Cobbloviate

The Ol' Bloviator is long past looking forward to his birthdays, and in fact, he is well along into dreading them. Not the least of the reasons for this is that in recent years, anniversaries of his arrival in anno domini MCMLXVII have been prefaced by developments seemingly devised specifically to warn him emphatically that his day of departure from this mortal coil might be coming any day now, and certainly sooner rather than later. In 2010, for example, while he was running along without a care in the world, he was not-so-subtly reminded of his mortality by the left front fender and tire (CRUNCH!) of a hit-and-run driver. Last year, five days before he was to close out his sixty-fifth year on the planet, he tripped while running and received an early birthday present in the form of a crack in his outer hip bone, thereby achieving the symmetry of having suffered fractures on both lower limbs which, in turn, serve as bookends to his totally devastated discs in the L4-L5 vicinity.

            Yet, resolutely oblivious to these oversized flashing neon signs that he should be rocking on the porch rather than pounding the pavement, the O.B. persists. The upshot is that he has become a battered and bloodied affirmation of the stereotypical old man who gives evidence of being a runner primarily through his inability to walk normally. If you think the O.B. is exaggerating in the least here, just watch the airport wheelchair guys who automatically assume he is their passenger and descend upon him as soon as he limps/shuffles off the plane. Granted, this is now a regular occurrence, but lest his birthday week pass without further evidence of his advanced decrepitude, this one began with news of the passing of the loveliest damsel ever to grace the magical Mouseketeer kingdom, Annette Funicello. While her death doubtless came as a welcome end to a protracted ordeal for her friends and family, it robbed a huge slice of the   males of the O.B.'s generation of the primary object of the first stirrings of their pre-pubescent sexuality. Truth be told, the first thought about Annette that entered the O.B.'s head was that although she was a girl, she really seemed nice. Suffice it to say, stronger feelings (that he does not care to elaborate on here or elsewhere) soon supplanted this one. The O.B.'s sadness at Annette's death was only compounded by the discovery that she was merely four years his senior. Who knows? Maybe he could have a shot with her after all.

            Then, a couple of nights later, still bummed out over losing Annette and totally blitzed after a day of absolutely mind-numbing research in the manuscripts library of a prestigious New England university, the O.B. staggered into a brew-pub/pizza joint, where a pint or two later, he ordered himself a big ol' pie. Unfortunately, just as he prepared to ravage it with all the gusto of a man who hadn't eaten since breakfast, he noted the designation assigned him on his pizza tab:

(Sorry about the tomato sauce fingerprints. When it comes to pizza, the O.B. is a less than fastidious ravager.)

            When the O.B., making great pretense of jocularity, called the barkeep on his brazen display of ageism, the young man responded with an apology that was itself a little more genuine in its jocularity than the O.B. might have preferred, especially, coupled as it was with the familiar millennial shrug, which so far as anyone can tell, seems to translate loosely into "Whatever." (In this barkeep's case, the shrug also translated into a tip of $3 Confederate. Turn the town upside down on that, Buddy Boy!)

            In the end, however, since the shaggy ol' prof was plenty old enough to be this guy's grandpa and that of practically everyone else in the establishment, there was really little option other than to be amused by the whole business, especially when it called to mind numerous male members of the O.B.'s non-academic age cohort who persist in fancying themselves viable candidates for lusty frolics with playful coeds.  By way of salving his own wounded ego just a bit, the O.B. has wondered whether the barkeep's less than respectful designation of him might be related to his telling the lad that the first pint of the house brew put before him was totally flat. If such ridicule is the price of maintaining one's standards, then so be it, for at the O.B.'s advanced age, no maxim resonates more powerfully with him right now than "Life's too short to drink bad beer."

            A few days back, the Ol' Bloviator's absolute desperation demanded that he spend a few hours away from the bottomless pit of frustration, insurmountable obstacles, and unrequited effort that is his current book manuscript. Even so, a hardnosed stickler for accuracy in any popular or artistic treatment of the past hardly seems a good match for a movie that absolutely wee-wees on practically every historical, geographic, and economic fact that it comes across. The OB speaks, of course, of the already notorious "Django Unchained," the latest Quentin Tarantino blood- (not to mention brain-and-gut) bath. Set in 1858, the film stars Jamie Foxx as the aforementioned Django, a seriously pissed-off former slave who is unloosed on the slaveholding South by none other than Christoph Waltz, who as Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist turned bounty hunter finds Django's taste and aptitude for homicide a definite asset in his line of work. Though he, too, can be a mighty violent and uncompassionate feller himself when provoked, Waltz's Dr. Schultz is far more endearing in this film than his well-mannered sociopathic Nazi--or as Brad Pitt so eloquently put it, "NAT-z"--officer Hans Landa in Tarantino's "Inglorious Bastards." As a bounty-hunter who believes "Wanted Dead or Alive" clearly implies "Preferably Dead," Dr. Schulz deals in human flesh himself, but he hates slavery with a passion equal to that of any Boston abolitionist. He demonstrates as much in the impressive, steadily accreting count of slaveholders and racist peckerheads he summarily dispatches during the film, the last of them being the despicable dandy, Calvin Candie, played to ultimate repulsiveness by one Leo Dicaprio.

            It is Candie, for example, who sets his vicious dogs on his own slave for failing to achieve the soulless brutality and killer instinct that Marse Candie likes to see in a member of his prized stable of "Mandingo" fighters whose high-stakes fights-to-the death with other slaves keep his palms as greasy as his hair. (In case you are wondering if there is a history of any such Mandingo fighting, the answer is yes, but it dates back only to the 1975 "Blaxploitation" epic "Mandingo.") At any rate, Schultz and his main man, Django, have arrived at Candyland ostensibly to purchase one of Candie's prized gladiators for $12,000, a sum likely equal to the price of a dozen or more healthy male field hands in Mississippi at that juncture. Their real aim, however, is to purchase one Brunhilda, Django's wife, who has been torn from his arms and sold away to Candie. Schultz's premise for such an apparently whimsical acquisition is the fact that Brunhilda was once owned by German immigrants and speaks his native tongue and for her he offers but $300, a sum perhaps a bit shy of the going rate for such a young and attractive slave woman at that point.

            Their strategy to unite husband and wife and leave Calvin Candie none the wiser is foiled, however, not by one of the aforementioned racist peckerheads but by Stephen, the plantation's highest ranking slave who is at once a bullying, backstabbing tyrant to the other slaves and a curmudgeonly Uncle Tom to the whites and played brilliantly against type by none other than Samuel L. Jackson.

            Doubtless you have already persuaded yourself that this house of horrors and abominations cannot stand, and, in fact, you are correct. Suffice it to say that when Judgment Day arrives, it is unspeakably bloody, unremittingly pitiless, and absolutely beautiful. Think of the most bodacious cans of whup-ass ever cracked open by the likes of Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal and multiply them by about a gazillion-and-a-half. Speaking of characters evoked by the film, which took part of its title and feel from the old spaghetti western "Django," the outlaw Josey Wayles himself wouldn't have been the least bit out of place in this flick.

