You wake up one day, and you go off to greet your parents. Maybe it’s at an airport, or maybe it’s just down the block. There’s one day etched in your memory as the day you realized it. That one day when the years of worrying about you and all the other things that crossed the lives of your parents are etched in their faces and pulled out the thinning strands of their hair. One day, your parents suddenly look old.
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All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.
Patriot
To hear the podcast, please click on the “play” arrow. The music is “Liberty City” by Jaco Pastorius.
Election Day is not a national holiday, at least not in the traditional sense. But it is the one day that our nation asks something from all of us, even if it’s just a few minutes. If you follow calle ocho through Little Havana in Miami on Election Day, you’ll see a long line houses with the red white and blue of US and Cuban flags stretching off into the horizon. Families sometimes come together across generations, as with any holiday, before they go off to vote. Cubans are a people that know what it means to be free because freedom and good times are often best measured against their opposite.
The Pragmatic Party
Back in 1999, I wrote this piece to recruit potential members of what I called “The Pragmatic Party”. It was a party beyond ideology and all the other nonsense people drone on about – a People’s Party for a cynical age.
Naturally, it went nowhere. Since I wasn’t surprised, I wasn’t upset. But when a crappy looking attack piece tying Obama to Bill Ayers hit my mailbox today, I had to laugh. After all, this was exactly the kind of nonsense I knew how to innoculate against. As this campaign descends into a pitiful series of lessons from Tactics 101, I thought it was time to re-run my original piece from Columbus Day Riot on how to run a Pragmatic Campaign. Here it is with only the introductory paragraph removed.
Banana Republic
As the election draws closer, the inevitable cries of fraud and vote buying are being raised. Early voting has opened in Florida and other states, and the process is being watched closely. Despite all that we’ve heard on this, however, vote buying and fraud is almost certainly a big industry in some parts of the nation, particularly Florida – just not in the form people are talking about.
Generations: Played Out
The party platform is 35,000 words long, addressing just about every aspect of government and how it desperately needs an overhaul. It opens with a strong statement of purpose:
America is adrift. Our country moves agonizingly, aimlessly, almost helplessly into one of the most dangerous and disorderly periods in history. At home, our economy careens, whiplashed from one extreme to another. Earlier this year, inflation skyrocketed to its highest levels in more than a century; weeks later, the economy plummeted, suffering its steepest slide on record.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 