"The Meanest Man In Town"...

In the 1946 Frank Capra classic "It's a Wonderful Life" (an ironic title it seems) the great (and Republican) character actor Lionel Barrymore plays the "banker" (Jimmy Stewart, also a Republican, is the savings & loan guy remember), a recently reviled figure of the very recent "great depression" (see for further example Burton Churchill as the corrupt banker in John Ford's 1939 "Stagecoach").

Barrymore's "Mr Potter" in the nightmare sequence of the film (the darkest among Capra's rather "dark" pictures "rescued" by sudden "happy endings") has succeeded (Stewart's "George Bailey" never having existed you recall) in making of small town "Bedford Falls" his own "Pottersville," a "potter's field" indeed of corruption, crime, dissipation and lost hopes among the few "decent" folk left in this "conservative capitalist" hell, literally a "town without pity."

I've made the allusion re the current tea bagged Republican party a number of times in the last few years but considering the "controversy" over renewal of emergency unemployment benefits (a controversy! to help people without resources! well indeed!) it appears to me that the GOP is "content" with its Mr Potter image and is even eager to underscore it!

Only a few Republicans voted to bring the issue to the floor of the senate and John Boehner promptly harumphed that any "consideration" by the house must require cuts in other programs, most hopefully in the dreaded evil satanic Kenyan not American "Obamacare."

The old song says that "it's a long time from May to December" and it's a long time from Jan 8 1964 to this Jan 8 but it was fifty years ago that President Lyndon Johnson delivered his "war on poverty" speech and began to make "US" hope that as he put it and it's still apt that "the richest nation on earth" ought to be able to care for its poorest and indeed "abolish" their poverty 'cuz gee Mitt Romney hardly NEEDS 22 million dollars a year to live on does he? "Some people" as a friend of mine once said "have too much money" and it's so obvious that MANY MANY have too little.

As baby boomers retire I think even the white ones will be more and more cognizant of Repub designs on reducing social security, medicare, pensions public or otherwise and generally degrading the New Deal-Fair Deal-New Frontier-Great Society "welfare state." As latinos, blacks and Asian Americans vote more and more regularly and as younger folks get older and begin to vote their concerns, I think it is inevitable that this nation become more and more "liberal," a term disparaged by both right and left these last three decades but still the aptest term for a country that if not "radical" is "progressive," at least in its best moments.

I'm not trying to encourage those who despair re the rightist attempt to "take over" as much as I believe that the real "trends" are clearer than we might yet see. By 2016 the US will be back to "full employment," i. e., 5-6% unemployed, but income disparity will remain and the employed will work hard for less and that WILL be an issue, moreso than Benghazi or even internet spying, more important than any other and if the GOPpists continue their disdain for "47%" of the public and think this sort of divide will benefit them, they will discover that only in the dwindling rural-small towns will they for long maintain their homophobic, NRA, quasi racist, misogynistic (throw in the kitchen sink Welch! yer on a roll!) "islands" of bigotry -- whew!

That's what I think -- the "future" is not "rosy" but the battle is turning. The "war" on poverty is to be "reengaged" -- "ALL the WAY with LBJ!"...

> 1 -- You talk like someone whose experience of rural communities is seriously limited. If you live in a city, it's probably a "continent of bigotry". The ghettos in Iowa are small and far between, for example, but I hear there's plenty of big ones in places like LA, New York, Boston, and other cities.

I'm with you on the so-called welfare state. I personally don't know anybody who asked to be born but in my life I've known plenty who lived to regret being born. As a society, it seems we're all agreed that everybody has a right to earn a living but we seem unable to engineer an economy that has a job for everybody that needs one. That has got to change, but how that change will be accomplished is one heckuva complex enigma.

Things being what they are right now, I don't count on an election in 2016. I see there's a good chance we'll be too busy trying to rid ourselves of the Sino-Russian Marine Corps to do much social engineering. I hope I'm wrong. In any event, I have too little confidence in any person, place, or thing to predict what's coming down the pike. If I HAD to make predictions, I think I'd start haunting garage sales and look for a Magic 8-Ball. Flipping coins (Who's got a coin these days?) is declasse.