            Simply put, if you get a genuine vicarious satisfaction from seeing really, really bad guys get their just desserts, you will love this film. If, however, you are a stickler in the mud for accuracy in all details historical, geographic, economic, or otherwise, this definitely ain't the show for you. This much becomes apparent in the first shot of a cotton patch, which appears to have been created by taping cotton balls to zinnia stalks, and this sense is quickly reinforced in an absolutely hilarious sketch where the Kluxers are transposed to the antebellum era. If this doesn't make you break out in hives, there is the film's implications that Tennessee is just a few hours' ride from Texas. Candyland is supposed to be located near Greenville, Mississippi, which is in the Yazoo Delta well upriver from the Natchez District's mega-mansion plantation houses and overhanging Spanish moss that are depicted--and destroyed--in the film. Moreover, Greenville is identified as being in Chickasaw County, which is actually all the way across the state.

            Also, needless to say, if you are at all squeamish about nonstop violence, this movie will have you staring down at your popcorn box a great deal. Finally, if you are also concerned about showing strong moral disapproval of reprehensible behavior or practices whenever they are encountered, not only should you stay away from this film, but you should leave town even if it simply comes to a theater near you. The Ol' Bloviator, on the other hand, believes that the single strongest aspect of this instant cinematic classic is its thoroughly nonchalant treatment of the most egregiously inhumane, physically and emotionally destructive daily realities of slavery. In fact, the OB believes that the film scores such a triumph of realism in this regard that, perhaps even by design, it's obviously intentional slights to such mundane concerns as historical or geographic fidelity simply underscore the transcendent importance of what happened over when and where. When, in order to succeed in reclaiming his wife, Django is forced to look on poker-faced as one black man is forced to beat another one to death with a hammer and a third black man is ripped apart by dogs while whites regard such episodes as hardly worthy of their note, the filmmakers are nailing slavery and its world dead-on or at least as much as anyone who has never been a slave possibly could. Among the slaves, the prospects for altruists and moral absolutists were virtually nil. Wealthy slaveholders like Calvin Candie might be as villainous as they chose without fear or regret, but for slaves like Django, the ultimate price of survival was almost inevitably a piece of their soul.

            The interim between the end of football recruiting and the start of spring practice is a season of unremitting funk for the Ol' Bloviator. One of the reasons that his funk resulutely refuses to remit is that when nobody's playing or practicing, he is more prone to move back a step or two and take a harder look at some of the more troubling off-field aspects of this now thoroughly commercialized amateur pastime that, most of the time, despite himself, he loves way too uncritically.

            For instance, we here at UGA have just seen fit to bestow a modest $400,000 pay increase on head football coach Mark Richt, who had been struggling heretofore to get by on a paltry $2.8 million. Hopefully, Mr. Richt will now feel loved and motivated enough to go out and give our lads another season's worth of hugs and thwacks on the buttocks sufficient to inspire them to give their all for the old Red and Black. If this is not incentive enough, perhaps an additional $800K in performance bonuses will do the trick.

             Apparently, we had to give Richt a little boost in pay simply to avoid the mortal embarrassment of having his salary cease to seem less than "competitive" in the Southeastern Conference, where football is not simply the tail that wags the dog but the whole big ol' dog, who wags his tail and does whatever else he chooses whenever and wherever he by God chooses. Why, even with that nice little bump, our guy is still only the fourth-highest-paid SEC coach--some $350K behind the Evil Genius in Columbia and more than $1 million down to Coach Bizzaro in Baton Rouge and an absolute piker, of course, compared to the diabolical Nick Saban ($5.3 million) over there in Tusky Town. Never mind whether Richt's actual performance is competitive with the guys ahead of him, each of whom has won at least one national championship and two of whom have done so in the last five years, while, over the same span, Richt is 1-12 against SEC opponents who finished their seasons in the top 25. Regardless of their perceived value to their respective sports programs, where their respective academic units are concerned, none of these guys is worth anything remotely close to what he is making. If you are going to dispute this contention--be my guest--so long as you come armed with some hard numbers instead of the standard unsubstantiated assumption that successful sports teams must surely bring in a lot of money for the book-learning enterprise. The OB has been hearing this for damn nigh forty years, but he has yet to see it validated by a single significant entry in the ledger. Oh, by the way, did the OB mention that Richt's new salary is more than SEVEN times--that's right, SEVEN times--what brand new UGA president Jere Morehead will be paid.

            The "out-of-whackness" of this situation pales dramatically, however, in comparison to the god-awful mess they've gotten themselves into up yonder on Rocky Top, where the University of Tennessee's Athletic Department has managed to get itself more than $200 million in debt with less than 1 percent of that amount left in its reserve fund. If you will indulge the OB in a little number crunching, this means that the Athletic Department is now forking over about $21 million a year just to service its debt! A reported $13.5 million of this tidy little sum comes out of the $99.5-million athletic budget, and the rest ($7.5 million, for the math-challenged among you) must be raised through donations, which, by the way, were down 25 percent ($10 million) in 2012.

            Of the accrued Kilimanjaro of debt to date, $11.4 million can be chalked up to the costs of buying out the contracts of several fired or edged-out coaches and administrators all of whose salaries were, of course, also "competitive." On top of that hefty figure comes this year's additional obligations to the recently dispatched head football coach Derek Dooley ($5 million) and his staff ($2 million). Coincidental or not, it is surely symbolically significant that the $7 million required to salve the sting of separation for the banished Dooley crew is precisely the same figure that the Athletic Department had been transferring yearly into the university's general fund, where at least some of that loot may have actually trickled down sufficiently to support the school's academic endeavors. As of now, however, with the agreement of the school's chancellor, that annual transfer has been suspended for up to three years.

            Tennessee has spent nearly $300 million on its athletic facilities in the last decade, more than half of which went into renovating Neyland Stadium ($130 million) and a new football training center ($38 million). Beyond that, the "improvements" to the stadium undertaken since 2006 are said to tally up to right at $130 million. These dire financial circumstances are exceptional in a conference where athletic department reserve funds typically run north of $50 million, but what happened in Big Orange Country nonetheless strikes the OB as a cautionary tale with broad implications. With the football program riding high after the Peyton Manning era and a national championship in 1998 (a year after Peyton departed them thar hills), Tennessee administrators thought they were betting on a sure-thing future by giving the team and fans a 104,000-seat playground (give or take a tuckus or two) every bit as spacious as the ones in Ann Arbor and Happy Valley.

            Sure enough, the investment seemed to pay off big time with home attendance averaging at or very near 107,000 per game between 2000 and 2005. Since that point, however, the slippage in the team's performance and ranking has met with a comparable slippage of faith among what once was as devoted a flock as ever painted themselves hideously orange. Not only did donations take a nosedive in 2012, but average attendance sank to 89,965, marking the first time it had fallen below 90,000 since 1979. Looking to win back the roughly 17,000 additional fannies needed to fill the stands, Tennessee has begun offering tickets to "young alumni" at a discount and has set aside some 1,500 seats to be available sans the additional oxymoronic required "donation" that is SOP at most big-time football schools. Whether this will trigger a major stampede back to the fold remains to be seen, but for Vols AD Dave Hart, dogpaddling in an ocean of red ink, it damn sure better.

            Although both donations and ticket sales are down nationwide, no such athletic budget woes plague us here in Athens, where we have about a $70 million reserve and are apparently augmenting it by finishing in the black each year. Yet athletic director Greg McGarity has also launched a "young-alumni" ticket initiative for reasons perhaps somewhat different from those given at Tennessee. These tickets will be deducted from our previous allotment for students. In UGA's case, it seems that we are seeing a decline in student interest in attending football games. With nearly 18,000 seats available to them, over the last five years, our eager young scholars have mustered a maximum turnout that still fell nearly 2,500 short of the max. Last year, it seems, even at $8 a pop, the average number of student tickets scanned was but 11,802.

