1. Here’s the problem with the Will Ayers thing, as I have observed this weekend–when people my age or younger think Obama is somehow associated with a domestic terrorist, they feel negatively about that. When they learn that it’s some dude from the 60s, though, and “some dude from the 60s” is as direct a quote as I can remember, they don’t give a shit. Self-described Democrats and Republicans.
Maybe among people older than us being associated with any kind of 60s radicalism has some great meaning and resonance for y’all, but for us, the general consensus on the 60s seems to be that a lot of weird shit happened back then but it doesn’t have anything to do with us. We can argue the veracity of that, but my point is that for those of us who weren’t alive in the 60s, we’ve developed a somewhat dismissive and callous attitude towards being dragged, yet again, back into the fights of the 60s.
It’s like the second you say “Obama knows some dude from the 60s” the whole crowd was just like “Oh, well, that’s different. What do you expect from some dude from the 60s?”
So, I’m with Mark, but for slightly different reasons. I say, let them name Ayers and explain what’s wrong with him because for young people, learning something more than “domestic terrorist” makes him irrelevant.
2. Thank the gods I missed this or I would have probably had a stroke and died trying to write a post about how supremely fucked up this is. But as it is, I get to see how delicious the resolution is and share it with you.
3. I have been trying for a while to write a post about Palin’s “small town Real America” schtick and I just have two things I keep coming back to. One, yes, she is as small town Real America as they come. There’s no need to pretend otherwise or that she’s somehow misrepresenting herself or misrepresenting small town America. She is what it is at its worst. I was telling the kids yesterday that it reminds me of when I was in high school and we girls would see something that irked us–like say that there were no girls doing something cool–and we would pitch a fit and they would rectify it by picking some girl who was not the most qualified girl, but the “right” girl. And the right girl was usually someone who would do okay, but not too well, and who would look good doing it.
It was a total pyrric victory. You supposedly won something for girls, but only for the right kind of girls, which you were inevitably not one of.
But two, I think the thing that pisses me off so much about Palin–and let’s be honest, I do have a visceral dislike of her–is that I and many of the people I care about deeply thought we made some kind of deal with small town America. “Fine, Small Town America,” we said, “You want to make sure we never forget that you think that we’re fags and freaks and whores and improper and not right and not like other people and just in general so weird to the point where we can barely breathe, fine. We’ll stop fighting for room here to live. We’ll go live somewhere else, somewhere cool, where there are more people like us or at least where people don’t give a shit what we’re like. But, if we have to give this up, then you have to take it. You stay on your side. We’ll stay on ours.”
And I feel like, yet again, the unspoken agreements we make to get through really don’t mean shit. The deal is, if folks like her want to turn small town America into some seething conservative hell-hole where, fine, but leave the rest of us alone. But no, here they come, hell-bent on doing to the rest of the country what they’ve done to the small places–and that is, I think, to run the rest of us out.
I just can’t abide by that. It makes me so damn angry.
I’m not going to concede my whole damn country to those fuckers.
Tiny Cat Pants 
Exactly. I was talking with my leans-Republican 27-year-old nephew over the weekend and he asked me who Ayers was. When I told him, he said “Well, who gives a shit about what happened in 1968? That was forty years ago! Next he’s going to run a scare-commercial telling us that Obama listens to Black Sabbath and subscribes to Rolling Stone. Jesus, how lame.”
I can’t figure out the whole Bill Ayers gambit. Anyone old enough to remember and care that still cares about shit like that was going to vote for McCain anyhow. Anyone old enough to remember and care who doesn’t care won’t be swayed. He’s lost the 40-and-under demo by a pretty big margin, so who exactly is he trying to pick up?
The Republican Party is trying to drown Obama in a glass of water and I just don’t think it’s going to work. Undecideds are typically not all that ideological — they are more motivated by pocketbook issues and let’s be honest, McCain’s not really building much of a case for himself as an economic genius or anything. I think that losing half the value of your 401K in the last two weeks is probably going to be a more pressing issue to American voters than whether Obama held a fundraiser at some 60’s dudes house.
I don’t get it either. I think it works only as long as no one digs any deeper than “domestic terrorist” but I think there’s a whole set of dog whistles having to do with the 60s that don’t mean anything for a lot of folks anymore.
And how can you have your vice-presidential candidate talking about how they’re not the ones constantly looking to the past or stuck in the past and turn around and say “Oh, except for the 60s! We are not going to let that shit go!”
well, I guess there goes my bid for the presidency. I used to have my mail delivered and buy beer / gas from rumoured Klan members. I guess I’m guilty by association
The other thing about the Ayers thing is that negative campaigning is always a double edged sword. You will always lose voters with negativity, the gamble is that you win more than you lose. In this case, the Ayer’s connection has already been brought up in this election. It’s old news, whatever damage it was going to do has been done. Talking about Ayers (or Wright for that matter) isn’t introducing new information that might convince some voter Obama’s not right for them, but it is a negative attack that might convince some voter that McCain’s not right for them.
