Table of Contents:

General News

• My Plans For The Fourth
• Al Gore For President
• The Signers Of The Declaration

Computer Industry News

• None

Web Site of the Week

• None

Humor

• None

Movies

• None

Letters

• Ray and Yoli Pardo on the AFI List

General News

My Plans For The Fourth

Most regular readers realize by now that I play tenor saxophone in the Contra Costa Wind Symphony. I also play annually in the Orinda pickup marching band, which marches in our town's Fourth of July parade. This year, it appears Marlow and Rae will both join me in the marching band, and then I will entertain both of them by playing on Moraga Commons in the afternoon. A lot of music on the glorious Fourth, which in Orinda, is either 90 degrees and still or 50 degrees and windy.

This column is being filed early because Vicki, the girls and I are headed out for a long weekend at Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco, one of our favorite spots. It is my intention not to take my computer. Vicki will stay through the Fourth, while the girls and I come home on the third for all that music.

In honor of the patriotic nature of the holiday, I decided to end any suspense you might be in and make my presidential endorsement. I am sure it won't come as much of a surprise. I present it in lieu of most of my regular features, which will return next week. Have a glorious Fourth! Try not to overdose on Stars and Stripes Forever (written by John Philip Sousa on the boat back from Europe during the Christmas holiday of 1898, and, since 1986, the official U.S. National March.

Al Gore For President

I have always believed that you vote your head, your heart or your pocketbook. Voting your head is easy; dispassionate analysis, logic, a careful checkbox view of the issues. Voting your heart is easier still, just go with your gut. And of course, no one but a fool fails to vote his pocketbook.

I am a fool.

I have always thought it most noble to vote with your head, most ignoble to vote your pocketbook. Every public position George W. Bush has taken on an economic issue favors my economic class and me. I am voting for Al Gore. Let me tell you why.

There is a simple formula by which you can predict position and passion George W. Bush will adopt towards any issue: both are directly proportional to the benefit that will accrue to the rich, however you wish to define them. This repulses me, intellectually.

The two exceptions are abortion and gun control, issues on which Bush reflexively adopts the position of his religion and party.

Now don't tell me abortion is a divisive issue. I know that. My best friend for a decade of grade school and high school was Tom Kervin. Our split began when he worked for McCarthy while I worked for Bobby Kennedy in the 1968 Oregon Primary (McCarthy won). But our loudest arguments were reserved for the issue of abortion, which was pretty amazing, considering that neither of us had any skin in the game (no pregnant girl friends, no sisters). He argued with passion that life started at conception. I believed then and I believe now that it begins with a live birth. I believed then and I believe now that the life of the mother takes precedence over the life of an unborn child. I believe there should be no unwanted children in this world, and I agree with Bill Clinton: abortion should be available, safe and rare. We must do what it takes as a society to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. Issues of faith are always difficult to discuss in the commonweal, I find. If you believe abortion is murder, don't practice it. But don't make it illegal for my daughters to do so.

As for gun control, my position is simple and couldn't be more different than Bush's. Registration and licensing. We do it for cars, we can do it for guns. I'm sorry, I don't think registration is the first step towards confiscation by jackbooted thugs. This is as much a matter of faith as abortion.

It chills me to the bone to think of George W. Bush naming between three and five clones of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. If ever Supreme Court justices made a habit of putting their thumbs on the scale of justice in favor of the well-off, the majority, the powerful, it is these two. In our poll-driven society, with elected judges at the state level, the federal courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular have been the last line of defense for the poor, the helpless, the minority viewpoint on any issue. They have been the reason we aren't Canada or Europe or Japan, consensus-bound and unalterably majoritarian. Scalia, Thomas and their ilk, itching to be elevated to the high court in a Bush administration, will give us an antediluvian court, the likes of which we haven't seen since Taft and Hughes were on the bench.