            By the OB's estimation, the number who actually made it into the stadium by kickoff or even the second quarter was considerably short of that, especially if gametime fell earlier than 3:30 p.m. An absolutely de rigueur Greek partying regimen and a lively local music and bar scene, not to mention the beckoning flesh pots scarcely an hour away over in Atlanta, are definitely factors here. There is also the reality that some 60 percent of our students hail from metro Atlanta these days, and a lot of them, if not transplants themselves, are the progeny of such, and therefore have no family legacy at UGA stretching back several generations. As I recall, a contingent from one of the leading fraternities hereabouts blew off UGA's division-clinching game with Auburn in 2011 in order to take in a concert in Columbia.

            There are broader societal factors, too. A big screen HD-TV and comfy recliner are as conducive to inertia in a frat house as in a suburban McMansion. Thusly does television give on the one hand and take away with another. In the short run, at least, the cost of some of the lost ticket renewals is easily offset by the great gobs of money spewed out annually by the networks for the rights to televise these gladiatorial spectacles. Latest estimates put the SEC's total potential take from its renegotiated deals with CBS and ESPN at $300 million, and suffice it to say, it can't come soon enough for the folks in Knoxville.

Even so, the OB can't help but wonder if, in banking so heavily on an uninterrupted flow of big bucks from the broadcasters, college football in general isn't currently positioned to fall prey to delusions of ever-expanding prosperity and suffer what amounts to the Knoxville debacle writ large. For example, do the high definition and cyber-centric amusement preferences of UGA students and young people in general portend ill for the future of college football as a significant connection to place and identity? Watching an entire football game on the tube is challenging enough for today's severely truncated attention spans, much less following one on your IPhone while fielding an incessant barrage of tweets and (OMG!) texts.  Today's conference realignment craze may be sucking in all kinds of TV money right now, but it could eventually lead to fewer fans on campus because there are fewer games each year that "matter" to them emotionally. In a world that is so geographically unhinged that Texas regularly plays West Virginia but never plays Texas A&M and practically every game is televised somewhere and many of them everywhere, will emotional attachments to the on-campus scene be enough to keep the turnstiles clicking? If they don't, are folks going to keep sending their money someplace they no longer go themselves?

The Ol' Bloviator sincerely hopes this is just another one of his paranoid Doomsday scenarios. In any event, the prospect is still not nearly so fearsome--or likely--as going into the Clemson game with five starters suspended.

The Ol' Bloviator was greatly honored to deliver this year's Founder's Day  Lecture at the University of Georgia.  His talk focused on humor and southern cultural identity.  The following little excerpt tackles the question of why ministers and religion are so often the butt of jokes in the so-called Bible Belt:

I first set foot in this hallowed structure[ the UGA Chapel] in September 1965 to attend a freshman orientation session presided over by none other than the University of Georgia's legendary dean of men, William Tate, who was both a great wit and an old-school practitioner of what is now known as "tough love." As Dean Tate set me and several hundred of my classmates straight on the great many things that might bring his wrath down on anyone of us, he softened his stern admonitions with a number of disarming one-liners. The one I recall most vividly some forty-seven years later was his observation that the baby boomer-induced on-campus housing crunch would be mitigated at least a bit that year by the admission of a particularly large contingent of Baptists, who were typically so narrow that three of them could share a single bed. The ensuing sprinkle of no more than polite laughter suggested that his quip had gone right over most of the student heads in the Chapel that day. Still, as I look back on it now, I am struck by the "southernness" of Dean Tate's use of what he honestly believed was "insider" humor to signal to an auditorium filled with anxious eighteen-year-old boys that while he expected to be seen as an authority figure he hoped at least to be understood as an empathetic one.

            A year before my first visit to the Chapel, a fellow named Lewis Grizzard had doubtless sat here listening to a similar and perhaps identical Dean Tate monologue. On his way to fame as a southern humorist, Grizzard popularized a story that actually inspired the title for this little talk. Distressed by the steady shrinkage in both attendance and the contents of the offering plate, a minister vowed to light a fire under his complacent congregation by calling on them to make public confessions of their most egregious sins, "Come on now," he demanded, "I want each and every one of you to tell it all," and when the first congregant rose to confess to gambling away his paycheck, the preacher's response was "Tell It All, Brother! Tell It All!" And so it went, as one after another member of his disturbingly wayward flock offered a litany of shocking revelations about their drinking, ("Tell It All, Brother! Tell It All!"), fighting, ("Tell It All, Brother! Tell It All!") and adultery, ("Tell It All, Brother! Tell It All!") until finally there remained but one unburdened sinner, who, under a steady barrage from the pulpit of "Tell It All, Brother! Tell It All!", rose hesitantly from the back pew to admit "Well, preacher, I had sex with a goat last week," leading the minister to exclaim without hesitation, "Damn Brother! I don't believe I'd a told that!"

            I think the odds are pretty good that French philosopher and Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson never heard this joke, but he did insist that "to understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all we must determine the utility of its function, which is a social one . . . Laughter must have a social significance." Apropos of Bergson's remarks, the foregoing story seems to suggest that while many residents of the Bible Belt South may have indeed believed that God's forgiving grace was boundless, their own definitely had its limits....

Although irreverence toward men of the cloth was hardly out of the ordinary among jokesters of either race, as the blues would also suggest, it was definitely pronounced among black men who suspected that ministers pursued their calling primarily to avoid hard manual labor while enjoying easy access to the good food and sexual favors provided by the female faithful. Sure enough, seeking likely candidates for the ministry, a pastor asked all the men who loved fried chicken more than anything to move to one side of the church and those who loved women more than anything to move to the other. When the young man left standing in the middle explained that he loved both equally well, the minister broke into a huge smile and shouted, "Come forward, Brother. You've been called to preach."

It may seem incongruous that, in a region where Bibles are sold in tire stores and everyone is presumed either to have or be searching for "a church home," so many jokes showed so little reverence for institutionalized religion, the clergy, or even the admonitions of the Holy Scriptures. Although Dean Tate was a Methodist, he delivered his little dig at the Baptists knowing full well that their perceived dogmatism had long invited far sharper ridicule. His fellow Methodist Lewis Grizzard even observed that things must really be changing in the South because the Baptists were finally starting to make eye contact with each other in the liquor store. In reality, the profusion of such jokes in the Bible-bound South simply illustrates the socially interpretive value of humor, which, by its inherently subversive nature, is typically directed at absolute taboos or iconic figures and precepts. Thus it provides invaluable clues about a society's social and cultural sore spots, the places where its norms and constraints bind a little too tightly or the rough edges of its history have left a wound that resolutely refuses to be healed...

Having heard a few Founders Day lectures himself, the Ol' Bloviator harbors no illusion that his was the best ever, but he can at least assert with complete assurance that his talk marked the first time in its 180-year history that a speaker has alluded to sex with a goat within the sacred confines of the University of Georgia Chapel.  In retrospect, he is happy that his instincts told him not to circulate his remarks in advance, lest a raucous protest from the S.P.C.A. and P.E.T.A  detract from the dignity of the occasion.

