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Kevin Drum, writing in Mother Jones, astutely notes:

“[I]t’s not that the working class has abandoned Democrats. It’s just the opposite: The Democratic Party has largely abandoned the working class.” 

 It’s an excellent article, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.

He goes on to describe the animosity that existed between the “New Left”, as he calls it, and organized labor. Specifically, to paraphrase him a bit, there was something of a culture clash, and so the  “New Leftists” were disliked by the old-school working class.

It’s this clash, of course, which has caused such a problem for the Democratic party, and the article does a good job of explaining how it still impacts them even today. And (forgive me a bit of self-promotion) it’s sort of related to the issue I wrote about here.

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I’ve only seen one of the movies that is nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture this year, and that is Toy Story 3.

Last year, I saw both Avatar and The Hurt Locker, neither of which I liked very much. Toy Story 3 is a better film than both, in my opinion.

I don’t really see new movies in the theater very much; I think I average about one per year over the past ten years. (It’s more if you count seeing the last two Star Wars prequels twice.) I usually wait a few years and watch them on DVD.

It’s odd, too, because I enjoy movies. And what I really like about them is analyzing them, not just watching them. So, logically, I probably should care which movies win what awards; but such ceremonies are too heavy on  pageantry and light on analysis for my own tastes.

So, I’ve never watched one of these ceremonies, and I probably won’t again this year.

I hope Natalie Portman wins, though.

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On the advice in this post of thingy, I’ve been reading the book Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I think it’s a very good book, but in the early going, there’s a character named “John Reed” whom I find astoundingly irritating. Obviously, the character is intended to be this way, but I feel that he is rather too well-written in this regard, and becomes so unpleasant as to impair the reader’s (well, this reader’s) enjoyment of the book.

I’d never thought about it much before, but it’s a delicate balance in fiction to write unlikable characters. You don’t want them to be too sympathetic, obviously; or it screws up the audience’s reaction to them. But if you succeed too well at making them unlikable, people might say “I deal with enough jerks in life as it is”, and give up on the book altogether.

Not that I’d do that with Jane Eyre. It’s quite good.

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I am not good at telling jokes. I once tried to tell a joke to some people, at their request. I figured my only chance was to tell a joke I knew to be “bad” and hope it was funny by virtue of its sheer “badness”. This may have been a mistake. Anyway, I forget where I read this joke originally (some magazine, I know) but it went something like this:

A Priest, a Rabbi, and an Atheist walk into a bar. The bartender turns to them and says “Is this some kind of joke?”

The reaction was, as you might imagine, stony silence. I might have felt embarrassed, but it hadn’t been my idea to tell a joke, and I felt they deserved what they got.

Some people, including relatives of mine, are very good at telling jokes. I don’t know how they do it. I suppose part of it has to do with the “delivery”, which is obviously hard to discuss on a blog.

I don’t think of myself as being a particularly humorless person, either. It’s just that I prefer humor in the form of a witty observation, or a well-crafted piece of dialogue in a book, film or video game.

Not that there’s anything wrong with jokes, but it’s just not my thing, for some reason.

P.S. I realize it’s possible you’ll want to tell jokes in the comments. That’s fine, but keep it PG-13, if you would.

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A new Gallup poll puts Ronald Reagan as the nation’s greatest President. Then it’s Lincoln, Clinton, Kennedy, Washington and FDR.

Yes, in that order.

My opinion: Lincoln, Washington and FDR are the only ones out of that crowd who could conceivably have any claim to the title of “greatest President”. And where is Eisenhower? I mean, maybe he wasn’t the greatest President ever, but he ought to have been in the running.

Also, George H. W. Bush should have gotten more votes than George W. Bush, in my opinion. Finally, I think President Obama shouldn’t even be eligible for this poll yet, since he’s currently President and we have yet to see what he’ll do the rest of his term and if he’ll win re-election.

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Jill Lawrence has an interesting article concerning George Will’s use of the phrase “the charisma of competence” in talking about Republican governor Mitch Daniels.

She mentions that this approach is similar to that taken by Michael Dukakis, whose decision to stress his “competence” failed to get him elected.

I’d never heard the phrase “charisma of competence” before; but I think that, in general, stressing their “competence” is often the last refuge of an anti-charismatic politician.

Charisma isn’t just being good-looking and attractive (though that helps) but the effect is very much the same: it produces an exciting “vibe” around the charismatic person in a way that no record of achievement ever really can. As Lawrence herself writes: “…let’s be honest, competence is not in itself charismatic. It’s boring.”

Indeed; though that is a little troubling if we accept the Paul Graham theory (as I do) that charisma is what determines the outcome of Presidential elections.

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“I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, 
Without knowledge or lustre or name.” 

Have you heard about the theory that there is a hitherto-unknown giant planet out at the edge of our Solar system? It sounds intriguing, although most scientists seem to be leaning against the idea now.

The Time article linked above also makes mention of a theory popular in the ’80s about “a faint, far-off companion star to the Sun was sending down a rain of comets when it reached just the right point in its orbit.” (The name for this hypothetical object was “Nemesis”, by the way.)

What I don’t quite understand is how, if it really is there, we could have gone this long without noticing it, since we can see well beyond the Solar system already.

Anyway, like it says in the article, the smart money at the moment says that the supposed giant planet probably doesn’t exist. But if it turns out that it does, I want them to name it “Yuggoth“.

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Via Andrew Sullivan, Scott Sumner has a new idea for a political spectrum, which you can view here. Like I posted about last week, I am becoming more and more convinced that we really do need a new way of thinking about politics.

The traditional right vs. left political spectrum is inadequate to the task of describing the actual situation. As a result, political discourse is a bit like the part in the book Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, where the Sphere is trying unsuccessfully to explain to the Square of two-dimensional  Flatland how the three-dimensional world works. The framework just isn’t built to handle it.

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Too bad about the Borders Bookstores bankruptcy and all the closings. I’ve always loved those stores.

I understand of course why technology made this more or less inevitable. Physical books are clearly on their last legs, and it’s hard to argue against electronic reading. It is more convenient, on the whole.

Really, though, what made Borders so great wasn’t the books at all, it was the ambiance they created in their stores. It would be very difficult to create an online store that could replicate that.