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11.12.04

Culturally Speaking #44: Can't Stop Talking About Politics

By Sarah Stodola

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Eyeshot offers us a convincingly optimistic reaction to the re-election of President Bush.

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A crucial element in the freedom of the press is at stake of late in this country.  If journalists can't be trusted to retain confidentiality, then they won't get their sources to talk, and the government wins.

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Extremely relevant statistic from The New Yorker (pp.36-37):

"Though the Republicans won nineteen of the thirty-four Senate seats that were up for grabs last Tuesday, for a gain of four, the number of voters who cast their ballots for Republican Senate candidates was 37.9 million, while 41.3 million voted for Democrats -- almost exactly Bush's popular vote margin over Kerry.  When the new Congress convenes in January, its fifty-five Republicans will be there on account of the votes of 57.6 million people, while the forty-four Democrats and one independent will be there on account of the votes of 59.6 million people.

So, only because two seats are given to each state, regardless of that state's population, is the new Senate going to be controlled by the Republicans, because all of the Senators combined received more Democratic votes than Republican ones, so that now, per capita, Democrats are severely underrepresented in the Senate.

And things don't look much better in the House, although for different reasons:

"...the Republicans' gain of four seats was due entirely to Tom DeLay's precedent-breaking re-gerrymandering of the Texas district lines."

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The New Republic came out with such headlines as "It's John Kerry, Stupid," "John Kerry lost for a Simple Reason: He's John Kerry," and "John Kerry Thinks his Message Still Resonates. What Message?" To me, this is pathetic. It is pathetic for a leftist publication such as this one to accuse Kerry of being the problem, rather than the 51% of electorate that can't sit down and comprehend rational arguments.  It's jumping on the bandwagon.  I grew to like Kerry more and more as the campaign progressed, and I'm sure that if just 150,000 Ohioans had voted differently, The New Republic would be singing his praises.  These headlines are pandering to the Other Half, and I, for one, have no inclination to lend legitimacy to their naive views.

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Because I continue to be convinced that most things in New York City have a counterpart in London...

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David Foster Wallace is incapable of writing without footnotes, even in this serious essay on Borges and a new bio on him appearing in the NYTBR.  So then how come the Times wasn't accommodating me when I wanted to write a book review with a page of footnotes at the end?

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I would really really like to know who made away with Edvard Munch's The Scream, and I would like to know what they are doing with it and why. I really would.

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And also, I am trying really really hard to talk about culture and not politics, but lately it seems that culture must come second, or else politics is going to wipe it away anyway.

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I wrote a huge paper on Diderot's Encyclopedie in grad school, so I know that it is a historical artifact that could stand to have another book written on it.  For such a significant milestone, it really hasn't been given much attention.  This book may have made my own research a whole lot easier.

Click here for the last Culturally Speaking.

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Sarah Stodola is the Executive Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted here.

© 2004 Me Three