As usual, the Ol' Bloviator is entering the New Year in a state of perplexity and confusion. Best he can tell, our wise and courageous leadership in Washington did not actually avert a tumble over the fiscal cliff, but as has been their wont, simply postponed it once again. This bunch did step just a bit out of character by, however unwittingly or accidentally, actually changing a few things. As a result, one of the things that the OB actually knows for sure is that taxes are going up on Americans with higher incomes, although, while those affected are not exactly happy, their rates are still far more moderate than they were between 1940 and 1980. Moreover, the estate tax exemption has now been fixed at $5 million and pegged to inflation, meaning, so say the bean counters, that no more than 1 percent of Americans will affected by this levy going forward. (Color the OB a little skeptical on this contention, which, he believes, will show once again that bean counters don't know beans about distinguishing the theoretical from the practical.)

But what of the oft-invoked "suffering middle class"? How did we/they fare in this deal?The most tangible "relief" proffered them courtesy of the latest tongue wagging and teeth gnashing congressional episode was setting the threshold for the infamous Alternative Minimum Tax at $78,750 and indexing it to inflation. It wouldn't take the OB long to tell you all he knows about the AMT other than that it has existed in some form since way back in 1969 and began ostensibly as an effort to insure that the rich could not squeeze through enough loopholes to avoid paying taxes altogether. Thanks to inflation, however, what it took to at least look rich back then barely makes you look middle class today. In keeping with their longstanding proclivity for never fixing anything that can be duct-taped, over the last forty-three years, our most worthy representatives in Congress have opted nearly twenty times to "patch" the tax threshold rather than simply peg it to inflation as they finally opted to do just a few days ago.

Beyond Congress's predictably procrastinatory approach to this problem, what strikes the OB here is the claim that the move saved 28 million "middle-class taxpayers" from exposure to what was once called "the wealth tax." Does that mean that the upper limits of middle class household income lies just south of $80K? To the OB, the selection of such an arbitrary figure, (representing roughly the 70th percentile nationally) simply illustrates how ambiguous and, in many cases, utterly meaningless, the "middle-class" appellation has become.

 Trying to figure out who the middle class actually is--or isn't, for that matter--is nothing less than an exercise in utter futility. The median household income in the U.S. sits just a little north of $50K right now, but is that where the middle class begins or where it "middles"? The typically smart and sober folks at the Pew Foundation define middle-class income as falling between 66 and 200 percent of the median figure (roughly $33,000 to $102,000 as of now). However, as the percentage of Americans with family incomes in that range has fallen by 10 percent (to roughly 50 percent of the population) over the last four decades, politicians on both sides of the aisle have steadily inflated its upper income limits, possibly because it gave them more leeway to defend programs actually geared to the interests of higher-income Americans (read: likeliest voters and potential donors) as "relief for the middle class." Thus it was that, last fall, both contenders for the presidency pegged the top end of middle-class-family income at the tidy sum of $250,000.

Although few bothered, anyone who checked the current census numbers might have pointed out that the Romney/Obama figure pushed the ceiling of middle-class income all the way to the 98th percentile. Surveying the sweep of income thresholds and ceilings suggested, we find that, potentially, all but the bottom 20 percent and top 2 percent of households nationally belong to this mythical mega- middle class. Steeped in notions of a fluid, relatively classless society, Americans have been quick to take refuge in the middle-class moniker, which marks them as a stabilizing presence, someone whose status has risen, but not easily or rapidly enough to make them forget their roots or  embrace the airs and pretensions of the elite. A recent survey, for example, showed that four in ten Americans earning less than $20,000 per year and one in three earning more than $150,000 considered themselves middle class.

Over the years, many models incorporating social and cultural traits have been devised to define and determine membership in the middle class. A number of these alternative approaches have emphasized conservative moral values and a mindset geared more to providing for the future than living it up in the here and now. If you combine this philosophical perception with the hard economic realities of what it means to be middle class these days, neither the present nor the future looks all that great. Battered by big-time portfolio shrinkage, income stagnation, and a 7 percent decline in real net worth over the past generation, the current ostensible middle class is also beset by rising food, fuel, and tuition costs. Yet with a whole bunch of them continuing to empty their pockets and stretch their credit to the very snapping point in order to forestall lifestyle retrenchment for themselves or their offspring, many of today's debt-and anxiety-ridden middle Americans would find no resonance whatsoever in re-runs of "Father Knows Best" or "Leave It To Beaver."

Looking just a little farther down the road, with folks whose outward circumstances mark them as middle class running through their 401Ks like Johnny Football through the Oklahoma defense, the implications for the already-endangered future of Social Security grow even darker. Not only will these folks be signing up in record numbers, but rather than treating their SS checks as "play money" to be used for spoiling their grandkids or enjoying an occasional geriatric cruise, they will now be counting on them to pay for groceries, prescriptions, etc., instead. Unlike historically low-income SS recipients conditioned to austerity, these are folks who spent most of their days living, if not luxuriously, at least comfortably. Moreover, again compared to those conditioned to live on less, these now-dependent middle classers are both more disposed and better equipped to raise a political ruckus in order to elevate their circumstances. Thus, it would seem that the oft-prophesied throw down between the upper-class "haves" and the lower-class "have nots" might well morph into a triangular fire fight also involving a new contingent of "once hads." Regardless of how middle-class membership might be defined or delineated these days, what was once seen as the bedrock of American society is starting to look a bit more like shifting sand.

"Nothing good ever happens."

(The Ol' Bloviator, responding to a query about his worldview on or about the occasion of his fifth birthday.)

 The above pronouncement probably comes as no surprise to the faithful followers of this site, who have suffered long and often through the OB's determined efforts to point out the dark cloud within every lining and have every glass that isn't full officially declared "half empty." Thus it will shock no one that the OB predicts here and now that, should the Mayan assumption that the world will end on the Friday before Christmas (which wouldn't surprise him a bit, of course) proves unfounded,  it means only that an even more painful and horrifying fate awaits us. Ms. OB finds it more than a little creepy that her husband's forlorn foretellings are so frequently borne out, but he knows better than to consider himself some kind of savant. Owing to his decidedly dark brown take on life, he simply realizes that the pessimist always has a clear edge in any prophesying contest.

            It ain't as though the OB is at all happy about being right when it would be better for all concerned if he weren't. In fact, he's stood outside on the darkest and stormiest nights shaking his fist in outright defiance of what he sees as the overwhelming odds of impending disaster and demanding, perhaps even begging, to be proven wrong. While he can't say for certain that this has never happened, he can say that his recollections of such outcomes are scattered and all too few.

            Even when the OB's just indulging in what he thinks is just a little hyperbole to blow off steam about how bad things already are, he often becomes an unwitting prophet. For example, he had his tongue tucked snugly into his cheek when he predicted that the next step in the evisceration of public higher education  would be an administrator actually requesting further cuts in a budget already hacked down to bone and sinew. Sure enough, apparently channeling Kevin Bacon's "Thank you, Sir! May I have another?" response to being paddled in "Animal House," University of Georgia System Chancellor Hank Huckaby recently assured a group of freshmen legislators that there would be no pushback from him when (Why waste our time with "if"?) the next round of budget cuts comes around: "Will we whine? I don't know anybody in this room that likes a whiner." (Note: "That" should have been "who," but the English dept. lost all of its Pronoun Police several cuts ago, so who's left to care, much less correct him?)

            Huckaby did allow that he was not exactly "happy" about the cuts, but rather than declare that  he was pretty hacked off about his budget being hacked on so much, he assured the legislative hackers-to-be that  "whatever level of funding you give us, we're going to do our darnedest [sic] to spend it wisely." (Having spent the last forty years at perpetually underfunded universities, the OB has ranted here and elsewhere a number of times to the effect that managing to do more with less in these circumstances virtually guarantees that you will soon be required to do even more with even less. Generally speaking, this can't be accomplished without demanding increasingly strenuous exertions from faculty and staff.

