photo: Meneer De Braker (flickr)

I know everyone is going to yell at me for writing this now. I can hear it now, “We’re trying to win an election! You’re not helping! Criticizing Democrats now is akin to getting into bed with Karl Rove!” Ok, I hope not the last one, that sounds creepy, but you get the point.

The reality is while a lot of people are talking, we’re actually doing something. Along with PCCC and DFA, we are participating in TurkOutTheVote.com. That is part of their larger effort at CallOutTheVote.com to get people who care to volunteer and make calls to turn out the vote for strong progressives. Please help in that effort if you have any free time. Some of the elections are very close and talking to real voters helps tremendously.

Now, the reason I’m writing a piece critical of Obama at this point is because I just saw an excellent interview Jon Stewart had with him on The Daily Show. In fact, I thought it was the best interview of the president I have ever seen (my detailed analysis of the interview is here).

Stewart got him to address real, substantive criticism of his record for the first time. Almost everyone else that has interviewed him has either wildly misstated the case or challenged him from the right. Stewart asked all of the right questions. And the answers were very informative. This is what I learned.

Unfortunately, Obama doesn’t get it. He’s not alone; almost the entire Washington media doesn’t understand what the hell we’re talking about when we say change. Obama said that he got 90% of what we wanted in health care reform and that people are complaining we didn’t get the other 10%. I totally disagree with him on the percentages (I think it was closer to 40%), but that misses the whole point.

We’re not quibbling over legislative compromises. For example, I would have given the NRA exemption and every other exemption that was proposed to pass the DISCLOSE act. We’re not stupid, we understand the need to compromise and the fact that of course you can’t get all of what you want.

The real issue isn’t whether you changed some provisions and didn’t change others; it’s whether you changed the system or not. That’s the change we were looking for.  [cont'd]

If you Google Saul Alinsky‘s name (or just “alinsky“), you’ll generally find that, after the first one or two cites (which are usually the Wikipedia entries for him and/or for his book Rules for Radicals), there are pages and pages of cites in which right-wing commenters outnumber non-right-wingers by around a ten-to-one margin.

Clearly, the righties have made Alinsky into one of their favorite Emmanuel Goldsteins, a semi-mythic figure they use as demon and scapegoat. But their interest in him goes beyond that.

The constant harping on Alinsky’s Socialist beliefs and some of his more outré actions conceals the basic fact that Alinsky practiced several techniques that are beloved of conservatives but eschewed by many if not most liberals and lefties, both of his era and today. If he were alive, he likely would be scorned as an amoral compromiser by the same people who are confronted daily by conservatives who successfully use his strategies and tactics.

Alinsky pioneered the use of single-issue politics as a tool for working with what we now call “low-information voters”, doing better with them than almost any other lefty activist before or since. His method was to first establish a relationship with the group he hoped to organize, and to pick a particular issue with which to create and nurture this relationship; he would keep things simple and distraction-free by focusing on that issue, and only that issue, until success was achieved or it was felt advisable to move on to another issue. (This, by the way, is why rallies that focus on one topic, one issue, one goal, are generally more successful than those that allow themselves to be hijacked by various groups wanting to push their own agendas and wind up, without intending to do so, worsening the signal-to-noise ratio so badly so that no message gets through.)

The issue itself was often secondary — the true objective was getting the people organized and comfortable enough with the organizer so that he/she could, by degrees, start introducing them to the organizer’s actual long-term goals. To keep from endangering this relationship in its early stages, Alinsky initially avoided mentioning things he knew might be likely to alienate his target audience. Here’s how he describes this strategy in Rules for Radicals:

photo: peasap (flickr)

I rarely watch horror films, because they either scare me or bore me. Still, I thought I would take one for the team this week and watch both Blue Velvet and Carrie…after all, Halloween is coming up this weekend. Besides, I like both Isabella Rossellini and Sissy Spacek. But, in the end, I couldn’t watch either of them to the end. I saw about 44 minutes of Blue Velvet and about 6 minutes of Carrie. Dennis Hopper’s entrance in Blue Velvet (opening) completely did me in and the bullying in Carrie (trailer) was more than I could bear. Okay… so I’m a wuss and I freely admit it.

After failing at watching horror films, I decided to look for some spooky poems and stories, instead. I found some poems here at Poets.org and at Classic Horror, I found both poems and short stories. And Elliott sent me this link to Poetry Foundation via email, where you will find a collection of more modern poems suited to this weekend.

As for stories that I know… Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton is a pretty grim tale, but beautifully written. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is also pretty unforgettable. I seem to recall that we put on the play of James’ story when I was in high school. And, let’s not forget Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, his unusual tale about a headless horseman.

And there’s always Edgar Allan Poe, who during his life was better known for his literary criticism, but who almost single-handedly invented what we call detective fiction or the murder mystery, along with his many other contributions to the horror genre. Poe invented a non-professional detective named C. August Dupin, who first appeared in Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and appears again in The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and in The Purloined Letter. Poe also wrote a number of horror stories, including The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Gold Bug and Ligeia. If you want something in the horror genre to read to your children or your spouse or partner, you cannot go wrong with Poe, whether you read his stories or his poems… The Raven, comes to mind. And I love the sonorous sounds in his poem, The Bells.

Trick-or-treaters will be out on Sunday evening, ringing our doorbells and asking for goodies. We usually have a pumpkin on our walkway, one with a sensor that laughs uproariously when it senses that someone is near by. Sometimes, it scares the very small children. Still, the lure of candy will often bring them to our door anyway. And we hang up some of that webby stuff that looks like spider webs, as well as a skeleton in the entryway, and a few bats, too. I don’t get dressed up any more, though. Not enough time.

On Halloween, do you dress up and try to scare the little ones? Or, do you restrain yourself and just give them candy? Do you have any favorite Halloween poems or short stories or movies that you that you think we should know about?