I grew up in a household, in a time, in which the Republican party was anathema, in which to vote GOP was not just wrong-headed, but bordering on the sinful. True, we heard stories of East Coast Establishment liberals out in Oregon; in 1964, we even got a close look at Nelson Rockefeller, as he made his last, belated run for the presidency. We even had some liberal Republicans in Oregon: Mark Hatfield, Robert Packwood (the destroyer of Wayne Morse, the lion of the Senate, the best thing ever to come out of Oregon) and the sainted Tom McCall. But, as a colonial state in the shadow of California, we got a good look at the dark underbelly of the GOP, the John Birch/John Wayne/Ronald Reagan/Orange Country strain of Republicanism, and it didn't look too good. And of course, we got a royal dose of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, and they really didn't look good--to my family. Nixon carried Oregon all three times he ran for president, and it made me despair for my state. In third grade, the day after the election, my mother (secretary of the young Democrats at Portland State University) sent me to school singing, "Whistle while you work, Nixon is a jerk, and all his henchmen, all his doormen, all are out of work." It cemented my already burgeoning reputation as a misfit. Which just made it easier to concentrate on my schoolwork.

Strip away the frou-frou, and we have a Labor Party in the United States. It is called the Democratic Party. The Republicans have been the party of capital in this country since the 1880s that I know of. For that reason alone, I support the Democratic Party.

You know, every time I say Democratic Party, I think of the congressional Republican effort to rename it the Democrat Party. They made Liberal a dirty word, and now they think they can make my political party seem less important, less inclusive, if they can change its name. The Congressional GOP as a group have more faith in the power of language than any average group of Marxist English professors at a liberal arts college. And they may well be right; look at the mileage they are getting out of renaming the estate tax the death tax. Well, it's the Democratic Party. Always has been. Always will be.

I support the Democratic party, even though it is against my economic and class interest, because I have studied the history of American labor, and it is crystal clear to me as I think it would be to any fair observer that Capital holds all the cards. Unless government puts its thumb on the scale, or tilts the playing field, or suits up and plays on the Labor team, the working class hasn't got a chance.

I know whereof I speak. My mother taught English, my father was a milkman. Both are retired now. I am the first male on either side of my family to graduate from college, and I have devoted my life to the avoidance of physical labor. Don't talk to me of the dignity of labor. I have seen it close up. I have punched a time clock, and watched my father punch a time clock, and I'll never do it again. For centuries, the men of the Schindler and Van Ronk and Marshall families lived the life of the body, not the mind. Short lives, filled with monotony and pain, and precious little beauty and joy.

Why was I able to rise above my station in life, to leave the working class? The Teamsters Union. Plain and simple. Thanks to organized labor, my father, a hard-working high-school graduate, could own a home and two cars, support a wife and two sons. He was able to live a middle-class lifestyle, sending his boys to high-class public schools, raising their aspirations to the point where one of them could go off to MIT and become a professional journalist. I contributed a burning desire to get out of the working class, unstinting devotion to schoolwork, and native intelligence. My parents both contributed love and support. My timing--being born a boomer--was excellent. But organized labor allowed my father and his fellow workers to extract a living wage from capital. For this alone, I am a Democrat, and will be until and unless my party abandons labor.

There is a difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore. They do differ on the important issues of our time. It does matter whether a Democrat or a Republican controls the White House. America's political parties have a fundamentally different view of the polity. I prefer the one that favors the powerless, which will lessen, rather than widen, the ever-growing gap between rich and poor. I like Ralph Nader, I have heard him speak, I think he and the Green Party have done much good in this country, and when/if we ever get proportional voting, I'll cast a ballot for the Greens. But in the meantime, count me in for Al Gore, and you too if you think about it. Gore is an imperfect messenger with a muddled message. That's the way it goes in American politics. I'll take our system over Canada, Japan, Britain, Italy or Israel any day.

The Signers Of The Declaration

Well, well well. The Internet strikes again. There is a lovely, stirring, patriotic essay that makes it around the net every year at this time.

Its sentiments are valid, the and the values it reflects are worthwhile and deserving of contemplation by all of us. Alas, despite its very specific detail, it is apparently inaccurate in some of its essentials, according to E. Brooke Harlowe, Asst. Prof. and Coordinator, Intl Studies major/minor, Dept. of Political Science, Susquehanna University.

What the Internet needs is a fact-checking department, one in which people sign their names to their work.

Computer Industry News

None This Week

Web Site of the Week

None This Week

Humor

None This Week

Movies

None This Week

You want the facts? Go to the Internet Movie Database.

I am getting away for the holiday. Loads of movies by next week, I am sure. Rocky and Bullwinkle is on my radar…

Letters

Ray and Yoli Pardo on the AFI 100 List

A pair of Boston friends, Ray and Yoli Pardo, wrote in about my comments on the American Film Institute list of the 100 funniest movies of all times: