(no subject)

Apparently it is time to dispose of certain delusions, and now revel in a simple truth: Most citizens of this country are morons.

(no subject)

Okay, which electors can we lobby? In 38 states they are apparently bound to go with winner-take-all, so my question is, which are the remaining states?

All Across America

It is abundantly clear, if not yesterday then today, that there is not just one America. I hear that there are two Americas, a Democrat (with a big "D") one and a Republican (with a big "R") one, and they sporadically ask "Whose country is this?" when they're talking about what they want this country to become. I've heard, too, of the "Culture Wars," described in the media like some Roman holiday, complete with gladiators and an inevitable shakespearean reënactment. But there cannot be just two Americas. The Parties lump together the strangest groups, who would never have each other over for dinner, and who would not nod to each other on the street. So there could be three or four Americas, perhaps, and the real answer, doubtlessly, is that there are 294,673,820 Americas, and many more that have been and yet more that will be. Yet somehow all these Americas get lumped together into two, and these two lumps grow further and further apart.

It occurred to me this afternoon that what this country needs is a giant room-to-room. A "progressive," a "mixer," a get-to-know-each-other event on a national scale. This is what we have when we all move into a dorm together, when we don't know anything about each other yet, knowing we're going to have to live together, we want to make friends.

It's a common thing for a student at an American university to spend a few months or a year living in a foreign country and pretty much everyone agrees that it's an incredibly worthwhile thing. What about a domestic exchange program? Spend a semester in Kentucky or Alaska or Iowa. Work on a farm, or in a hospital. Find out for yourself what makes Kansas tick, why farm subsidies are a big deal, why the blue states don't see what the big problem with same-sex marriage is, why red states think trickle-down economics is a good idea. Expand Americorps to be the "Domestic PeaceCorps" that it was supposed to be. And so forth. We could have a program like AFS that arranges home-stay exchanges for high school students within the United States. Spend a year in high school in a different state. Or in a different part of your own state. Exchange between Los Angeles and the Central Valley, between San Francisco and South California. Call it 'homeland exchange' and the neocons will hop on the bandwagen like it was their own.