The timing couldn’t have been better.
I’d just finished a load of laundry and was taking it
upstairs when I grasped hold of the railing on the basement steps, and felt it
wiggle. Like a loose tooth, it felt as though one good yank would pull the
sucker clean of the wall. Upon inspection, I saw further cracks in the drywall
surrounding it, and up and down the walls leading to the ground floor.
Terrific, I thought. Add that to the drywall already
crumbling on the second floor, the holes in the garage walls (cleverly
concealed from the home inspector before we moved in), the drafty doors, the
sagging fences, the leaky garage roof, the splintered paneling and the walls
thin enough to allow us to hear the neighbors playing World of Warcraft at 10
p.m. on a worknight. Some of this stuff is doubtless normal wear and tear, but
much of it is the result of shoddy construction, and all of it will have to
wait until other repairs are done on the condo I’ve owned since 2005 and rented
for years now since I can’t get rid of it in the current market. It's enough to get you to start drinking vodka in the morning. Except I already do, so I guess I can't blame the house.
When I got back upstairs and checked the mail, still
juggling figures in my head and trying to decide whether the drywall repair
could wait until spring or not, I found a nondescript envelope bearing the
title “voter” next to my name. When I opened it, it turned out to be a letter
from my builder. Advising me on how to vote.
I won’t quote the letter, but the gist of it was that my
builder, reminding me of his credentials as a small business owner of the
community who’d been building homes for fifty years and employing tens of
thousands of people in the industry, had concerns over the direction the
country was headed under President Obama and certain members of the House and
Senate. He advised me to vote Republican, under the grounds that the country
can’t afford another four years of reckless spending on entitlements and
ill-advised programs. It closes with an urgent call to action: it’s time to
take back the country for the next generation.
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| The basement wall is perfect symbolism for the 2012 election. The drywall represents my eroding trust in our electoral system, and the paneling is pure evil. |
Take it back? I can’t
help but wonder. Take it back to what? Back to military aggression, unaffordable tax cuts and a public
docile from fear of terrorism, happily signing their library records away to
the government and racking up credit card debt? What planet is this guy from?
Well, at least he gave me a better reason to break out the Absolut. Got to give him that.
“Reckless government spending” is a line that’s starting to
get old for a number of reasons. Mostly because “reckless” (or whatever
derogatory term you prefer) is an epithet applied selectively, depending on
whom you ask. Some argue that massive spending on health
care for the poor and infirm is unaffordable while others argue that wars
tend to be pretty reckless, especially if you decrease
taxes while fighting them. But hey, my builder wants to build more homes.
He’s throwing his weight behind the guy he thinks will get that to happen. If I
had to bet, I’d say you’re barking up the wrong tree, but good luck with that
anyway.
Actually, my builder’s letter infuriates me for a different
reason: He’s forcing me to stick up for President Barack Obama.
Let me be clear: I am not making a partisan argument here.
Vote your conscience. But as historian James Loewen reminds us, although we’re
all entitled to our own opinion, we are not entitled to our own facts.
There’s a current of thinking that seems to be building
steam: Things were great back in the aught’s (2000-2008-ish) because back then,
we had President Bush and the Republicans in charge. Unemployment was low, the
stock market was booming, consumer confidence was high and nobody was making
any noise about hope and change. We were on top of the world, but then the
Democrats took Congress in 2006, and Obama took over in 2008. Suddenly, the
economy crashes, people lose their homes, we’ve got a massive deficit and China and India are killing us on the global market. So if we just get
the right guys back in charge, we’ll be back in the good old days again.
All of that used to be called a “straw man argument.” Then
it surfaced as a
viral email debunked by Snopes. Now it’s circulating in my newsfeed.
Were I to rebut all of these points one by one, I’d be, at
best, parroting finer minds than my own; at worst, outright plagiarizing them.
But I hope it’s not untoward of me to point out that to accuse Obama and the
Democrats of tanking the country after a mere 15 to 20 months or so in power is
to severely overestimate their power. Remember that President Bush was in
office for eight or nine months when 9/11 happened, yet to blame him and him alone for that
would be idiotic. Rather, one has to take a wider perspective of our foreign
entanglements, and once you do that, you go beyond one president and one party,
and start to focus on the
military/industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about in 1961. Ditto
with the economy: anyone who can think their way out of a paper bag will have
no trouble drawing a line from the Friedmanite/Reaganite
overhaul of the 1970s/1980s to the deregulation and subprime mortgage
vomit-inducing monstrosity that left
us all holding the bag while the
criminals went off scot-free, more powerful than ever and ready to do it
all over again.