I am all for "the welfare state"; I regard Franklin Delano Roosevelt as our "best president" and I have admiration for Lyndon Johnson's bold attempt to carry out the New Deal on an even greater scale but of course LB destroyed his "dream" with the Vietnam war although I'm unsure how he could have avoided it at the time.

"It's a Wonderful Life" is a MOVIE, not a "real place" but its metaphoric depiction of American "values" and their denigration seem apt to me...

Our hometown banker, one Prentiss Folvag -- whom everyone liked and respected -- turned out to be a crook, too.

I don't think it's a rural problem per se. If you want a better example than poor, ol' Prentiss, you'd better look at Wall Street or the Chicago Board of Trade or someplace like that.

Out here on the acres, during the farm crisis of the early eighties, more than a few conscience-stricken, grain-elevator operators made TV news because they killed themselves when they were caught stealing grain (i.e.: money) from their customers and hiding their thefts with jiggered accounting. Some of them shot themselves, some of them jumped off tall buildings because they couldn't face their victims. You might say they died of guilt and shame.

Everyone in the money business is exposed to vast temptation. The human condition dictates that there are crooks everywhere, in business, on used-car lots, etc. Big-town crooks steal more because there is more to steal. Small-town crooks steal less because there's less money to tinker with. To the point you're trying to make, I don't read anything about suicides among the circle of big-town bankers who have stolen trillions of dollars in recent years. There's no guilt or shame in that crowd. The vast majority of them haven't even been charged or arrested.

I feel they represent the NEW American values manifest in the NEW American economy and in economics and law schools, nationally. In any case, they are encouraged in everything they do by people who praise or encourage or ignore such behavior.

"Physician, heal thyself."

I wasn't "attacking" small town bankers or even small towns -- I've lived in a couple actually.

I was making the point that the present Republican party has made itself tantamount to the "Mr Potter" character in the Capra film, i. e., "the meanest man in town," and that I believe that "image" will not be any more successful for the party than Mitt Romney's.

I even believe that the NEXT president will be MORE "liberal" than the present one but then perhaps I should consult "O Swami!" on that?...

You mean just like obummer is more liberal than bush?

Good luck selling that plate of swill. I don't want any of it.

I shan't offer it to you...

One of the main themes of the Democrats and Obama when he first ran for POTUS--is they are pro-labor--for the working man blah, blah, blah. The republicans appeal to their voters with themes such as anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-immigrant/welfare. Neither party is really serious about doing anything about these favorite themes except using them for the next round of elections.

On the issue of jobs--both parties will tell you that if you let them have a free hand--in next to no time at all everything will be great--which is bullshit. Both are indebted to those who want to keep the working population on their knees. The republicans do stink more than the democrats IMO. It's like they believe that Ayn Rand is the good fairy godmother which is such a fucked up idea it's not even comical. If there is such a thing as hell and a 'good' God to boot (I don't believe there is) she's burning in it alongside Ronnie Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Hurrah, for you, Iriley! If you haven't already read Hemingway, may I recommend his short story, "A Natural History of the Dead"? PM me after you've read it. Tell me what you got from it.

PS. Let's all hope that William F. Buckley is down there with Ron and Nancy and Margaret and Ann.

Best.

Deacon

> 7 -- Michael_Welch wrote: "I shan't offer it to you."

Solomon sez: I now see a faint glimmer of hope for you.

Well there's no use going around the same block over and over again; I know how you feel about Obama and I disagree although I have expressed my own disagreements re some of his policies but overall I think him an "improvement" and I think he has handled the twin crises of warS and economic depression well or as well as possible under the circumstances.

The control of the house of representatives by a rigidly hostile and extreme right wing GOP (more "rightist" even than say ANY previous REPUBLICAN president) since 2011 of course severely limited Obama's ability to get more liberal legislation passed.