I won’t deny that negativity may be the most effective method for the McCain campaign at this point, but I don’t know what they plan to accomplish with old stuff. Negativity generally only works when it’s fresh.
“pyrric” or pyrrhic
maybe you should be content to throw out a few more f-bombs
And miss out on your condescending assholishness? Nah.
Maybe you should learn to write in complete sentences, complete with capital letters and periods, when you’re being a condescending asshole.
Ha.
> You stay on your side. We’ll stay on ours.
To be fair, we (latte liberal commie fags) don’t stay on our side. We intrude via the law in not allowing “their” schools to have prayer or “their” legislatures to imprison people for miscegenation and/or sodomy. We insist on some basic-level freedom and protection for ‘minorities’, even in the hell-holes.
We also intrude via the media. Now you could argue that the small towns could band together and broadcast their own 24-hour channel: Pat Boone, Lawrence Welk, Andy Griffith, and “Live from Branson”, but they know that most of them would watch our sinful content instead. So we violate “the agreement” by assaulting them with content that they hate to love to watch.
Private schools operated and paid for by religious groups can have all the prayers they want, provided that they can make a fair run at meeting state-mandated curricular standards while doing so. Schools that we both pay for and thus must share, however, cannot.
You describe our local PBS station on a Saturday night. Hubba hubba and 23 skidoo.
1. As a certified leftover from the ’60s (I was politically precocious; what can I say?) I have one and only one reaction to this entire thing, which is not the one the McCain campaign wants me to have. It is the thought that McCain might just possibly piss Ayers’s household off big enough that Bernardine Dohrn might just possibly vote for a Democrat for what will probably be the first time ever. Bwhahahah!
3. Palin’s use of this trope doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it’s use by people who aren’t even from small towns but use it to take out their anger on the rest of us horrible different people anyway. I’m looking at you, George W. Bush.
This Ayers fellow is the excuse my uncle (a decorated veteran who has returned to the tee-niney hometown he used to belittle as “backwoods, gossip-riddled and incestuous” because it’s now “just so nice and conservative”) used to berate my mother last week for her “socialist tendencies” because she has openly endorsed Obama. He began to shout that it was clearly “guilt by association” and that Obama would “tear this nation apart because of his associates.”
Oddly, he got in his truck and left when my mother brought up the name Keating.
Score one for the Queen Mum, who is beginning to accept her socialist tendencies as long as it keeps down negative campaigning.
i wish i could post the following response on my own blog, but i know it’ll result in some horrible email war between me and my friends and family who still live in the small town i grew up in, so instead i’m just posting it here:
this “small town” rhetoric has been seeping into a lot of discussion, political and otherwise, and for me it’s a really personal topic. i’m from a very small town, and i left a very small town. this is a hard subject for me to really talk about openly because i’ve had a number of uncomfortable disagreements/conversations with people when the subject of small town v. urban living has come up. while i always feel bad talking shit about small towns while most of my family still lives in one, i left for a reason. smalltowners defend their way of life, and accuse urbanites of being a) elitist and b) socialists, not to mention try to make a point out of things like crime and pollution associated with urban areas. i like to point out that i know way more people who’ve been arrested/served time back in my hometown than i do here in oakland. most my personal community here doesn’t have a record.
liberal/conservative politics aside, the weird cultural chocolate-vanilla twist between “everybody knows everything about everyone” and “leave me the fuck alone”/libertarian bent is super dysfunctional. there is a weird thing in small town culture, where people feel like everyone should just leave them alone, even if they’re doing something wrong, like part of living in a small town is having the right to be an asshole and everyone should mind their own business. it’s often painted as a “liberal” thing to do – to tell your neighbors when you think they’re doing something wrong. i don’t understand this, just like i don’t understand how wanting to enforce accountability in government is a “liberal” thing. the government should be left alone to abuse our system just like your neighbor should be left alone to abuse his wife? i don’t think so. (a cousin of mine recently wrote about intersecting a woman abusing her child in public and being told to “mind her own fucking business” when she intervened, and i sent her a link to your “ive-seen-it-all-in-a-small-town” post )
as much as i sometimes can’t take the noise and crowds of urban neighbors, it definitely seems like people in urban settings don’t tolerate people being fucktards nearly as much as they do in rural places. maybe it’s because we live on top of eachother and everyone feels empowered to keep everyone else in check, i dunno. maybe it’s the “urban liberalism” that results in living next to people NOT LIKE YOU.
in any case, back to the beginning – the idea of someone who views small town mentality as the pinnacle of the american dream having the 2nd most powerful position in the world scares the hell out of me. the majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas. more importantly, that dream of andy griffith-style small town community only works in homogeneous places, where no one dares step out of line. it seems like a large part of the conservative agenda is to promote homogeneity, and for those who aren’t the same, separatism. no thanks. like Aunt B., i won’t allow christian conservatives to take over all of America. if you want to live in your small town and still call people fags, go right ahead, but don’t you dare try to take over everything and tell those of us who moved away from there to create our own diversity-celebrating communities that we should now conform to your conservative ways “for the good of America”. conservatives like to argue that this country is going to hell in a handbasket because of liberal “san francisco values”. given the current state of America (particularly rural America) under this conservative administration, it seems like the evidence argues to the contrary.