            As a matter of fact, in the current fiscal, political, and (anti-) intellectual climate, public universities are not unlike the cotton mills and garment factories operating in the South during the first half of the twentieth century. Required to exact more production from fewer workers on a reduced payroll, mill managers simply adopted the "stretch-out" system that required each employee to meet a production quota in order to qualify for full (but by no means exorbitant) pay on every shift. Even as a youngster, the OB was struck by the prevalence of "nervous breakdowns," depression, migraines, and flat-out exhaustion he witnessed among the women who worked under this system in local garment plants.

The OB is not claiming here that many, if any, of his faculty peers have as yet been pushed to anywhere near this point. But several consecutive years of salary stagnation (not to mention some, thus far, at least, temporary reductions) have definitely put the OB's colleagues, especially those of junior rank, way behind the inflation eight ball, even as each new plundering of the budget brings further rumblings about increasing teaching loads with nary even a hint of relaxing publication standards for tenure and promotion. Now here comes ol' Chancellor Hank telling the budget vultures (Hawks wouldn't bother themselves with so picked-over and pathetic a carcass as we now present.) that in the interest of, in the reporter's words, "stretching" our funding, we will be doing a better job of utilizing our "classroom buildings and laboratories." No honest observer could deny that we could up our game in this respect, but despite the Chancellor's insistence that "everybody can't take a class between 9 and 2 o'clock," judging by the generally anemic enrollment in classes outside that time frame, it would appear that practically everybody does. Although the Huckster is probably stretching it a bit to say that classrooms and laboratories are "basically vacant" on Fridays, he definitely has a point. Still, while it could surely be reduced, the obvious disparity at UGA between enrollments in Tuesday-Thursday and Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes is endemic to the semester system on practically any large campus in America. The desire to be in the classroom only two days a week as opposed to three burns no more intensely in the heart of the professor, after all, than in the heart of the student.

Beyond that issue, however, Huckaby's reported interest in offering classes on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons bespeaks a bureaucratic, "all-it-takes-is-a-memo" mindset of the first order. Some non-traditional students might find such a schedule appealing, but imposing it out of the blue and simply by edict might amount to pushing an already demoralized and marginalized faculty a fiat too far. Personally, the OB will believe this seven-day "stretchout" schedule is going to happen when the objects flying overhead start emitting "oinks" (and hopefully nothing else), but it is not the substance of such a proposal so much as the unmistakably "corporate boardroom" mentality behind it that suggests how badly degraded is our sense of the value of those charged with fostering intellectual development and interaction among our young people.  

            The Ol' Bloviator does not mean to suggest that the plight of faculty at public colleges and universities in this country is by any means as severe as that of the multitude of poor folks who have been out of work so long that they have lost track of when they were laid off. Nor, as of yet at least, are he and his kind under the kind of direct frontal assault now directed against employed workers who once believed that they had punched their  tickets to the middle class only to find themselves struggling to fend off brazen attempts to strip them of any economic and political leverage they might once have enjoyed. Meanwhile, the already enormous and still swelling disparity between compensation for corporate execs and  that for the folks on the forklifts and assembly lines simply reeks of a self-serving conviction among the higher-ups who get to do the deciding that increases in profits and productivity are overwhelmingly a reflection of their managerial genius rather the diligence and exertion of their workers.

Lest this be seen as somewhat remote from what's happening on campus, check out the figures showing that nationwide between 1993 and 2009 the number of administrators on university payrolls increased by a whopping 60 percent, a growth rate at least ten times that for tenure-track faculty appointments. A pretty fair estimate would be that very few if any within this 60 percent are paid less than 130-150 percent of the average senior professor's salary. Thus it is that over roughly the same period, spending on administration at 198 of our leading universities rose almost twice as fast as spending on research and teaching.  "Austerity," it seems, is more austere for some than for others.

Certainly, the proletariatization of the professoriate is not without parallel elsewhere in society. Check out the dead-ended outcomes awaiting so many recent law school grads, who, like many of their counterparts in academe, are also suffering from being on the wrong side of the law of supply and demand. For that matter, the OB doesn't find it too much of a stretch to suggest that a similar fate may befall a number of those who have recently sworn fealty to Hippocrates.

Given the unspeakable horrors we have witnessed in recent days, the familiar seasonal good cheer is already in exceedingly short supply. Although the OB is hardly equipped to counter this malaise on a grand scale, he realizes that it is time to suspend his bellyachin' for a while and at least undertake to brighten the little corner where he is. To that end, he begs to share once again what has become a sign of the season, not to mention his egregious taste, in these parts. This visual greeting comes courtesy of his longsuffering 1994 GMC Sierra, which, were it capable, would join him and the equally longsuffering Ms. OB in wishing you the best possible holiday season and especially the renewal of hope and inspiration that is inherent to its meaning and spirit.

                        The events of November 6 have all but impelled the Ol' Bloviator to claw his way out from under the Mount Everest of student papers, recommendation letters, and book manuscripts that have been threatening to smother him for several weeks now and point back to an entry that first appeared in this very space way back in March. He hastens to add that he was simply relating what reliable poll crunchers were saying at that point, and thus, the point of this trip down memory lane is really not "I Told You So!" but "They Told Me, So I Tried to Tell You."  At any rate, here we go:

             In much the same way that TV sports commentators will do their dead-level best to create a sense of drama or uncertainly about the outcome of an arm wrestling contest between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pee Wee Herman--"Well, Arnie pinned him again, but it took him nearly twelve nanoseconds, and Pee Wee barely whimpered this time"--so do political reporters leap to embrace any signs that the front runner is losing ground. [If you didn't see this happening all the way up until they called Colorado on election night, your TV must have been pulling in "Decision Mars, 2012."]

             In presidential politics, the best places to find at least some faint suggestion that the race might be getting more competitive are national preference polls . . . [which, of course were coming out of God knows where and from God knows whom in the last two weeks of the campaign with results pointing to a likely Romney landslide]. Certainly, such polls are not to be dismissed out of hand, especially if they begin to show a cumulative shift in favor of the challenger, but provided you didn't sleep through eighth-grade civics, you may recall that we don't actually choose our president according to the popular vote. If, by chance, this had slipped by you, you can bet your eco-friendly Range Rover that Ozone Al Gore will never forget it, and neither should anybody just itching at this point to lay down big money that President Obama will be sent packing in November. [See, I warned you!] . . . . When we complicate matters by throwing recent trends in the Electoral College into the mix, it all boils down to the fact that eighteen states, plus the District of Columbia, have voted Democratic in the last five presidential elections...these states account for 45 percent of all the electoral votes out there, not to mention 90 percent of the 270 votes required to win the presidency. On the other side of the ledger, thirteen states have done right by the GOP in each of the last five elections, but they currently represent only 102 electoral votes.