I think the economy would be stronger, unemployment less, wages higher and the circumstances for the middle and lower classes looking "up" if there had been as per the great depression of the 1930s a government of Democrats dominated by a liberal attitude.

Obama ended the war in Iraq (for "US" at least if not for them) and is withdrawing from Afghanistan. "He Kept 'US' Out Of Libya" and his Syrian policy was rightfully circumspect. I hardly find him as poor a prez as you do but I'm grateful HE has been president and NOT John McCain or Mitt Romney; I think even YOU would discover a "difference" if either of these had been the president the past five years?...

#9--the Hemingway piece reminds me of Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt or Gert Ledig. It's very good.

Anyway speaking of the House--the Senate--the one thing those are not are the people's House or Senate. What they are are marketplaces for powerful entities to acquire and exert control over the economy and over the public. They do this through either of the two political parties--sometimes both together. Those who rise up out of them to run for the highest offices are also creatures of the same dynamic.

I think with Obama--it's like for the most part he hasn't made things worse than they were from the previous administration. Some things are maybe even marginally better and we don't have all the stupid or out in your face and we don't care corruption. There's been no real step forward though. The good things he promised for the most part have either not been delivered or have been effectively diluted. His administration kowtows to big business like the administrations before him. We're not creating real jobs with real pay and benefits--it's still profits before people. The mantra these days is 'more for less'.

"You say you want a rev-o-lu-tion well you know" -- that it isn't in the cards as they say. One deals with reality and this is How Things Are: "business" IS America's "business" as Calvin Coolidge once pointed out.

I thought (naively!) that in 2008 Obama would be able to FDR his way through the muck or even LBJ it but I didn't understand the depth of disease in the "heart of the heart" of the country re a "Kenyanese" and Not Of Our "Group" sort of prez though as you point out he was HARDLY as "different" as all that!

Now I see that Obama has at least restrained the unrestrained and that as a NATION we'd rather have that than say Santorum or Cruz "at large" -- at least I assume so.

The American Socialist party leader Norman Thomas was asked whether Franklin D. Roosevelt "carried out a socialist program" as per what Herbert Hoover and alike were saying and Thomas quite wryly responded "Yeah -- he 'carried it out' on a stretcher" meaning that FDR actually "saved" capitalism and was hardly the "traitor to his class" his rightist critics insisted he was. (Then Thomas called the Tennessee Valley Authority, a now "forgotten" project, "a rose in a garden of weeds" so there was something hmm.)

Leftists in America are not going to get "Lenin," much less "Lennon" but this has been a "progressive" country (in the proverbial "long run") nonetheless (certainly more "progressive" than say Russia) and will continue to be, compared to SO MANY others eh. The sixties are "dead" as they say but the results are not and even then the results were decidedly "mixed."

By the way anyone have any opinions on Robert Gates' latest opinions?...

> 11 -- I concede nothing of the sort. I'm unhappy that McCain or Romney or some other Republican son-of-a-bitch didn't get into the White House because, if they had won instead of Obama, America would be much closer to revolution than it presently is.

There is no such thing as "a liberal attitude" in today's Democratic Party. The only difference between the Dems and the GOP is that the Democrats are more cautious than the GOP in their move toward a fascist police state. obummer broke every promise he made during his entire first campaign and is well on his way to trashing every promise he made during his second campaign. obummer did NOT keep us out of Libya. He just hired someone else to drop all those bombs for us.

obummer hasn't done one single thing for the American people since he took office. Not one. People such as you will cite gay marriage as one major achievement. It is no such thing. They've used the courts to ram gay marriage down the throats of the electorate just as government used the courts to achieve Roe v. Wade and now attempts to do with gun rights. The proper thing to do (in all such cases) would have been to use the bully pulpit to convince the electorate to vote for a constitutional amendment. Had they done so, neither abortion nor gay marriage would have become a political football. They way they've gone about it, they've convinced a LARGE percentage of the electorate that the courts are politicized and corrupt and cannot be trusted to dispense justice in any event.