(Side note: My original mortgage lender was Countrywide.
You’ve heard of them--at least they’re getting slapped on the wrist with a
civil suit. But every morning when I wake up, I say a little prayer to the
Gods of Retribution that the
hookers those guys were frolicking with all had scorching cases of herpes.)
I’m willing to yell about all that to whomever wants to
debate the issue, provided we’re interested in arriving at some kind of truth
rather than just scoring points and trying to get votes for “our guy.” Hell,
I’m no genius, and I need all the perspective I can get. Yet I hope that, by
articulating the aforementioned points of view, I’m not forced, by shoddy
logic, to take the role of de facto
apologist for President Obama. We should all possess the requisite gray cells
to qualify the issue here.
There are grave concerns and misgivings I have about Mr.
Obama, but almost none of them are shared by anyone in our country’s mainstream
political reporting, or, if they are, I haven’t heard of them. “Obamacare,” for
instance? Less to be disliked for its “socialism” and more for its
subsidies to the insurance companies while simultaneously expanding their
customer base.
His foreign policy? Sure, it’s great that bin Laden is dead,
although if you want to split hairs, we did commit a war crime.
Meanwhile, drone attacks have skyrocketed under the president from the
level they were at under Bush, which is a pretty good way of sowing
anti-American sentiment and future self-styled holy warriors with an antipathy
for America. (Never mind that their
accuracy is abysmal.)
His education plan? A
complete train wreck: accountability takes the form of test scores and
discounts external factors that have a much greater impact on a pupil’s
performance. Race to the Top might as well be called Frankennochildleftbehind.
And don’t even get me started on fiscal reform and his
explanations of it thereof. His opponents can scream about how taxing the
rich won’t help all they want—that’s a sideshow to me (although if you decide
to tackle long-term deficit reduction, the $90 billion a year we’d save turns
into $900 billion over ten years, a much more serious figure than the $130
million or so we give to public broadcasting that Mitt
Romney sees as so unsustainable). What we should really be talking about is
a system of oversight that ensures we won’t have to bail out the banks any
more. We should be talking about why Obama’s Justice Department failed
to prosecute the worst of the financirati even when they practically had
DNA evidence of their malfeasance. And would it kill him to hire economists without fingerprints
all over the current crisis?
But none of that has happened, for a perfectly clear reason:
Wall
Street funds Democrats in addition to Republicans, as do pharmaceutical
companies and education
reformists/activists/lobbyists. All of them have deep pockets. The voters
suckered into thinking there’s a tangible difference between the two political
parties include, it would seem, my builder, who’s convinced that his guy will
make a difference because he’s not going to throw any lavish cocktail parties
and he’ll sleep on a sleeping bag in his office to save money. Sort of
like…why, it’s like cutting Sesame Street to pay for a financial bailout, isn’t
it?
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| If we hire a few hundred billion of him and then fire them all, we'd save billions! |
In 2008, I was of the opinion that “Change” was a
no-brainer: Rising unemployment, two wars, and a looming economic crisis? How
the hell did that happen? No, no, we’ve got to turn this mess around!
Now, “change” is being marketed as Change to the stuff we
did before the radical socialist took charge, and in order to swallow that
pill, you just have to hit the right parts of your head hard enough to forget
all the history that led up to the mess we’re in right now.
But if you try to correct the record, if you’re not careful,
you wind up playing defense for Team Obama, and until my rental property is
saleable, Countrywide is behind bars and drone planes are recalibrated to start
dropping books all over the Middle East, I’ll pass, thanks.
So anyway, Mr. Builder of my Home Sweet Home, I won't be voting for your guy. I'm not even sure I'll be voting for the one everyone assumes is my guy. Or anyone's guy. I don't think there is a guy for us any more, even if we use the term in a gender-neutral sense. But as long as there's guys like you to distract us with the bogus issues, I guess there'll be plenty of mud slinging and innuendo to spare for 2016-on. Now come over and help me fix this wall. You bring the plaster. I've already got plenty of vodka.