In other words, going into the thing, Obama knew that he could get within spittin' distance of the White House simply by carrying states that haven't voted Republican in more than a generation, while claiming all the states that have been equally loyal to the GOP over the same span wouldn't get the Mittster closer than a $50 cab ride. As it turned out, Romney wound up in better shape than his hapless predecessor in 2008, but although he did manage to re-cloak North Carolina and Indiana in their traditional red and pick up an additional vote in Nebraska (where they are allotted according to popular vote percentage), 6 of the 33 votes in his margin over John McCain simply reflected net electoral vote gains (courtesy of the 2010 census) among the states he carried. Those 6 votes came out of the Democrats' hide, of course, but even so, the 336 at the top of Barry O's column meant not only that his eighteen-state cushion had made it through a sixth election without springing a leak but, that, to my mild surprise, I admit, he managed to maintain his grip on two of the three southern states he had snatched up in 2008. Back then, I chalked Obama's 14,000-vote squeak-by in North Carolina to the roughly 25,000 votes claimed by Libertarian candidate Bob Barr. This year, although Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson put Barr's performance among Tar Heel voters to shame by claiming some 44,000 votes, Obama fell roughly 96,000 ballots short of Romney. Still, in light of what happened in 2004, I'd say this relatively slim margin gives at least some reason to think that the Blues are closing in on the Reds even if at least a small part of what looks like North Carolina becoming more Democratic may be North Carolina becoming more Libertarian as well. Meanwhile, we are told that efforts to turn out more Hispanic voters paid off in keeping Virginia and Florida (not to mention Nevada and Colorado) in the Demo column. The growing number of states (including both Florida and Georgia) with "majority-minority" stamped on their futures should clue the Repubs in to the fact that, like it or not, politics ain't just for white folks anymore.

            You have to wonder, however, whether for some folks, cluelessness truly is bliss, as it surely must have been for many of those who really expected to be celebrating a Romney victory on election night. Instead of seizing on this unwelcome surprise as an opportunity for a serious self-appraisal, many Repubs apparently persist in thinking that it is not they but everybody else who is nuts, including Einstein, who defined insanity as doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. In case you require proof of this, the Missus just received an invitation to join a group dedicated to undermining Obamacare because "as devastated as we all have been, we need to turn our attention to some concrete things we can do now to thwart this administration."  Sure Enough? How has that strategy worked out for you so far? If you believe four more years of putting what you think is bad for Obama ahead of what would be good for the country will somehow pan out better for you in 2016 than it has in 2012, then have at it. If you imagine that quivering at every release of hateful high-decibel extremist flatulence from the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity is going to get you something it has already failed twice to deliver, then by all means stick to it. By no means should you consider what kowtowing to this bunch managed to accomplish on November 6., which would include not only the serious whupping administered to two of your highest-profile anti-abortionists in Congress, but the approval of same-sex marriage in four more states and the legalization of recreational pot-smoking (Hot damn! Colorado here I come!) in two more. Judging from all this, I'd venture that, right now, rather than your worst enemy, ol' Beelzebub is closer to being your biggest fan. Committed, vocal minorities can often achieve a great deal more clout within any organization than their numbers would suggest, and I know better than to count the lunatic fringe out of the game at any point. Yet the pertinent stats for this group suggest graying more than growing, and GOP leaders would do well to realize that the more the Tea Baggers and others in the tinfoil-beanie set fear that their influence might be on the swoon, the louder and more demanding they will become.

            Finally, there are some very valid reasons to dislike Barack Obama and oppose his policies. However, not only has he proven thus far to be arguably the most conservative Democrat in the White House in the last seventy-five years, but several of his positions are well to the right of some advanced by Richard Nixon. Instead of just keeping on keeping on with "He's a Socialist/Communist/Marxist/Fascist/Muslim/Kenyan etc.," (The people have spoken on this and all other such unadulterated horse hockey, not once, but twice, for God's sake!) why don't you just own up to the fact that you can't handle having a black man in the White House? Since you lack anything remotely like the kind of courage this would require, I have taken steps to prevent any future exposure to your hypocritical drivel. Mustering all my hitherto unheralded cyber savvy, I have devised "Bigot Buster," a prophylactic app (intended purely for protection rather than recreational use) that will scan incoming email for any of the terms listed above used in conjunction with "Obama" and alert me with this icon:

At the same time, the app will infiltrate your computer and install a continuous loop of Rev. Al Sharpton reruns from MSNBC. Some of you may protest that this is truly cruel and unusual punishment, but, by God, my tolerance for your intolerance is all used  up!

A couple of weeks back an intelligent, well-intentioned fellow in the employ of the New York Times asked me to respond to a new study showing that, among other things, 62 percent of working-class white southerners supported Mitt Romney, a figure roughly 20 points higher than in any other region. "How could this be?" my earnest new editor friend begged to know. Why did lower-income whites persist in voting Republican in direct contradiction to their economic interests? This being only the gazillionth time I have fielded this query, my first impulse was to politely decline his invite, but true to my pledge to try to educate as many Yankees as I can in the short time I have left, I signed on, knowing from the start that I was to be accorded all of 400 words to unravel a mystery that could not be done justice in 400 pages. To his credit, the editor proved very patient and did his dead-level best to hack the piece down to size without destroying my argument entirely, but I hope you will be kind enough to indulge my effort to salvage the stuff that wound up on the cutting-room floor and reconstruct what I would have said if they had just given me the elbow room to say it. So here goes:

The fundamental explanation for such strong support for Romney among working-class white southerners is actually quite simple. An overwhelming majority of them are Republicans--and highly partisan ones at that. Beyond this point, however, things get a little more complicated. The old blatantly racial Republican strategy that won Barry Goldwater five southern states in 1964 has given way to a subtler, more suburban-oriented emphasis on fiscal conservatism and protecting the rewards of individual success. Yet George W. Bush ran stronger (60 percent-plus) in southern rural white-majority counties than in metropolitan (55 percent) ones in 2004. Four years later, the counties where John McCain ran stronger than Bush fit this profile as well. In general, these counties were not only decidedly rural and majority-white, but sparsely populated, economically and educationally laggard, with a strong evangelical tilt.
When the current survey notes that 58 percent of working-class white southerners feel that the federal government has been too attentive to the problems of blacks and other minorities, it is simply affirming that history matters. Beginning in the 1850s (when the slavocrats who disdained the very notion of educating the lesser whites warned them that without slavery they would be reduced to social and economic equality with blacks) and moving forward to the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal, the Civil Rights movement, and the Great Society, regardless of whether the federal government was in Republican or Democratic hands, low-income white southerners have been encouraged to see it as, if not primarily, at least potentially, an agent of Yankee outsiders bent on elevating black people at their expense. (Many years later, labor unions were tarred with essentially the same brush while the South's captains of industry consistently flouted federal labor regulations with absolute impunity.)

Wrong-headed and paranoid as this perception may be, there is little doubt that, as of the New Deal, the Democratic Party began to grow increasingly responsive not only to blacks but to union voters outside the South. Today, the Democrats' definition of "working people" effectively translates as "those with union cards," resulting in a striking communications disconnect between rural, overwhelmingly non-union, southern white workers (who have long since won the heart of many a southbound Yankee manufacturer) and the national Democratic Party with its fairly proscribed union-centric approach to labor issues. This in turn makes it easier for blue-collar southern whites to convince themselves (with the eager assistance of Republican politicos) that the primary aim of Democratic initiatives such as federal worker-training programs was/is to put black people in a position to take their jobs. While the above survey shows that working-class whites who had received food stamps or other benefits looked a bit more kindly on the idea of federal aid programs, the South's more stringent participation requirements, not to mention the racial stigma, are reflected in figures showing that white families account for 52 percent of the food stamp recipients in Massachusetts, where 11 percent of the poverty population is white, and only 25 percent of the recipients in Mississippi, where 15 percent of those living in poverty are white.

