I Voted for Ed Clark in my first Presidential Election

I was a bit naive, but I was aware that American politics was a scam.

This was 1980. Jimmy Carter (Democrat) v. Ronald Reagan (Republican) v. John B. Anderson (Independent) v. Ed Clark (Libertarian)

I lifted this pic from his wikipedia page. Oh — btw? Support Wikipedia.

That moment in time feels crucially foundational to this moment. I won’t say that I chose correctly. I don’t believe I did, to be honest with you, but given the situation the country was in and the choices available, I’m not terribly mad at myself for this vote. That said, based on my understanding of myself and of the world of that time with my 20/40 hindsight, I might have done better to vote for John B. Anderson.

Jimmy Carter, much as he is now admired by modern Liberals, was an ineffective and arrogant failPOTUS. For those who don’t know the history, he faced a difficult geopolitical era. The US-installed Shah of Iran was deposed and that country was taken over by fundamentalist Muslims under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeni. As Iran had been the US’s main supplier of petroleum to that point, the US suddenly found itself in yet another round of long lines at the gas pumps and rising prices for things like heating oil and jet fuel and all of the down-market items that depend on oil for either production or transport, which is pretty much everything. At the same time that prices were rising, so was unemployment — a situation known as stagflation.

Complicating this was that Iran then kidnapped and held hostage 52 Americans employed at the US Embassy to Iran. They were held in Tehran for 444 days, and only released (suspiciously) within hours of Ronald Reagan’s swearing-in on 1/20/81. Carter had launched a rescue attempt in April 1980, which failed and led to the deaths of 8 American servicemen.

Let’s just say that it’s no surprise that Carter lost in 1980 in a landslide, even without understanding his own arrogance and high-handedness within the confines of the leadership of his own party. He even got on television and gave a speech in which he chastized the American people for a “lack of confidence.”

I certainly had no loyalty to him as a Democratic presidential candidate. In my opinion, he typefies the breed: Ineffectual and smug. I continue to view the leadership of the Democratic Party in this way to this day. Carter got 44% of the vote, winning 6 states in the Electoral College.

Ronald Reagan was not a good option, either. Darling of the Christian right, least articulate and intellectually rigorous of all four candidates on my ballot that year, and championing some of the craziest economic policy of the era, which his own vice presidential candidate, GHW Bush, had characterized as “voodoo economics” right up until the moment that Reagan chose him as his running mate. Me voting for that fascist was never gonna happen. Still, he got 47% of the vote and 44 states in the Electoral College.

Ed Clark angered his party once by describing Libertarianism as “low-tax Liberalism.” He’d run in the previous California gubernatorial race in favor of the anti property-tax referendum Proposition 13 and against Proposition 6, which sought to bar gay men and lesbians from working in public schools. It was his pro-gay stance and record of fighting for us that won me over. My burgeoning understanding of myself as a queer person made him an attractive candidate in a field of terrifying prospects. I’ve only recently been reminded that his running mate in that election was David Koch of Koch Industries. eep. He got just over 1% of the vote.

John B. Anderson, the candidate today-me would have absolutely supported in that election was also pro-civil rights, including gay rights, ran in the Republican primary that year warning that Reagan’s economic policies would be a disaster for the country (he was right) proposed a 50% hike in gasoline taxes, using that to offset a 50% reduction in Social Security payroll contributions, which I recall liking, and which I now think is a little bit questionable as policy, based on how it would have tied the Social Security fund to unrelated outside factors. He was also against the draft registration that Carter had initiated in 1978, and which Reagan supporters were very excited about. Anderson wound up with 6.6% of the vote, not winning even a single precinct across the country.

I can’t claim to be an authority on this, but it seems to me that Anderson was the last gasp of Liberal Republicanism in this country’s politics. I would not ever describe myself as any such thing as a Liberal or a Republican, much less some hybrid combination of the two, but from this standpoint almost five decades later (damn, I’m old!) He looks to me like the best path forward the country could have chosen at the time. He wasn’t perfect on policy, but at least he was generally pointed in the right direction.

Jackie O and Paul Newman supported this guy for POTUS in 1980. I also swiped this photo off of Wikipedia.

