James Howard Kunstler

My friends, who humor me more than I deserve, have listened to me invoke the name of James Howard Kunstler for years. He is the Ron Paul of Peak Oil obsessives. While I'm not a PO crackpot, it's clear to me that there is plenty of reason to be wary of what an oil deprived world may bring. There's no disputing that there is a limited volume of easily accessible petroleum in the world, which combined with an insatiable appetite for the stuff, will lead to convulsive social and political upheaval throughout the industrialized world if we don't manage to ween ourselves off it. Unfortunately, Kunstler makes a convincing case for why that will not be easy, and why we'll have to transform in very fundamental ways who we are as a society and what we should desire as individuals. His op-ed in the Washington Post makes for a good introduction to what his argument is.

"The elephant’s in the room, but nobody will say it."

George Packer has another article in The New Yorker that identifies some big problems Barack Obama has in Appalachia, especially Kentucky and West Virginia. It makes for sobering reading. Here's a paragraph that jumped out at me:

John Preston, who is the county’s circuit-court judge and also its amateur historian, Harvard-educated, with a flag pin on his lapel, said, “Obama is considered an élitist.” He added, “There’s a racial component, obviously, to it. Thousands of people won’t publicly say it, but they won’t vote for a black man—on both sides, Democrat and Republican. It won’t show up in the polls, because they won’t admit it. The elephant’s in the room, but nobody will say it. Sad to say it, but it’s true.” Later, I spoke with half a dozen men eating lunch at the Pigeon Roost Dairy Bar outside town, and none of them had any trouble saying it. They announced their refusal to vote for a black man, without hesitation or apology. “He’s a Muslim, isn’t he?” an aging mine electrician asked. “I won’t vote for a colored man. He’ll put too many coloreds in jobs. Colored are O.K.—they’ve done well, good for them, look where they came from. But radical coloreds, no—like that Farrakhan, or that senator from New York, Rangel. There’d be riots in the streets, like the sixties.” No speech, on race or élitism or anything else, would move them. Here was one part of the white working class—maybe not representative, but at least significant—and in an Obama-McCain race they would never be the swing vote. It is a brutal fact, and Obama probably shouldn’t even mention it.

If Packer knows this, the brain trust of the Obama campaign knows it, too, and, even worse, the Clinton campaign knows it and uses that to their advantage. Is it any wonder that the Obama campaign wasted little time in a place like Kentucky?

What is it about Kentucky and West Virginia?

This post from Obsidian Wings raises some good points about the primary results from Kentucky last night.

The most salient graphs are:

"One thing to keep in mind is that many of Kentucky’s “Democrats” are Republicans for all practical purposes. Interestingly, registered Democrats still far outnumber Republicans 57%-36% (that's as of 2006, though Republicans are gaining). But despite the party registration totals, Bush won the state handily 60%-40%."

and

"Ideologically, many of these people are simply Republicans — but they still got to vote today. Sure, they sometimes vote for a Democrat on the state or local level (just like Massachusetts elects Republican governors). But they consider themselves conservative — and no Democratic candidate who could win the median Democratic voter nationally would be acceptable."

You'll find demographic and cultural, social parallels in West Virginia. Kentucky and West Virginia are what you get when you blend Southern states without any meaningful ethnic diversity with endemic poverty and ignorance.

This video raises some interesting questions about the motives of some voters in West Virginia.

George Packer's "Interesting Times" contribution to The New Yorker in April raises similar issues about Kentucky.

Finally, here's an overview of Obama's "Appalachian Problem".

Exit polling in Kentucky indicates that "race" was a factor among 20% of Kentucky Democratic primary voters. The number was 25% for Dem primary voters in West Virginia.

There is much to loathe about Hillary Clinton's efforts to overturn the will of the majority of Democrats who have voted in these primary races. However, the tacit racism of arguing that there's no way poor, white Americans would lower themselves to vote for a black man for president is the most repulsive ploy yet attempted. It may well prove that Barack Obama can't be elected president because he's black, but for Clinton to argue that she's more electable 'cause she's white is not an argument a Democrat should make...ever. Hell, it's not an argument any American should make...ever.

Here's something else, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.

How awesome is this?

Here's a link to Andrew Sullivan's "Email of the Day". Big, big doin's in California today. Their Supreme Court recognized what the Legislature already knew: Gay people fall in love, too. I read that one in ten Americans live in California. When are the other nine gonna get the same rights as folks in Cali and Massachussetts?

Mildred Loving has passed on

Mildred Loving, of Loving v. Virginia fame, has died. There's nothing I can say about this remarkable woman and her husband that she didn't say better herself last year on the 40th anniversary of their landmark case. You can read a PDF of her statement at Freedom to Marry.