"Smack a midget for Norm."

Kara's just back from voting.

A registered Democrat she originally wanted to vote for Dennis Kucinich in the primaries but his campaign didn't reach New York so instead she opted for Clinton over Obama.

What was a political 0/2* now looks like 1/3 as, but for real life imitating art, it looks Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States.

No four hour queues, no problem with whether or not she'd be allowed to vote. In and out from the local school/polling station in the time it took me to play side 1 of Trout Mask Replica to Owen. (I've put him on a crash course of Pretentious Muso-Bollocks Disappreciation. I'm inoculating him against The White Stripes next week.)

She was that quick with the exercising of her democratic rights that she didn't even pause to see who else was on the ballot paper. Shame that 'cos I would have been intrigued to see if the Socialist Party Presidential candidate, Brian Moore, had made the ballot in New York.

If nothing else, you've got to admire the chutzpah of Moore for issuing a press release on the Sunday before election day whereby he announced his shadow cabinet in the event he gets elected the 44th President of the United States. He's pencilled in Howard Zinn as Secretary of Labor; the original maverick, Mike Gravel, as Secretary of Defense; and, my favourite curveball from his proposed political dream team, Barack Obama's former religious mentor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, would be appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in a Moore administration.

Before any reader scoffs too hard at Moore's press release, the bloke's no fool. He's a student of history. The history of political humour. He knows his Lenny Bruce, and because of that knowledge he's ensuring that he doesn't fall victim to the same lack of preparation that Norman Thomas did when he won the Presidential Election in a Lenny Bruce sketch all those years ago:

Norman Thomas/Filipinos/Midgets mp3

There's a lot of political truth in that Lenny Bruce skit. Dating back to the days of Werner Sombart, social scientists, radical activists and bar room philosophers have debated again and again the complex matter of American exceptionalism. In a nutshell - and to paraphrase the title of Sombart's own classic 1906 work - 'Why has there been no Socialism in the United States?'

Now we know. Second International Social Democracy never looked out for the little people.

*Compare and contrast Kara's 1/3 with my own political 0/1904.

As We Saw the Thirties edited by Rita James Simon (University of Illinois Press 1967)

Another thing to remember about the twenties is that, after a brief postwar depression, it was a decade of unusual prosperity. Big business and we thought of as its government seemed absolutely impregnable. And most of us were in one way or another beneficiaries of national prosperity. How was H. L. Mencken able to publish a glossy journal such as the American Mercury? Because the publishing business of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., was flourishing. How were the expatriates able to live abroad? Because they were taking advantage of a favorable rate of exchange. Why did I get a raise in salary at Smith College? Because papas were able to pay increased tuition fees.

Then the depression came. It began, of course, with the stock market crash of October, 1929, but our awareness of it did not begin then. I had started teaching that fall at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and one or two of my colleagues got squeezed, but I thought it served them right for playing the market. After all, they still had their jobs, and their families would not starve. Some of the big operators had been badly hurt, and a few committed suicide, but we had no great sympathy for the men of Wall Street. This, we said to ourselves, was what a business civilization was like.

But as 1930 went by, we began to wonder what was happening, and in 1932 it seemed clear to some of us that this business civilization that we had been belaboring on cultural and moral grounds had collapsed. The machines - those wonderful machines that had given so many of us a high standard of living - had stopped running. And more and more people were out of jobs. By 1932 some economists said that as many as 17 million people were unemployed, and that meant that every fourth person we met was jobless . . . [From ' Writers in the Thirties' by Granville Hicks.]