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Villainelle, First Attempt

Playing with the form, riffing on the Brain Radio

I didn’t know why I was wrong.
I thought I was bad company.
That’s what it said in that old song.

Just got along to get along
That’s what I thought my life should be
I didn’t know why I was wrong.

To get it on! To bang a gong!
Diamond star halo waits for me!
That’s what it said in that old song.

Felt wrong inside my whole life long
At least that’s how it seemed to be
I didn’t know why I was wrong.

I wondered as I walked along
Someone in my head that wasn’t me
Just like it said in that old song.

The radio played another song
About the man I’ll never be
I didn’t know why I was wrong
That’s what it said in that old song

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Ameleks

Sometimes the world won’t leave me alone.

The other night, I woke up from a dream about Netanyahu callling the Palestinians Ameleks, and how that was a justifucation for destroying them. I did something I almost never do, and came into my office, got on my computer and searched the term “Amelek.” Here’s what I learned:

The Torah and the Old Testament say that when the people of Israel were walking through the desert to return to their own land after being delivered from slavery in Egypt, they were attacked by the Ameleks. This act made the Ameleks the enemies of God, in the eyes of the Hebrews. But then, they thought that God himself had created the Ameleks to cause the Hebrews misery. It’s all very confusing and contradictory, but that’s how they thought.

In the Bible/Torah, it says if Moses kept his staff held high while the battle continued, the Israelites would win. If he let it drop, the Ameleks would win. Aaron and Tur helped Moses keep his staff high. This is not in any way superstition or homoerotic symbolism. Get your minds out of the gutter, heathens.

The Ameleks were a nomadic people who mostly lived in and around Canaan, which is in the southern part of modern-day Israel. They had moved into the area because of the void left by the Hebrew tribes being enslaved in Egypt.

“Amelek” is what Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have called the Palestinians. The Israelis think the Palestinians are the enemies of God. It doesn’t matter, though, because the Palestinians can’t be the Ameleks, because, over the course of generations, thousands of years ago, the Hebrews wiped out all the Ameleks.

Somehow we need to turn away from the path we’re trundling down as a species. We’re fixin to kill the world and ourselves with it if we don’t straighten up. The ideals and morals of the ruling class of this time are bereft of value and actively destructive. We have to change course.

And patterning behavior after tribal disputes from thousands of years ago doesn’t seem like a very good way to conduct ourselves. Especially when those tribal disputes ended with the death of an entire people.

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Jethro Tull’s Second Album

In which The Ghost of Mick Abrahams is exorcised.

I’m working my way through the Jethro Tull catalogue, one record at a time in chronological order. This Was was a shock to me, because it sounded like a different band entirely. All they changed, on the most physical level, was to switch out their guitar player. On a policy level, Tull became Ian Anderson’s baby. That narrowing and defining of leadership led to a huge expansion of the band’s artistic territory.

I can’t know this for sure, but I suspect that Mick Abrahams left Jethro Tull under a cloud. In the context of the band, he needed to be saged out of the space. Not to keep anyone in suspense or anything, but they 100% accomplished their goal. MA is pretty much a footnote in the Tull story, an early fork in the road. They become Tull as we know them on Stand Up.

In fact, by the third song on side one, the Brubeck-inspired “Bouree,” we’re already so far beyond the blues rock of what’s-‘is-name that the clock can never be turned back, and it becomes completely unfair of me to link everything that happens here to that guy.

But even though a listener who only had This Was as a reference point would feel his absence throughout, one would also hear the future. A great future. This album led to Benefit, and Benefit led to Aqualung, and everything that followed.

And Mick Abrahams could never have been the guitarist for Stand Up or any record that was made by Jethro Tull afterward. Martin Barre blows him out of the water, all while acknowledging that Ian Anderson is the boss. Where Abrahams wrote about half of the previous record, all of the songs here are Anderson’s, and collectively an upgrade from what had come before.

That’s Martin Barre in the middle, making eye contact with you. Hi, Martin! Photo of my copy of Stand Up by me.

While the Ghost of Mick hangs over this record, by the end of it, the listener is only looking forward, not backward. The band virtually never went back to the blues rock well from which This Was sprang.

