men. But they miss the point entirely. He’s not throwing his grandmother under the bus, as some are wont to say. He’s not trying to insult white people. He’s merely illustrating an unfortunate truism about American culture, which Chris Rock touched upon a long time ago:

When I go to the money machine at night, I ain’t looking over my back for the media. I’m looking for niggers!

In America, the darker your skin is, the more you are feared. It sucks, but it’s true. It’s not just white people who do this. Brown people do it to. Even black people can be conditioned to be fearful of black people.

Because black people hate black people, too. Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people don’t like about black people.

But everyone is trying to hide behind the facade of political correctness. I can hear it now. I’m not a racist. How dare you call me a racist? But by definition, if you partake of American culture, you’re a racist. Even people of color can be racist.

The first step to recovery is recognizing the problem. Americans, especially white people, but including many people of color, continue to pretend that there is no problem, that racism is some relic from the past (even though fifty years ago, it was still legal to segregate.) People keep trying to pretend that we have a level playing field, and that anyone crying “racism” is merely playing the race card and trying to leverage their skin color for an unfair advantage.

Barack is keeping it real. The majority of American History has been hostile to people-of-color, and to pretend that this history is over and done with—that this history has no ramifications on the present—is to stick your head in the sand.

I like to think I take a progressive stance on several issues: for example, universal health care, women’s rights for choice, same sex marriage. I want us out of Iraq now. I want us to work on alternative fuels, and to add stricter regulations to the consumption of hydrocarbons. On the other hand, I’m all for a small government. Maybe Reagan successfully brainwashed me as a child. If I lived during the time of the foundation of the Republic (and I wasn’t a person-of-color), I might have been a Whig. I’m all for weak executives, paralyzed/gridlocked legislators, and strict constructionists. Let the people in power play their futile tug-of-wars. It will let the rest of us get down to business. To me, states’ rights are paramount, and local politics are key.

The company who is running this site is Dutch. I honestly didn’t think that Obama was more progressive than Edwards, but apparently it’s not just the media frenzy that makes me want to vote for my man Barack. According to this site, he actually best matches my political positions.

I wasn’t expecting this.

Since 2001, I’ve been struggling with a crisis of faith. I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church as a baby, participated in the Eucharist, and was Confirmed. I went to a parochial elementary school and junior high. I went to a high school that is run by the Jesuits. In college, and in the beginning of med school, I participated in the Catholic Community.

I still believe that the person presented by the four Gospels known as Jesus Christ is someone worth emulating—someone who cares for the unwanted, the down-trodden, the outcast. Someone who is willing to face up to authority and to unflinchingly stand true to your beliefs, without arrogance, without false bravado.

I still keep the words from the sermon on the mount in my heart: blessed are the poor, blessed are the hunger, blessed are those who, in their quest for justice, are made to suffer at the hands of authority. Blessed are those who are merciful, blessed are those who strive to bring peace to the world.

But in 2001, evil and/or deluded people performed evil deeds in the name of God—Muslim and Christian alike—and in the religious communities around me, no one heeded my cry for understanding. I was treated to dirty looks, and shaking heads, as if I were the one who was crazy and deluded.

The Roman Catholic Church’s failure to express true contrition for the acts of perversion their representatives have done over the years was another blow to my faith. The continued ranting and raving of sick fucks like Pat Robertson for vengeance upon his enemies and the failure of other Christians to condemn him made me wonder what the point of believing was. The demented, idiotic leaders of this nation who are intent on turning our secular democracy into a Christian fascist theocracy, every bit as sick and twisted as the madness spewed by bin Laden, made me wonder if God even existed.

My religious education through the years has taught me that God does not make himself/herself manifest to human beings in flashy, ostentatious ways. In my mind, much of the Old Testament is allegorical, metaphorical, and reflects the incomplete thinking of less sophisticated people, or more likely, the imperfect translation of less sophisticated, more superstitious people. So while I don’t believe in the literal appearance of a burning bush, that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to know the story of Moses, and to draw lessons from it. So I’m not expecting God to suddenly appear with the legions of heaven behind him. I’m not expecting him to show up in my dreams telling me that everything is OK. More than anything in the Scriptures, I think of what Galileo told the Inquisitors:

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

God has already given us the answers. I’m not just talking about sacred scriptures. I’m talking about the totality of human experience. About our relationship to each other, and to the physical world. The difficult part is understanding it all. Faith is not about easy answers, or blind obedience. Faith is about trying to understand. Without doubt, there cannot be faith.

But in the end, I cannot completely be rid of my desire to believe that a massive, benign hyperintelligence exists somewhere in the great beyond. Call it wishful thinking. Call it madness. I know that what everyone says God is, isn’t. Or at least, it’s not the whole of the story. Each culture in the world has an idea of what their supreme deity is like, and I think the post-modern, pre-Singularity vision of what this might be has already been postulated in works of speculative fiction.

