danajohnhill.org

In today’s New York Times is A.O. Scott’s review of the new film Sicko. In the review he comments on one of the chief ironies of today’s political climate in America. Describing Michael Moore, Scott writes:

“His regular-guy, happy-warrior personality plays a large part in the movies and in their publicity campaigns, and he has no use for neutrality, balance or objectivity. More than that, his polemical, left-populist manner seems calculated to drive guardians of conventional wisdom bananas. That is because conventional wisdom seems to hold, against much available evidence, that liberalism is an elite ideology, and that the authentic vox populi always comes from the right. Mr. Moore, therefore, must be an oxymoron or a hypocrite of some kind.”

The second to last sentence is the key here. Why is it that liberals are branded elitist? I think it is because there is a distrust in conservative America of anything that appears intellectual. You see it in a variety of settings, from the ridiculous (and yes, I literally mean worthy of ridicule) denial of central tenets of science, to President Bush’s demonstrable lack of intellectual curiosity.

Moreover, I firmly believe that the “vox populi” as put forth by the political right is not, in fact, genuine. Consider the irony that the little support that remains for the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” comes largely from Bible-belt, red state America, the least likely target of international terrorism. And, as pointed out by another writer recently, environmental activism is largely the domain of urban “liberal elite” types, and not conservative, rural America.

Ironic.

For now it looks like the rains have stopped, and looking around the house I am surveying the damage. Nothing severe. The nice fern, sitting in a pot beneath the eaves, was pelted such that it is looking droopy, but it will spring back. The impatiens appear happy, and so do the St. Augustine plugs I have planted. I’ve been waiting two years to see one of the rotten limbs on the live oak come crashing down, and when it finally did the day before yesterday, it did so not with a fearsome, obliterating force upon the Japanese magnolias, but with a relatively gentile swinging motion. Pulling it the rest of the way down will be challenging, since other delicate plants are at risk.

The rain has been very welcome. At our house we have gone without rain for what seems like months. April and May are usually dry months, but they had been so dry that we were several inches below normal precipitation levels region-wide, and at this particular location, even lower, since rains that fell on other parts of the county missed us altogether. But we got a couple inches this week, and that’s good news. Now we just need another two inches this month to be “average”, though I have pondered for a decade or more why they continue to say year in and year out how annual rainfall has been “below average”. If “below average” rainfall is the norm, why hasn’t the “average” changed?

So I am wrapping up the finer details of the new web page, and I guess I’m satisfied.  Sure, I would love it if it was the best looking site in the world, and if it had all manner of pretty things to look at, but what’re you going to do?  I’m just one man.

I am about to put a message up on the old site that will forward visitors to the new one.  I haven’t decided if I’ll migrate all the old archives over to the new site.  It might take a lot of work, and still wouldn’t look as I’d like.  I’d need some help, probably, to even create the appropriate page structure to have it work.  So, for the time being, if it’s the past you’re interested in–and I’m with you there–then seek ye the old Archives.