Prof. Jeffery Feldman is one of the better individuals I've come into contact through politics. He's a thoughtful, eloquent and good-natured individual, with powerful intellect an ultra-keen ear for language. I just recently came across his campaign roundup post. It's a very good read, especially for someone fatigued and frustrated with the political process as I am.

Feldman basically takes a high-level view of how the major campaigns have been conducting themselves, looking at how they frame their appeals to voters. It's both prescient, and also much more engaging than the usual horserace or battle-of-accusations post.

For those wondering what this primary season has been all about, I suggest giving it a read.

More Huckabee stuff. It's a shame there aren't interesting movements in the Democratic race to write about. But anyway, check this out:

People in business (or other worlds where Popularity Matters) know what that kind of curve means (the green line). It means you've got true hot-shit exponential growth going on. The Dean campaign had that for a while; Huckabee has it now, at least in Iowa.

However, the institutional forces are arraying against him, and the GOP has a history of putting down outsider upstarts who win an early primary (c.f. McCain, John and Buchannan, Paddy). There's also plenty of time for the Huckster's fortunes to reverse in Iowa, and with it being a caucus, and Romney spending the big cash, I would expect the MormBot to outperform his polling. Professional organizers matter a lot when %0.01 of the population participates and the process is arcane.

Here's a great and lengthy quote from Air Guitar, an essay entitled Romancing the Lookey-Loos which starts off with a moment of Waylon Jennings on tour, and goes on to explore the difference between spectators and participants in Art.

It's quite a brilliant essay, and which I think it cuts to the quick of what my shit is all about in both art and in politics:

[Spectators] were non-participants, people who did not live the life -- people with no real passion for what was going on on. They were just looking. They paid their dollar at the door, but they contributed nothing to the occasion -- afforded no confirmation or denial that you could work with or around or against.

With spectators, as Waylon put it, it's a one-way deal, and in the whole idea was not to be one of them... Even so, [growing up] it wasn't something we discussed of even though about, since the possibility of any of us spectating or being spectated was fairly remote. It is, however, something worth thinking about today, since, with the professionalization of the art world, and the dissolution of the underground cultures that once fed into it, the distinction between spectators and participants is dissolving as well.

So, as you may have heard, Atlanta is running out of water, and nobody really seems to know what will happen if the unthinkable occurs and drought persists for another two months. But it's not as if this is really a new thing.

It seems like somehow in the latter part of the 20th Century, we in the US lost track of the fact that we're actually quite small and powerless in the face of macro-scale events. Droughts and other disasters (some of them manmade) have always happened, and will happen again, but we've forgotten this. We seem to believe too deeply in our exceptionalism, that we're somehow exempt from history and the cruel twitches of fortune.

As Bukowski said, "The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed.". We have no feel for loss. We've constructed massive metropolises -- the fastest growing in the nation -- in the middle of deserts. There were dead cities in the same places when white people first got here. It's a failure of history and memory; hubris.

As Dick Cheney said, "The American way of life is not negotiable," and indeed it seems literally inconceivable to our leadership class that shit might not work out. I find this baffling and sad.

Politically I think this is part and parcel with the rise of post-modern conservatism. It's a particular blend of resource-intensive, non-scalable, non-sustainable infrastructure -- think exurbs, big lawns, etc -- coupled with a paradoxically anti-government philosophy (juiced with reactionary cultural backlash, of course).