And that’s what I like most about that time in rock music, bands grew and developed. Each new album was a chapter in the larger story arc. Taking a big chance such as completely redefining a band’s approach could be either a horrible disappointment or a thrilling expansion of what a band could be. It may be true that in most cases it would be the former, but in this case, it’s absolutely the latter.

So many bands went through these changes around that time. Yes booted Peter Banks in favor of Steve Howe. Genesis lost Anthony Phillips but added Steve Hackett and got Phil Collins in the bargain. In the larger context, the music was changing, but this round of changes seems to have codified things in such a way that they began to become stagnant. Less than a decade later, all of these revisions up in quality became an unassailable status quo which necessitated a revolution.

From this decades-later standpoint, one can see that things were both gained and lost amidst all the changes… as they always are.

Here’s to change. We all need it, from time to time.

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Zeitgeist 7/14/26

I feel like I have an obligation to dig into this whole Graham Platner debacle, considering how enthusiastic I’ve been about him.

I had thought to write a bit about a Jethro Tull album for this week, but I’ve trashed that post. I might write about it again at some point, since I am interested in the evolution of that band over its many decades of existence. Every band is a story, and Jethro Tull has fascinated me for years. This observation idea of mine is a chance for a deeper dive and I will definitely take that opportunity.

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But what I feel like I have an obligation to dig into right now is the whole Graham Platner debacle. Regular readers of this blog (if such a beast exists outside of my imagination) will remember that I have posted about that dude with enthusiasm on more than one occasion.

And then this week we learned that he probably is the horrible person the oppo researchers have so wanted him to be this whole time. Yes, most likely he’s a rapist. I’ll tell you straight up. I’ve been made aware of the incident’s particulars and it really does seem like he’s done a terrible thing, dehumanized a woman, and lived in denial of that fact for years – denied it so hard he thought he could deny it right into a seat in the US Senate.

And until the facts of this case surfaced, I was absolutely on his side, even though there were a few other rumblings in the oppositional noise to suggest that he had this tendency. Because that’s the nature of elections in this country. Throw dirt at your opponent and hope some of it sticks. In this case, it really did, like a fork in a roast turkey. Goddammit.

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I’ve been listening to The Pretty Reckless a lot lately. They’re a fabulously arty punk/rock/pop band with a decidedly modern flair. Taylor Momsen is blowing my mind, tbh. At different times, they’ve tickled my particularly generation jones ear with a redolence of Gun Club, Zep, Kelly Clarkson (this is a compliment, goddammit,) X, mid-seventies Floyd, and Jobriath. In short, they’re brilliant. The cover art for this new album, Dear God pt. 1, is spectacular. I have the indie-variant vinyl, which is, I think, the proper format for this album.

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But the thing with this whole Platner situation is that… Platner constantly said to his audience, “This is not about me, it’s about YOU!” and the fact is, that is the way every US pol should think. One of the things that really made Platner click with people is that he understood that money being the biggest influence in our politics these days needs to end. I think he also campaigned on the terminality of the cult of personality. We should vote for the politicians who say and feel like they will follow through with policies that will help working people.

I think I need to reiterate, at this point, that Graham Platner is not an acceptable or viable candidate. He has **** of his own that he needs to deal with now. And seeking the approval of the public while he goes through this is… anathema.

But whoever replaces him on the ticket should reflect the values of the voters who supported Platner. The next candidate should:

  • work to abolish ice
  • address the corruption on the supreme court and in the federal government generally
  • fight for medicare for all
  • campaign for a living wage and affordable housing
  • strongly oppose the Israeli genocide against Palestinians and Lebanon
  • And the same for all forever wars.

In short, he campaigned as a representative of working Americans. That needs to not be lost, and the next person who takes up the mantle of Democratic nominee for that senate seat should have the same positions.

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We’re about to start our third heat wave in as many weeks here. That seems to be going on in a lot of places. The planet’s clearly out of whack, due to stupid human activity. I’ve been hearing that we’ve crossed the line, and that no matter what we do, we’re about to face climate disaster. And yet we’re in the middle east fighting for oil and against human decency. It all makes me wonder if humanity can survive its own greed and thickheadedness. I don’t have an answer for you about this. Time will tell, if there’s anyone to listen.

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The best things about Summer are home grown tomatoes and ice cream. I wish you plenty of both!

Some of Karen’s tomato haul from last year. Photo by me.

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