Learning Politics with Travis McGee

Our friend John D. MacDonald pauses in his narrative of the search for Bix Bowie's fate in the Oaxacan highlands. Travis and Meyer are interested in the scene, a high mesa marked with anthropological remnants of a tough and ancient people.  John D. permits Enelio, their bright new Mexican friend, to explain. (N.B. The term "priest" needs to be read in its meaning in Meso-American culture before the Spanish invasion. The priests were also the temporal masters -- the polticians, the Obamas, Santorums, Gingriches, and Romneys, among many other latter-day names.):

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"Here is how it was.  Five, six, seven hundred years ago, these mountain people who had been led into this place by the priests and the soldiers, they cimbed to that place that you see, and they made offerings of food, and they worshipped. They bult the temples and they dug the wells, carried the stones, made the pottery, cut the thatch. But the priests got too far away from the people. They thought they owned the people forever. They lost common understanding. So one day the people went up to the high places and killed the priests and killed the guards and pulled down the temples and never went back. ... They just got tired of slave life, of catering to the demands of priests for food and women and children to train, and tired of work that became more meaningless to them. They went up and killed them and put and end to it...".


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This little offering is not meant as an immediate call to hone the swords and hoist Mencken's Black Flag. It is a suggestion that authoritarianism has its ultimate punishments.

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From Dress Her in Indigo, the 1987 Fawcett printing, p. 95.

Investment paranoia

I foggily clicked through the trading numbers of a little stock I don't hate. They looked okay, so I scribbled a calculation of the dividend income compared to the zero-point zero-point-insult-giggle interest rate from my friendly home-town bank.

Decided the difference justified the principle risk. Started entering the order and noticed it hadn't traded in the first five minutes of  the Wall Street Daily Follies. Crap! More coffee. Or if I'd powered up the electric teevee I'd have been reminded.

Even Washington and Lincoln hate me.
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The Frontrunner Ron Paul (Caution: Adult Content)

Now will you forgive us for imposing Rick Santorum on you? Even though his primary campaign theme is a strict "One Climax, One Kid" rule?

The competent Ann Selzer has just published a poll of Iowa voters, and our "unelectable" Ron Paul whips every other GOPer in a face-to-face against His Ineptness Barack Obama.

I wouldn't break out the champagne just yet. The results seem to reflect more revulsion with President Obama and the other Republicans than any great enchantment with our offbeat ol' Grandpa Paul.  But a guy can be heartened to see hints of a friendlier attitude toward Constitutional government.

Paul beats the president by 7 points. Santorum beats him by 4 and Romney wins by 2. Poor Newt loses; Mr. Obama sends him home to Callista by 14 points.

From Hawkeye lips to God's ears, eh?

(There is rain on our parade. Paul's unfavorables total 41 points against Santorum's 33.  The others' hate numbers are worse, 51 for Mitt and 65 for Newt.  



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For a couple of reasons you probably want to read the whole thing, including links to the polling geekery. My brief report here is undoubtedly colored by a bias against hinging a presidential race on regulating the reproductive habits of every Joe and Sally Sixpack in the land. Likewise by disgust with the intense debate about how manly -- or bogus -- Mitt looks in his new starched and ironed jeans.  Too, my mind may still be fogged by the pleasant little fantasy  about going  rock climbing with Rachel.

Here ya go

This is what happens when the studio makeup dudes get their hands on a woman. Not terrible, of course, but she still looks better in climbing togs with face smudges.