While they have precious little reason to think the GOP might actually help them, working-class white southerners know at least that the Republicans are infinitely less likely to do anything to help blacks at their expense, or anyone else's for that matter. Seizing on this line of thought, Republicans have been quite effective in racializing political identification in the South, to the point that the Democrats are perceived as simply the party of blacks in many cases, much as Republicans were seen in the Reconstruction era. Although some deft GOP gerrymandering had a hand in it as well, there is no better personification of the thorough color-coding of southern partisan affiliation than Representative John Barrow of Georgia, the only white Democrat in the Deep South still serving in the House of Representatives.

Anyone who thinks the Dems had no hand in their own undoing among rural southern whites need only look back at the absolutely horrified response of their liberal luminaries, when poor ol' Howard Dean allowed that he would welcome the support of "guys with Confederate flags in their pickups." The absolute wet-your-britches-and-say-you-went-swimming frenzy that ensued made it clear that from top to bottom, their party was way too enlightened to have any truck (pickup or otherwise) with a bunch of mouth-breathing southern yahoos. (It's too much to hope for, of course, but the Dems might profit from considering the connection between the GOP takeover by a bunch of ideological purists and the greater probability, these days, of encountering a Wooly Mammoth than a moderate Republican.)

Lest we go overboard in emphasizing the peculiarities of working-class white southerners, however, we should remember that racially tinged, working-class white conservatism is a fixture throughout much of rural America. Is it really all that striking, for example, that nearly six in ten working-class whites in the South complained of federal favoritism toward blacks when nearly five in ten responded similarly in the Northeast and Midwest? This reflects a mindset discernible thirty years ago among blue-collar northern whites who became "Reagan Democrats" in the 1980s. To tell you the truth, I'm beginning to suspect that a lot of what may seem like North/South disparities in political attitudes and behavior these days may actually be rural/metropolitan instead.

Anyone who thinks that an inclination to support what appears to be the party most inimical to their interests is peculiar to rural white southerners must not have heard tell of Google, which puts them but a single mouse-click away from a multitude of such instances across the rest of the country. Take, for one, the case of the frustrated Iowa Democrat lamenting the strong GOP vote in the 2010 congressional contests at a time marked by "$5.50 a bushel corn, $12 for beans, fuel a dollar a gallon cheaper than under the Bush administration and a majority of Republicans in Congress wanting to cut farm subsidies." 

Rural whites' distaste for all things Democratic is a little less puzzling in light of this observation from the party's standard bearer in 2008: "You go into these small towns . . . and . . . the jobs have been gone now for twenty years and nothing's replaced them . . . And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them. . . ." Ironically, by summarily pathologizing gun ownership and religiosity, Barack Obama actually managed to intensify the very aversion of rural white voters to the Democrats that he was trying to explain. By the way, he was talking about voters in Pennsylvania, not Alabama.

If you need further evidence that anti-ruralism isn't just directed at southerners anymore, get a load of what former FCC commissioner Michael Katz had to say in February 2009 as he spoke in opposition to the Obama administration's support for rural broadband infrastructure: "Other people don't like to say bad things about rural areas . . . [s]o I will. . . . The notion that we should be helping people who live in rural areas avoid the costs that they impose on society . . . is misguided . . . from an efficiency point of view and an equity one." Places out there beyond the 'burbs, Katz added, tend to be "environmentally hostile, energy inefficient and even weak in innovation, simply because rural people are spread out across the landscape."

Well, excuse us country folk for even existin'! Emotionalism aside, however, one need not absolve rural white folks of this or any other vicinity of responsibility for the racism, religious intolerance and xenophobia that they sometimes exhibit to realize that they are also on occasion the objects of bias themselves, however offhandedly it is expressed or condoned by some of America's ostensibly most tolerant and sensitive people. In either case, beneath this polarizing hostility and disdain lies a much broader divide that is framed less by region than by deep cultural and class antagonisms that we may continue to ignore only at our peril.

            I recently got yet another copy of that stupid email story where the ten beer drinkers pay their collective tab of $100 in what is supposed to be "the same way we pay our taxes," i.e., the long-suffering rich guy gets stuck with the lion's share of the tab while four of his less affluent buddies drink for free. Although this misguided missive arrived a few days before the $50K-per-pop, "just-us-one-percenters" gala where the ol' Mittster bashed the freeloading 47 percenters who pay no federal income taxes whatsoever, as a friend of mine points out, this parable is not exactly applicable to Romney, who not only doesn't drink (even though he would probably benefit from it more than any teetotaler who ever lived), but wouldn't be caught dead in a place where the beer was that cheap even if he did.

            The survival of this inane analogy, like the text of Mitt's sermon to his well-heeled choir of yea-sayers, is ample affirmation of what politicians have been counting on for centuries: People seldom challenge the accuracy or probe the deeper meaning of what they want to hear. In fact, I'd venture that it's never really occurred to some of my Republican-leaning fellow oldsters that they actually account for more than one in five of the nearly five in ten who pay no federal income taxes and thus are members in good standing of the "dependent" demographic that His Mittness was castigating. Beyond that, I wonder when he lit into those who feel "entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it," if Romney himself truly understood that he was effectively trashing a sizable segment of his own base. It stands to reason, after all, that if you serve up enough of what is essentially warmed-over political comfort food, your own palate will soon be no more discriminating than those of the folks who are happily wolfing it down.

            The O.B. will say that since Mitt's most recent muckup, he has heard more fact-based discussion of who actually pays what than he ever expected. For example, several taxperts have pointed out that effectively 60 percent of those who do not pay federal income taxes are paying payroll taxes nonetheless while only 1 percent of the citizenry is truly making no contribution whatsoever to our revenue coffers.

In case you haven't noticed, the ol' Bloviator has become something of a map/chart geek recently, and he is really smitten with the following one, which compares percentages of total taxes (of any sort at any level) paid with percentages of total income received across all income layers. Rather than showing the rich guy shouldering a disproportionate share of the burden, it reveals what strikes the O.B. as remarkable equity across the income quintiles.

The O.B. would like to think that Romney's over-the-top stereotyping has spurred a general determination to understand the facts behind taxation issues a little better, but he still sees way too many cases where we seem positively eager to be deceived about fiscal realities and possibilities, especially if we don't really feel that we personally have a pooch in a particular budgetary dogfight. As many of you know, such a dogfight erupted here in Georgia last week after our secretary of state, Brian Kemp, announced that in response to the governor's call for a 3 percent budget cut, he was ponying up the requisite $730K and change demanded of his office by simply shutting down our state archives as a public research facility. When the O.B. sought to show the shortsightedness of Kemp's move in a piece that appeared on the Hotlanta paper's web site, one of the first folks to comment wanted to know, "So where would you like your money to go--to the archives or to education?" The O.B. was sorely tempted to launch into a lengthy, high-minded philosophical explanation as to why closing its archives would amount to a sizable step back from any state's commitment to education. After several "get thee hence's" however, he focused on his astonishingly credulous critic's ready acceptance of our elected officialdom's boilerplate assurances that there was neither enough bureaucratic adipose left to excise elsewhere in the state budget nor more potential revenue sources sufficient to make such a Draconian cut unnecessary:

            This move becomes even more embarrassing and difficult to justify in light of the fact that the $732,626 that shutting down the archives is supposed to save is less than half the annual cost of operating the "Go Fish Georgia Educational Center." This big-ticket facility was constructed at a reported cost of $14 million down in Perry, (quite coincidentally, I'm sure) on the home turf of former Gov. Sonny Perdue, and in its first twelve months of operation drew about 15,000 visitors, roughly 3 percent of the number served by the archives each year back when it was fully operational.