American political violence, when it finally breaks out, is gonna break mighty bad on abortion clinics and gay-rights groups and anti-gun groups and civil-rights groups and on judges and lawyers generally. Understand that I personally favor NO such developments but that's what I see coming down the pike.

Regarding your position on all such issues: I don't believe you know what you're talking about and because I believe that, I don't care what you think.

The United States of America is doomed, in my opinion. All of our leaders and wanna-be leaders have forgotten (or likely never knew) the single most important thing about leadership: "Those who choose to lead must follow." Many people out there (and I'm sure that obummer and you are among them) think that means rousing the rabble and running ahead of the mob. You couldn't be more wrong, and the whole country will pay for your folly. Soon.

You sound like someone else I know. Well it's your privilege but "if all is doomed" then there's nothing else to say is there?...

Kind of funny--before my dad died he would bitch at me that we had two liberal parties. I saw it as quite the opposite and still do that both the democratic and republican party are conservative--just that one is way more extreme.

Doomed, doomed, doomed!...

> 16 -- Iriley -- I disagree with you. One party is every bit as extreme as the other. The sole difference between them is the two different methods they've chosen to install the same totalitarian police state.

I have trouble - real trouble - envisioning Obama as a totalitarian (either secret or overt).

Jebus, that guy has got me fooled, I guess.

To me it seems that the old George Wallace mantra - that there's not a dime's worth of difference between the democrat and republican parties - is a putrid load of fucking bullshit.

But such is just my opinion. I could be wrong. But I doubt it.

> 19 -- Solomon sez: You're just jealous because George Wallace knew more than you do. Of course I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

George Wallace "knew" thar was "gold" in them thar paranoid hills and he mined it good!...

> 21

Exactly. I never met George Wallace but I followed his career closely. (One of my great grandmothers was a Wallace so he could have been a cousin.)

My assessment was that George was essentially rather a liberal for a white southerner of his era. He was not an ideologue or a paranoid or a conspiracy freak. (And I doubt he knew more than I do.)

Wallace was rather stuck on getting ahead in life and he had no scruples much about doing whatever he needed to do to achieve his various ego-stroking goals. His power base was white southerners and he knew what they wanted to hear him say - he threw the red meat to the dogs. So to speak.

Yes, he was not the best guy in the world but certainly he was not the worst.

#22--which makes him different from the current crop of politicians in exactly what way?

> 23

He doesn't seem so bad, now that you mention it, compared to the present day teabagger asswipes. And maybe Hillary. And of course Christie Kreme.

Lriley: Have you ever come across suggestions that Kaputt was bogus? I have, but nothing I considered authoritative, but nor did i spend much time looking into it. The only reason it matters to me is that I love to refer to his basket of eyeballs meeting with Ante Pavelić.

So now a bigot, opportunistic or sincere, is being held up as not all that bad?

". . .suggestions that Kaputt was bogus?" (25)

I havenʻt read "Kaputt" (12, 25). Itʻs is buried deep in my TBR* pile, but, Iʻm curious, Rick, (assuming itʻs a fiction) how can a fiction be
"bogus"?
Stanley Elkin was once admonished about an episode in one of his novels: "That doesnʻt happen in real life!"
His reply: "Oh, I donʻt write ʻreal lifeʻ. I write stories."

* my TBR pile: Doesnʻt actually exist as a physical pile, or on paper - - only in my head.

Dear Roland,

It's reportage. Or is it. Here are three quotes from one Amazon page:

1. Sent by an Italian paper during World War II to cover the fighting on the Eastern Front, Malaparte secretly wrote this terrifying report from the abyss, which became an international bestseller when it was published after the war. Telling of the siege of Leningrad, of glittering dinner parties with Nazi leaders, and of trains disgorging bodies in war-devastated Romania, Malaparte paints a picture of humanity at its most depraved.

