Vic Socotra

23 June 2008

Not Even Past

Some of us are living in the past these days. I know I have been. It is a treat to wander through the cultural wreckage of the American Century, and the long Cold War. It is hard though, since you have to make lunch and dinner in the present, and what lurks around the corner is too unsettling to contemplate for long.

Tim Russert gone last week. George Carlin gone this morning. This time-marches-on-thing is starting to get awfully personal.

Apparently a lot of us are thinking that. I was startled to see a commercial sponsored by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Campaign season brings a lot of loons out of the woodwork, and in these late days of the Republic it is interesting enough to remember when there was a thing called Big Labor, and that it used to get involved in politics.

Being from Detroit, I sometimes drift off to the days of my lamented youth, when the UAW had its burly paws squarely around the crown jewels of the World’s Largest Corporations, and liked to tug vigorously at contract time.

AFSCME may be the last place where Labor still makes a difference, since it appears unlikely that local government will be outsourced any time soon. The union appears to be opposed to the war, or that is what I gathered from the thirty-second spot.

I am, too, since I agree with Sun Tsu that the best strategy is to be strong and smart enough not to have to fight them. More than that, though, I am more opposed to losing wars.

Anyway, Mom and Baby Alex made a compelling statement against the Draft. “Right on!” I said, and walked to the kitchen to get a cold Pabst Blue Ribbon. Opening it with that distinctive “whoosh” of naturally carbonated goodness, I recalled that it was in 1971 President Nixon had signed Public Law 92-129, the last bill for extension of draft induction authority.

I think the beer cans still had pull-off tabs then. I don’t know. Memory gets spotty with age.

By the time baby Alex is going to be eligible for the draft, it will have been nearly a half-century since the last draftee got his haircut.

Some things never end. As Faulkner observed, the past isn’t dead. It is not even past.

Fifty years seems to be a good time to take stock in things. Senator Obama’s birth certificate is nearly fifty years old. He was born in Hawaii, as my sons were, though he was a child of the early 1960s. They have re-written the narrative a little to make it fit today’s exciting reality, and the problem with that is that there can be some inconvenient collisions with former facts.

For some reason, his campaign refuses to provide a copy of his birth certificate. I don’t know why we would care about it, though of course there is a legitimate reason to do so. Proof of citizenship is a quid pro quo for the constitutional test of eligibility for the highest office in the land.

Senator McCain has some issues on that front, too, since he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Some of the people who cannot remember their history very well have asserted that being born in Panama should disqualify the feisty former aviator for the office.

The Zone was American soil then, as apple-pie American as Subic Bay in the Philippines. Or was. Anyway, the blogosphere is wrapped all around itself on why Senator Obama’s birth certificate should be privileged information. The usual dark rumors are circulating, mostly that the document proves that he was born a Muslim or something equally awful.

I don’t think the Senator can be held responsible for something written by someone else when he was only a day old, and more than Alex can be held responsible for his mother being a nitwit.

But in any event, I think the most likely explanation is that the given name on the public document is not the one by which he styles himself these days.

His Mom and Dad were having a tough time of it back then, and it is possible that his birth name could have been “Barry Dunham.”

Hey, a rose by any name and all that. Anyway, the Mom-and-Alex commercial is going to be around for a while, since the Union is kicking in a half million bucks to air it on CNN and MSNBC, and in the key battleground states of Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.

If the polls are to be believed, the Senator from Illinois is going to knock the stuffing out of the Senator from Arizona, 51-36% as of this morning. I’m sure this will all be quaint amusement, like the Bob Dole Viagra commercials, by this time next year.

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