 Defenders of the decision to padlock the archives claim it is preferable to cuts in other, more vital state services, but that scenario assumes that potential sources of additional revenue are not available. Very reasonable projections indicate that simply bringing Georgia's cigarette taxes up to the national average could raise an additional $500 million, not to mention the long-term savings in public and private health care costs. Two-tenths of 1 percent of that figure would keep the archives going, and obviously a lot more would be available to address other public needs. Although polls have shown a sizable majority of Georgians support raising the tax on cigarettes, efforts in this direction have been beaten back thus far by lobbying campaigns warning that such a move would destroy the "competitive advantage" enjoyed by convenience stores near the Georgia line that specialize in feeding the nicotine addictions out-of-state smokers.

Troubling as it might be to discover that the majority of our lawmakers have effectively chosen subsidizing the spread of lung cancer        over supporting education, historical or otherwise, we should recognize that such decisions are no more than we can expect so long as we allow them to be made without our fully informed consent. In this case, if our elected officials cannot bestir themselves to find a way to restore our state archives to a reasonably operational level, truth in advertising requires at the very least that they should be issued special license plates proclaiming Georgia "Historically Ignorant, But a Great Place to Smoke!"

             It's 95 degrees outside and the humidity is at least 125 percent,  so football season has obviously arrived. Before the trivial matter of who stands the best chance to occupy the White House for the next four years slips completely into the shadows encircling my ever-constricting attention span, I thought I would size up how things look at this point for the final accounting on November 6, just in case I happen to miss it, owing to the post-mortem hubbub over the outcome of the Bama and LSU tussle just three days earlier.

As fundamentally artificial enterprises from the get-go, presidential campaigns are always fertile ground for paradoxes and contradictions, and this one is surely no exception. For starters, at this stage, it is not the ostensibly bleeding-heart liberal champion of the common folk, Barack Obama, but Mitt Romney, the uber-rich, supposedly out-of-touch elitist who enjoys a commanding lead among blue-collar whites. Meanwhile, instead of reaching out to Independents and centrist Democrats disenchanted with Obama by stressing what strikes me as a fairly decent record as a moderate Republican governor of a traditionally Democratic state, Romney is zealously denying that he ever even knew that guy in favor of reinventing himself as a hard-core, gun-loving, entitlement-hating arch-conservative in order to ingratiate himself with the rabid and tenacious Teabaggers and the well-heeled financiers of the way-yonder Far Right. His strategists' appraisal of his success in this re-branding effort with the election less than three months away may be reelected in his choice of a running mate whose ideal government is armed to the teeth and spoiling for a fight but otherwise too puny and impoverished to be of any real consequence domestically. (Recall here that lovable ol' megalomaniac Grover Norquist's plan to starve government until it is so small and weak that he can drown in it his bathtub.)  Paul Ryan is clearly no Sarah Palin (Come to think of it, who is or ever has been other than perhaps Dan Quayle in drag?), but this choice does a least suggest a rather late-in-the-fray attempt to "secure the base," such as we witnessed from the McCain camp four years ago.

            Meanwhile, Harry Reid's suggestion that the mysterious Mittster may not have paid any taxes in several recent years was either the political equivalent of a colossally ballsy poker bluff or a carefully calculated move based on definite indications that something in Romney's returns might turn the public's tummy. The Old Bloviator found the move distasteful personally, although his sympathy for the Repubs is dulled somewhat by the recollection of the swift-boating of John Kerry in 2004 and the "birther" and "closet-Muslim" whispering campaigns against Obama four years later. At any rate, now that Mitt has investigated himself and revealed that he never paid less than 13 percent in taxes for the years in question and Ms. R. has nixed the prospect of any further such disclosures, it remains to be seen how the Dems will play out their hand on this issue. Early indications seem to be that they will keep on insisting that Romney's refusal to go public with his actual tax forms suggests that he is hiding something rather than jumping on the fact that he actually feels vindicated by reporting that, over the years in question, he typically paid roughly one-third the nominal rate for his income group and one-half the effective rate that most of us pay.

            How all of the above goes down with the voters is still anybody's guess at this point. Elections geek Nate Silver  at 538.com noted that with the Ryan pick, Romney has moved up some in several recent polls and projections of the likely outcome. Even his own forecast model, which has been fairly "bearish" on Romney heretofore, saw his chances of winning rise briefly from 27 to 31 percent although it had dipped back to the previous level by September 1. The matter of how much of a traditional convention bounce Romney enjoyed is still largely a question of whose polls you read at this point. Rasmussen polls typically tilt a little toward the Republicans because they are conducted among "likely voters," while any poll showing Obama (or any Democrat for that matter) leading among "registered voters" has to be discounted just a tad because...well, registerin' is one thing and votin's another. In fact, Democrats who have come up short in recent years have often had to settle for whatever consolation there may be in knowing that they were the clear choice of those who never managed to register, much less vote.

For example, a recent Suffolk University/USA Today  survey shows that among the unregistered, Obama tops Romney by a 3 to 1 margin and leads him more than 2 to 1 among those who are registered but don't expect to vote. Here, in a nutshell, is why Republican leaders in a number of key states have pushed measures that are all but certain to curtail voter participation. Not for nothing did a GOP legislator hail the passage of a strict voter-ID law "which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania." Suffice it to say, it is not just supporters who might stay home on Election Day, but those who show up and aren't allowed to vote that have some Democrats' knickers in disarray, especially in states where the poll margins are razor thin.

With all this in mind, the latest Rasmussen survey, released on September 1, has Romney ahead nationally by three points, a five-point swing from the previous poll, but only a two-point boost compared to his sixty-day Rasmussen average that already showed him with a one-point lead. Lest we forget, the popular vote matters pas de tout officially so long as we still have the Electoral College, and though Romney has tightened things up a teensy bit overall in key states like Michigan and Wisconsin, both of which have gone Democratic in the last five elections, my favorite poll crunchers over at RealClearPolitics.com still show him with a ways to go in collecting the votes that really count.   As of right now, the RCP'ers still see enough states solid, likely, or leaning to Obama at this give him at least 221 as opposed to Romney's 191. Ten remaining "toss-up" states account for 126 electoral votes, more than enough to give Romney the requisite 270, but the RCP'ers have him claiming only North Carolina's 15,  leaving Obama with a final projected tally of 332 electoral votes to Romney's 206.

Although this is supposedly a data-based assessment, it is obviously a long way from the final word. If the current nip-tuckers in Wisconsin and Michigan remain that way, the fact that the swamp-ridden, mosquito-and gator-infested, condo- and asphalt-blighted, jeans short-wearing hellhole that is the commonwealth of Florida now wields 29 electoral votes cannot be overemphasized. The importance of the black and Hispanic vote to Obama down there may make this one of the few states where voter-restriction statutes actually affect the outcome, and if those don't get the job done, of course, there's always the  possibility of the second coming of the infamous hanging chad. There is also the question of whether Obama gets a significant and sustainable bounce out of the forthcoming proceedings in Charlotte. (To that end, I'd recommend fitting Joe Biden's tongue for a shock collar and scrapping any plans to have Robert De Niro come in to speak to an empty suit wearing a Romney button.) Barring some such disaster,  I'd say Obama's odds for November 6 still seem to be a few clicks north of 50-50 right now, although given the choice, I think I'd rather have my money on Alabama to beat the spread on November 3.