Kaputt is an insider's dispatch from the world of the enemy that is as hypnotically fascinating as it is disturbing.

2. His novelistic account of the war, surreptitiously written, presents the conflict from the point of view of those doomed to lose it.

3. Partly true and partly fiction, Kaputt is based on Malparte's experiences as a journalist following the Fascist armies invading the Soviet Union...Malaparte’s grotesquely baroque stories do not need to be true. They speak honestly about the absurd horrors of war.
–The Times UK

I'm sure some of the criticism stemmed from his fellow travelling--a fascist who managed to come out smelling like roses (dying on a gravesite).

Ridge: you are against the resurrection of George Wallace?

#25--Malaparte had supported Mussolini's rise to power. He'd fallen out of grace and was thrown out of the Fascist party in 1933. He'd written a provocative book titled The technique of the Coup d'Etat--which outlined the methods that Mussolini, Lenin and Hitler used to seize power. Mussolini didn't like it. The book is available in English--I don't have it--you can find it on Abebooks but be prepared to spend over $100. The last time I looked it was very pricey. He was thrown into prison--got out and was thrown into prison again for more offenses against the state. He attempted suicide. Shortly afterwards the war broke out and he became a correspondent for the Corriere della Sera. He went to Finland to write about the Russians invasion of that country. Later he followed the German army into Eastern Europe. The Volga rises in Europe is a collection of those journalistic pieces--to me they are a companion piece to Kaputt. Not hard to read between the lines sometimes in those journalistic accounts that he thinks the Germans are pretty fucked up. He definitely didn't buy the line that Jews were the enemy of mankind.

I have read allegations particularly about the basket of eyes being a lot of shit. It's hard to say but keeping in mind this is the Serbs vs. the Croats or vice versa. Recent history between those two formerly Yugoslavian peoples might tell you they're capable of quite a lot. The Eastern European WWII front has never gotten the same attention that the Western front got. Not even close. Eastern European history seems to me a lot more tribal and a lot more violent than Western European history. Anyway Malaparte's Kaputt is an intentionally fictionalized Mea Culpa version of what he saw. He wanted to distance himself from the craziness not only of his own government but of the German nazis.

I mentioned Ledig as well. Both his books The Stalin front and Payback are excellent first hand descriptions of warfare. Payback describes an Allied bombing raid on a German city from the air on down. From the American tail gunner in a B-52 hit by a piece of flak and then having his jaw broken and all his teeth knocked out by his own gun spinning around on him in his turret to the streets turning into a kind of molten lava and the buildings collapsing on top of the German civilians below. Those two books would both fit easily into Dante's descriptions of hell in Inferno.

>28 RickHarsch: Oddly, yes. Despite his late in life conversion and apology to Civil Rights leaders.

> 26, 30

I don't think anyone here is nominating the late George Wallace for a medal or averring that he was a misunderstood political moderate.

My point was that he was not the worst of the worst and that the average teabagger of today is hardly more evolved in 2014 than Wallace was in 1964.

Without even referencing the infamous psycho-mass murderers of history, just in 1960's racist terms Lester Maddox could eat George Wallace's lunch. And J.B. Stoner could eat Maddox's lunch.

Who the eff was J.B. Stoner? This puke:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._Stoner

One of Stoner's heroes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_G._Bilbo

These lowlifes make George Wallace seem a ass-kissing liberal in comparison.

Robert Byrd was a Klan member. Harry S. Truman at least thought about becoming one.

No mention yet of Mr. Thurmond or Mr. Helms--they were pretty out there too.

IMO there are probably numerous racists in the Senate/House. They're just not open about it--they'd be pilloried constantly over it and it would be akin to political suicide. So we could say they're in the closet but the ugly overtones in the often made remarks towards immigrants especially those deemed illegal is a clue. Truthfully the overprotectiveness that some show to the extremely wealthy and the harsh measures that those same would give to the poor--whether jobless or working poor or single mothers or disabled is another clue.

