In our “Twilight”-obsessed culture, there’s a lot of pressure to buy into the will-he-bite-or-won’t-he appeal of vampires. But a true monster, as the novelist Colson Whitehead put it in The New Yorker recently, “is a person who has stopped pretending,” and, so in that spirit, I must admit that, aside from a brief, youthful indiscretion with “Buffy,” I’ve remained true to my first love—the zombie tale. In particular, I’ve fallen in love with “The Walking Dead,” the popular AMC series about survivors who spend their days wandering a Southern Gothic landscape, either killing zombies or hiding from them.
One further addition to my list of the horrors and wonders (and there are wonders! plenty of them!) of the once and possibly future Republic of Texas.
Did you know that the Lone Star State has its own Pledge of Allegiance? I didn’t. But it does. Of course it does!
According to Title 11, Subchapter C of the Government Code of the statutes of the state of Texas, the Texas pledge may be recited at any “public or private meeting at which the pledge of allegiance to the United States flag is recited.” Also, “The pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States should be recited before the pledge of allegiance to the state flag.” Is this a matter of putting first things first or saving the best for last? I’m not sure. But Willie Nelson is nobody’s opening act.
In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt was faced with a vicious reëlection campaign. He was vilified for the New Deal reforms. The word “boondoggle” was popularized in the U.S. the year before to describe alleged abuses of the New Deal. Opposition politicians and critics compared F.D.R. to Lenin. The Depression was still on, and unemployment, which had dropped significantly, was still high, over fourteen per cent. (It would rise again in 1938.) What Roosevelt had going for himself was a real set of policies and the capacity to speak on their behalf—a willed capacity to state things plainly, forcefully, and effectively. Never more so than on September 29, 1936, at the New York Democratic State Convention, in Syracuse. Here is the most famous passage of the speech, which came in the thick of the national campaign:
Thursday night’s ding-dong Vice-Presidential debate may have cheered up Democratic supporters, but opinion polls across the country are continuing to show Mitt Romney making up ground on Barack Obama. Obviously, the polls don’t yet reflect public reaction to the Biden-Ryan show. But whatever impact the Veep debate has—and I don’t think it will be major—we now know that Romney’s post-debate bounce was more than a two- or three-day phenomenon: the first Presidential debate, on October 3rd, changed the dynamics of the race like no other event this year.
In the national polls, Romney is now running slightly ahead of Obama (though within the margin of error), and in the key battleground states, he is also closing on him, and in some cases moving ahead. Reflecting this fact, I am making a couple of significant changes to The New Yorker’s electoral map—also known as Cassidy’s Count—which I last updated on Monday. In particular, I am shifting Florida from toss-up to leaning Romney, and New Hampshire from leaning Obama to toss-up. (By toss-up, I mean the state is too close to call.) In addition, I am keeping a beady eye on Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, and Wisconsin, five more states where Romney has made up a lot of ground. For the moment, though, I am keeping Colorado as a toss-up and the other four states as leaning Obama.
Earlier this week, Serge Haroche, a Frenchman, and David J. Wineland, an American, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems”—whatever that means. Even if you’re interested in quantum computers, the machines that Haroche and Wineland’s discoveries are helping to build, you’re likely to find that statement confusing. Both men work in the field of quantum optics; that is, they figure out ways to look at very small particles, like photons, and determine their quantum states. But wait—isn’t the whole point of quantum mechanics that you can’t know the states of individual particles? Aren’t they actually waves? Or probabilities? Or cats? (In boxes?) By now, your own mind may have a entered a quantum state: It is now knowledgeable and ignorant simultaneously.
Watching the political debates this season always puts this writer, perhaps irresponsibly, in mind of seventies movie comedies: Romney seems like the smug country clubber in a hundred National Lampoonish movies, the one Chevy Chase takes the girl away from, while Paul Ryan last night seemed exactly like the authority-pleasing, solemn student-body president who either gets pantsed midway by the stars of “Porkys” or else blissfully turned on to grass in the final reel by Bill Murray. Joe Biden watching Ryan, meanwhile, put me in mind of nothing so much as the great, grouchy, aged Eddie Albert in Elaine May’s matchless original, “The Heartbreak Kid,” narrowing his eyes in disbelief as he listens to the slick, oleaginous (and already married!) Charles Grodin courting his beautiful blond daughter: “ I heard everything you said… and I will tell you, quite honestly, I was very impressed. Very impressed. And I think I can also say, quite honestly… I have never heard such a crock of horseshit in my life.”
Last week, Mitt Romney won and Barack Obama lost. But the outcome was much more a matter of Obama losing than of Romney winning—because it was only Obama’s passive-unaggressive refusal to parry and thrust that permitted Romney to coast unmolested to victory on his perfectly prepared, professionally rehearsed, thoroughly focus-grouped, earnestly delivered speechlets.
This week was different. Joe Biden won, but not because Paul Ryan let him. Ryan came in second, you might say, but he didn’t lose.
“Americans vote for Presidents, not Vice-Presidents,” John Cassidy wrote before Thursday night’s debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan. Maybe so. But, with Mitt Romney’s performance in last week’s Presidential debate having led to a sudden shift in the race, the stakes were higher for the Vice-Presidential candidates than they normally would have been. In the national polls, and in battleground states like Colorado, Nevada, and Ohio, Romney and President Obama are essentially tied. Democrats, Cassidy says on this week’s Political Scene podcast, “desperately needed a bounce” out of the Vice-Presidential debate.
If last week’s Obama-Romney debate was extraordinary, the Biden-Ryan matchup last night was completely ordinary. What made the first debate unusual was the lopsided response from viewers: half of Democrats agreed with almost all Republicans that Romney won. By this point in the campaign, most voters have made up their minds about who they will support. They generally come into the debates wearing their partisan jerseys and cheer for the candidate they’ve already picked. Your guy has to do really poorly for you to admit it.
1995, the high point of Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution, was also the thirtieth anniversary of the kind of massive government program—government takeover, some might call it—that Gingrich and his allies, and their successors, should oppose: Medicare. It was also a year when Rush Limbaugh still had a television show. So on July 26, 1995, the actual week of the anniversary, Limbaugh was on air talking about Medicare.
“Well, this is the birthday week of Medicare. Happy birthday to you… whoopie do—folks, one of the biggest boondoggles in American social program history,” he said.
The rest of the segment was about Democrats’ rhetoric about the program and Republicans’ proposed changes to it—rhetoric he termed “Mediscare,” saying of the Democrats, “If anybody wants to kill it it’s you guys, because you’re going to end up destroying the people who provide the money for it.”
