Tonight I’m delighted to be starting a new show with the lovely and fierce Anita Finlay. We’re calling it Finlay And Smart Talk. Each week we’ll zero in on one topic for 30 minutes. Tonight, a perfect inaugural topic for many around these parts: Fear of speaking out, fear of ‘leaving the herd’, the need to speak out and the costs of both. Click here to listen at 7pm Pacific. Or anytime afterward in the archive.
Programing note: Never fear, my raucous hour-long show is on this Wednesday at 6pm Pacific. This week we’ll be talking about Big Bird…and some other poultry.
John, Thanks for a good conversation: It brought to mind this from the Sultan Knish blog, re. voting by tribe:
“We may scoff at the absurd sectarian arrangements of Iraqi and Lebanese politics, but we have our own quotas. Like the Sunnis and Shiites we turn out in large numbers to vote for our own, at least those who claim to be our own. Race, gender and other identity tabs have become excellent predictors of voting patterns and our conventions have become tribal displays that carefully include members of all the prominent tribes. Petty matters like economics or national defense have taken a backseat to unconvincing shows of tribal unity”
The quote above is from a longer piece, all of it compelling..
Awesome show John and Anita, when you both started sharing your experiences about being “out of the herd” at the end it brought to mind what I’ve been thinking past few years.
The runup to Obama getting the nomination in 2008 and subsequent campaign had me feeling pretty out of sorts as well, I run with pretty liberal crowd for the most part, and being unable to partake in the convival passing of the Kool Aid was a sea change for me.. the further I got away from it, the easier it was to look in from the outside in a way and see what was going on objectively…and it’s felt pretty cultish.
In a way that experience marked the passage of time for me, although I still agree with most of the ideals of the Democratic party, I couldn’t shake the feeling of “that doesn’t resonate with me anymore” in terms of the cultural aspect of the Democratic Party… almost in the sense of how baseball fans from Brooklyn stopped rooting for the Dodgers once they moved to LA, or how the folk music scene lambasted Bob Dylan for picking up an electric guitar… it’s been a very pop-culturish phenomena.. on one hand if Obama was simply a lame-duck President it could be dismissed as a “fad”… but for me there has always felt like there is an underlying miasmic quality to the whole thing that erodes the potential for people to have any real dialogue about any of it..
And we’re left to snicker about whether or not Big Bird will die in 2013.
I wanted to jump in and ask the question at the end, “Can you go back?” For me the answer seems more and more to be no… I think I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how if Obama loses then we can collectively go back and pick up the pieces of the Democratic party and start over… others think that if Romney wins that will usher in a new phase of economic growth and American exceptionalism like back in the good old days.. the Reagan days… but for me, I can’t go back, it’s simply not “there” anymore… all I can hope to do is take whatever worked for me then and go somewhere else with it.
Discussions like the one you had tonight are a good way to get there.
Dan, I so appreciate your calling in. I have asked myself the “can you go back” question a number of times these past four years. The answer is yes, in that I will try to stay open to those acquaintances or friends who tested me with their attitudes and intolerance, but the answer is a resounding no in terms of ever putting my head back in the sand. I cannot un-know what I now know, if that makes sense. Or stay silent about it. But the new like minded people I have met have surprised, supported and taught me many things. I am grateful to them. Glad you enjoyed the show! Keep tuning in!
Dan, for some of us, changing from Dem. to Independent is at least equal to, or worse than, changing religions, or becoming estranged from our family.. Our Party is one of the central facets of how we self identify, or it used to be…Sometimes I feel as if I have boarded up what was once a fun and interesting room in my house, I just didn’t want to live in it anymore, the mirror in that room reflected a tired stranger and the ceiling was badly cracked and leaking.. At my age, I can live where I want and not apologize., we all can.
I feel the same way and totally remember what that felt like in 2008 and moving through that…made for some fun dinner time conversations
My only thought is that if I hold true to what I think that the ideals of the Democratic party should be and make my choices accordingly, and own my judgements and my projections, that’s a lot more authentic for me than listen to the current crop of Democrats pay those same ideals lip service and expect me to carry water for them.
Loved the show tonight, John. A half hour wasn’t long enough.