I think of Charlie Stross’s Eschaton, the massively distributed galactic AI that shows signs of near-omnipotence, near-omniscience, near-omnipresence. Or Philip K Dick’s VALIS: the vast active living intelligence/information system that has been keeping its eye over us since the beginning of civilization.

I’ll accept the idea that it’s all just wish-fulfillment. Really, it’s just a more sophisticated form of an imaginary friend. But the fact of the matter is that, just as we can never prove the existence of God, we can never prove his non-existence either. (And if you believe in the Singularity, then it follows that a being with properties of God has a possibility of existing. And if you believe in Eternal Inflation, then anything that is possible is inevitable.)

In the end, I think the most honest answer to the question of “Does God exist?” is “I don’t know.” Anything else is dogmatism, in my mind.

But these thoughts come up when I overhear someone ask, “Is Obama Muslim?” Google leads me to this blog post that records Obama’s thoughts on his religion, and what he means by faith. It is the best answer I’ve ever heard someone give to the public at large. It’s just too bad that many people are too simple, too stupid, too wrong-headed to even have a chance to understand what he’s saying.

The blogosphere is a-twitter with Barack’s unlooked-for win in Iowa last night. Obama may not be as progressive as Edwards, and on certain positions he is definitely to the right of where I stand, but symbolically speaking, he is ideal.

Bruce Sterling, one of the founding fathers of cyberpunk gives us a little snippet of Rolling Stone’s coverage of Barack’s victory.

Some choice quotes:

[The next president must be] a symbol of the best possible future for twenty-first-century multicultural America and an antidote to both the callous reactionary idiocy of the Bush administration and the shrewd but soulless corporatism of the Clinton machine.

[Iraq, New Orleans, and other debacles/scandals] exposed much of Congress and the Cabinet as a low-rent crime family hired to collect protection money for the likes of Halliburton and Pfizer.

Obama is a dynamic, handsome, virile presence, a stark contrast to the bloated hairy shitbags we usually elect to positions of power in this country. Moreover, he completely lacks that air of grasping, gutter-scraping ambition sickness that follows most presidential hopefuls around like a rain cloud.

(The last one is my favorite.)

I know that every politician clamors for change and rarely ever delivers, but it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a shittier job of running the country than W has. Even I could do better while doped up on Valium and drunk off my ass. (At least I’d know not to get involved in a fucking land war in Asia!)

Seriously, though. W has shown us how low our country can go. Unless we do something batshit crazy like elect Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, it’s hard to imagine doing much worse for the next four to eight years. I mean, seriously, eventually we’ll have depopulated so much of Iraq that the insurgents would have anyone to hide behind. And while places like the Eastern seaboard and parts of California are likely to be underwater in the next decade or so, it’s not going to under the next president’s watch. The immigration problem will work itself out because soon American citizens will be just as uneducated and as challenged by the English language as the average undocumented worker, making the pay differential negligible. Spanish-speaking America (Mexico, Central America, South America) is likely to experience a renaissance as the dollar continues its downward spiral, making it even less favorable to try to get to the U.S.

It almost doesn’t matter, really. If Obama gets elected president, it will repudiate the current thinking of the DLC, that mealy-mouthed, spine-less, slimy, scummy branch of the Democratic government that has been promising center-right, Republicanesque policies all these long years. It will show all those fucking racists out there what’s what. (And don’t pretend that there aren’t a lot of closet racists out there.) It will show the rest of the world that we aren’t all a bunch of ignorant fuckwits who are out to destroy the world.

C’mon. We all know that Obama has at least 15-30 IQ points over W. Even if he were to start another hopeless war somewhere, and lose yet another entire American city to climate change, things would still probably go better than anything monkey-boy and his feces-hurling minions could cook up.

But it would change American forever. It would be a big “fuck you” to all the reactionary elements of our society. We want an America that is ready for the future, not an America that is forever looking backwards to a pre-1960’s, pre-Social Security/Title XIX, pre-free speech, pre-civil rights movement, pre-New Deal, even pre-abolition era (Just remember Trent Lott’s not-so-long-ago affirmation of Strom Thurmond’s straight-up segregationist/regressivist platform, may the motherfucker burn in hell.)

Welcome, once and for all, to the 21st century.

Barack Obama takes Iowa.

I’ll admit it, though. Barack is still not far left enough for me. In terms of politics, I’m definitely closer to Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich. But Barack’s message is powerful. Hope. And change. I wonder how Hillary is going to spin her third place showing. Maybe this will get her to finally give up the past, and to abandon her message of status quo ante W. We don’t want to just go back to the Pax Clintonis of the 1990s. What we want is a revolution.