The day after the election

Logo, The Warren Group, political advisors to unsuccessful South Carolina Democratic senatorial candidate Alvin Greene:

"Turn to the Left and Laugh/Turn to the Right and Laugh"
The Warren Group and its network of professional comedians will help politicians make their point with humor.

NYT, yesterday:

“Tonight there’s a Tea Party tidal wave, and we’re sending a message to them,” Mr. Paul said, facing a cheering throng in Bowling Green, Ky. To many in the movement, the singular goal now is to stop an expanding government in its tracks, to “hold the line at all hazards,” as Jennifer Stefano, a Tea Party leader in Pennsylvania, put it.

The movement is animated by a belief that the entire political system has become disconnected from the practical needs and values of Americans, suggesting that its voting power stemmed as much from a populist sense of outrage in a tough economic moment as it did from ideology. What many of its adherents want as much as anything is for the two parties to come together to solve problems.

That sometimes conflicting mandate was neatly captured by two interviews in Searchlight, Nev., hometown of Harry Reid, who as the leader of the Senate Democratic majority became the Tea Party’s biggest target. “I want to see gridlock,” said Ronald Hanvey, who supported Sharron Angle Mr. Reid’s opponent. “I don’t want to see any more laws.” A few months earlier on nearly the same spot, Jeff Church, arriving at a Tea Party rally against Mr. Reid, complained equally about the state’s Republican senator, John Ensign, and yearned for bipartisanship. “Why can’t they get along and make some common-sense solutions?” Mr. Church asked.

******

Every thirty years or so, a significant portion of the American public becomes unhinged. The clinical term is "goes batshit". Another description for this phenomenon was voiced by my Grandma Ida; the literal translation from Yiddish is better than a literary translation. It goes: When the putz stands up, the brains go into the dirt.

The circumstances that bring about a parade of batshit amerikans led by Richard Crainium (a meme devised by a lifelong friend ten years before the concept was re-discovered and popularized by Dawkins) are varied.

Below is an amerikan periodic table of batshitocratic sociopolitical effluvia:

1860s Civil War
1890s Gilded Age
1920s 1st Red Scare (Palmer)
1950s 2nd Red Scare (HUAC, McCarthy)
1980s Reganism
2010s Tea Party

My family has a bad habit of getting caught in the gears of these upheavals.

Grandpa Harry was beaten up in 1919 by a group of Palmer's Raiders while he chaired a meeting of the Benevolent Association of Laundrymen of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan. The Feds thought the Laundrymen were a front for the Union of Russian Workers. Indeed, they were a front, but Grandpa Harry was aligned with Meyer Lansky. The word on the street was not to whack a federal employee. Grandpa Harry must've been pissed.


My father worked at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) in the early 1950s. He was hauled, along with NBS Director Edward Condon, in front of HUAC, declared a Communist and security risk, and shown the door. Although my father was a Stalinist, he was relatively harmless. Much to my surprise, I recently found a picture of him in the wartime Met Lab Graphite Research Group. He worked on the Manhattan Project. He's in the first row, far right (not left).


I emerged from the Precambrian ooze of graduate school into civilized society in the early 1980s. I became associated with a subculture so far below the radar, the reference point used to explain it to civilians goes back to early 18th century Appalachia. I'm flailing away on the banjo-uke in the Ghost World. I may be able to avoid the current Tourette-like spasm.