> 32

Yes.

It's a sad story but in 1920 some huge per cent of white men in the Union, from every state, were Klan members - including lower, middle and upper classes.

In today's world if we could magically remove from Congress all the racists, closet or overt, who are willing to let their racism spill over in to the law-making process, then we would be removing a HUGE per cent of republicans and, in comparison, a TINY per cent of democrats.

That is a fact.

(For those who wish to dispute that FACT - well, look at the number of democratic black congresspersons and the number of republican congresspersons and ask yourself - "How far would a white racist democrat congressperson get in pushing his or her agenda within the democratic caucus?" - and then have a good laugh.)

#33--I remember my Dad telling me that when he was a kid in the 30's the Klan used to march around our town in upstate New York on occasion. They were all over the place. As well there were members of the German Bund (Hitler supporters) and also Mussolini supporters running around. These were more conservative Germans and Italians. Possible to give a good many of them the benefit of not really knowing what was going on back in their homeland--more than less just proud of their heritage and a little bit starry eyed reading the propaganda the media in those two countries were spewing. The Socialist party was much stronger then--capable of having a real impact on national elections--they had strong labor support. Would that that were still so. FDR's revitalization of the economy owes quite a bit to them. There were many communists in the United States as well. Things have broken down--now it's more like two tribes hammering each other and us all the time. I agree though that the Republicans have the greater % of whack jobs.

Wallace started out as a "redneck" type meaning that he focused largely on the economic plight of WHITE rural folks and ignored "race based" politics per se, his "mentor" in this someone like Huey Long or Big Jim Folsum, "populist" governors of Louisiana and Alabama respectively in the 1930s and '40s.

However the supreme court decisions of the 1950s and the subsequent federal action -- especially "Little Rock" in 1957 when Eisenhower "shocked" southerners by sending in national guard troops to integrate Central High school (don't "fuck" with Ike is the "lesson" Gov Faubus learned) -- created great anxiety throughout the white south and when Wallace ran for governor in 1960 (in the Democtaic primary which was all that mattered back then) against the incumbent John Patterson, Patterson stressed "race" issues and defeated GW who is said to have remarked "Wal Ah'll niveh be out niggered ag'in!" and he wasn't, winning the next time in 1962.

Wallace was often frustrated by the rulings of a federal judge in Alabama named Frank Johnson and Johnson once, in the 1980s, recounted a story in which he was having breakfast in his home in Montgomery when a guy in a trench coat with a fedora pulled down over his eyes showed up at the kitchen door. It's Gov Wallace he sees and "Kin Ah cum in?" "Sure; have some coffee?"

Well Wallace sits down and complains to Johnson that he's "in a fix" with the (federal) "guv'mint" over all this civil rights stuff and he'd like to get out of it somehow and isn't there some way Johnson could help him?

Johnson said of course that he was "only enforcing the law" and that if Wallace would follow his injunctions there'd be less trouble. Wallace only sighed, thanked Johnson for his time (and the cup of coffee) and left the way he came, by the back door and in the trench coat and pulled down fedora.

The upshot of this, Johnson thought, was that Wallace indeed "wanted out" of all this racial stuff but had gotten himself deep into the uh "tar baby" by emphasizing his pro segregationist stance and now he had to either back down or see more federal intervention, all over an issue that had never meant that much to him.

Obviously Wallace "adjusted" and configured himself as a "protest" candidate for prez in 1964, '68 and then most successfully until the shooting in 1972 but he centered mainly on resentments over the resistance to the Vietnam war, "hippies 'n' dope fiends," crime (i. e., as per Nixon meaning BLACK crime) and made himself really the "Archie Bunker" candidate though "Archie" on tv didn't DARE say so -- Archie had to be a NIXON man after all.

(By the way the great and popular movie actor John Wayne, another "Nixon man" publicly, sent in 1968 a $100 check to the Wallace-LeMay campaign...)