Please explain how you your “Hey it happened in the 60’s,that’s the stone age” attitude jives with the girl that’s always chanting that we’re still living half a step outside of Jim Crow, and all it’s lingering effects still make it relevent.
The guy who wrote this article was nine when Ayers fire bombed his family’s home.
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0430jm.html
From Ex’s article:
But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends
Always interesting to me that when a McCain supporter (as the author openly acknowledges he is) tells the story, Obama’s relationship with Ayers, which amounts to serving on a board together once and barely knowing each other, becomes synonymous with being a “mentor, associate, and friend.”
Makes me wonder who my mentors and friends are if we define those terms to mean anybody we’ve had any contact with at any point in our lives…
> Makes me wonder who my mentors and friends are if we define those terms to mean anybody we’ve had any contact with at any point in our lives…
Dolphin, you remember that bagger at the grocery store three weeks ago who put the pickles on top of the bread. So sorry, but it’s been decided that he’s your mentor. Tough break, better luck with your guru (should be decided next week; we’ll let you know).
Being on a board with someone amounts to parking in the same parking lot, sitting around the same really big conference table, eating the same stale doughnuts, and pissing in the same restroom during breaks. Hard to work “mentorship” out of that, but keep trying. A party that can believe that Sarah Palin is qualified to be president can delude themselves into believing anything.
Amy,
That was breathtaking. Very good analysis. Mayberry never existed.
‘course, I still live in Hooterville, but I have just learned to freak the natives out.
It’s my way.
Well, ‘Coma, it occurs to me that leaving, if they’re going to just follow you with the worst of their bullshit, isn’t really effective, so why shouldn’t you stay if you want to?
Hey, Ex, I am just making observations, not arguing whether those observations fit in with how I’d like the world to run in more perfect times.
Amy, I think you’ve squarely hit on the most frustrating and troubling dynamic of the small town–everyone’s in everyone’s business for their own amusement, but when it comes to actually helping, then suddenly it’s all like “Oh, mind your own.”
I did some work for the local family crisis center in a county in Illinois with probably 6,000 people in it and by the end of my time there, I was like “Is there anyone who isn’t beating or raping the people in their care?” I mean, you just want to shake people and be all “This is not how the majority of people treat each other.”
Since you guys have done a good job of pointing out the problems of small town living, I think NM’s comment needs to be restated. The Republican party has finally gone another step in their efforts to bring small town living to the rest of the world. They actually got a person from a small town to start pushing the agenda now. When it comes to pushing the small town lifestyle, Palin has a little more credibility than anyone I’ve heard it from in the past.
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Like Amy, I’m from a very small town. I don’t live there any more because when I graduated from college, there were no jobs for me there. I now live in a suburb of a major metropolitan area. There are times when I think it would be cool to go back and live there again, usually when I’ve just finished a pleasant visit, but when I sit down and actually look at it, what it would take for me to go back (especially if I need to take care of my parents and my grandparents), I get all knotted up inside. Part of it is everybody knowing everybody else’s business, because it’s almost Japanese the way you have to be in the information flow to get along well in a small town and mostly conform to norms for that small town, and I’ve been away for long enough that I know I’m missing critical pieces of information, despite my mother’s frequent data-dump updates. But I think the other part of it is, I’ve become comfortable with the notion that some stupid thing I did in high school is not even part of the knowledge base of my boss or my coworkers or my neighbors, whereas in my small hometown, The Time I Shot Off My Mouth to the Vice Principal would be resurrected and replayed at intervals for the rest of my natural-born life, and maybe beyond, if something happened to remind people of it.
All of which is a long-winded way to say that, while I understand at a gut level where Palin is coming from, at that same gut level I totally don’t like or trust her, because she is just like a couple of people I grew up with, who I don’t like or trust. Agatha Christie made a lot of money with Miss Marple because small-town folk understand that connection.
Further note: I overheard a registered Republican coworker say yesterday that he’s voting for Obama because Palin reminds him of his Aunt Mary. “I love my Aunt Mary dearly, but I would never want her to be President of the United States.”
The problem with a “small town” candidate isn’t that small towns are good or bad (that’s certainly open to debate, but I think irrelevant in the context of the presidential election). The problem is that the United States of America is a massive nation, and the single current world superpower. It’s not, and in no way even resembles, a small town.
““I love my Aunt Mary dearly, but I would never want her to be President of the United States.” — exactly.
and yes, dolphin is 100% correct. that is the crux of the Palin problem, although for many of us, as discussed, the “small town” thing resonates really really deeply in the opposite way that the GOP is trying to push it.