On Culture Wars, Trumpism, and My Self-Described Liberators:

I find it kinda ironic when liberal friends who've never been tempted to vote for a pachyderm and who are dumbfounded by the rise of Trumpism, are instant experts on whose to blame for the phenomenon.

Your attempts to externalize responsibility are understandable but misguided.

I am a libertarian, not a progressive, but let me come to you as a friend and sometimes ally who, despite underestimating Trumpism, understands it.

When dismissive snark moved from your dinner parties and Jon Stewart began broadcasting it into every one's living room, you weren't laughing with your fellow Americans, you were laughing at them. They knew this. They pay for cable too.

When you stopped reasoning with your fellow citizens and resorted to shutting them up by shouting "xenophobe," "racist," "homophobe," you were winning political battles while hardening hearts and minds against you.

When you were not content to merely win the Culture Wars but attempt to humiliate your fellow Americans in their own churches by attempting to redact not just shared social institutions, but their religious convictions, you revealed yourselves as the fundamentalists bent on your own form of holy struggle.

You delegitimized even the opposition which was sympathetic to your concerns and just wanted their concerns heard in turn; you laid the dead wood which is the tinder feeding this fire.

They are Americans and they demand the respect worthy of fellow citizens. If you will not give it, they will take it: by any means necessary. Even if, working together, we defeat Trump in a landslide, the progressive attempt to reconstruct the "unwashed masses" needs to end. We refuse to be subjugated by anyone, much less the likes of you.

You think of yourselves as liberators. You are viewed as an occupying force. In election 2016 the occupied have begun treating you as such and you will not convince them otherwise by laughing at them.
In the meantime, however, I will not vote my fears by casting a ballot for Hillary Clinton, or any other Donk who might be nominated, should she be indicted.  I will be voting my hopes, Gary Johnson 2016

Wisconsin: April 5, 2016

It is not very often that the Wisconsin Primary makes the news.

It's not early.
It's not big.
It's not part of any day named "Super."

I won't tell you who to vote for,
I will encourage you to vote your hopes,
not your fears,
your ideals,
not your anger,

Paul Simon wrote a song about not wanting to "end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard." The joke is on him, outside of our own heads, we're all cartoons destined for the grave.

Still, each of us chooses our own cartoon.

As for me, I'll choose to be a cartoon of a man who believes in liberty, not shouting people down, that public service is more important than winning,

that character is not the most important thing, it is the only thing.

Anger

When was the last time you made a major life decision out of anger?

How'd that work out for you?

New Hampshire Picks

Basically I believe the Pachyderm race is too close to call.  Trump will win but under perform expectations.  Rubio will continue to surge.  Cruz will rise again in the southern primaries in March unless Trump can add on the ground organization to his rhetoric.  Rubio will play among those more moderate Republicans in blue states: the Northeast, West Coast, and the blue and purple states of the Midwest.

Is a hung convention possible on the Republican side?  I suppose so, but my own perspective is clouded by the fact that I want it to be a hung convention and my mother taught me to tread carefully regarding those things I want believe.

Sanders will win the Donk contest in New Hampshire though I think it will be his high water mark.  I don't see him getting the same level of support in South Carolina, Nevada, or the Super Tuesday states.  He won't endorse Clinton and I don't think his supporters will reconcile themselves to the idea of another eight years of Clinton dominance of the party apparatus.

I do think the Clinton campaign will implode due to a combination of the e-mail scandal, the progressive revolt with in the Donk coalition, and the fact that the candidate has never won a contested election.  She is not a proven candidate.  All she proves is how deeply the Clintons used their influence within the Democratic Party to stack the deck in her favor within the bureaucracy of that party.  She is the establishment.

Biden still waits to ride in as a white knight.  First to save the party of Jefferson and then the nation from the Pachyderms who seem dead set on running a campaign based upon bringing back waterboarding.  I think President Obama wants him as a successor.  I think the party as a whole would prefer him as a standard bearer.  My pick of Bloomberg anticipates an attempt to harness the outsider mystique which seems to have seized the nation.  They might even both pledge to only serve one term, promising all members of the Democratic coalition an opportunity to begin jockeying for 2020.

That might be enough to unify the party for a 2016 win.

Rumors point to a Biden/Warren ticket.  That too is possible, but I don't want it.  ;)

Iowa Picks

Some people play fantasy football.  Others obsess over their NCAA basketball brackets.

I am into horse racing, electoral horse racing to be specific and this is my prediction for the 2016 Iowa Caucuses.

Trump's support is drawn from people who are not likely caucus participants.  Those that do show up will, through the caucus process, I suspect, be folded into the Cruz supporters during the course of the meeting.  I have Rubio in second but, frankly, Bush and Rubio could switch places in my standings.  I only chose Rubio on the hunch that Iowa, too, is tired of the Bush family.  I doubt Rubio  makes it out of South Carolina but, hey, one race at a time.

Rand Paul's supporters will not easily fold into any other group so he hits above his weight in Iowa, I suspect he'll do well again in New Hampshire before fading the night of Super Tuesday.

Team Donk is less complicated.  I have Clinton over Sanders: pragmatism over idealism.  Now if Hillary is indicted this weekend, well, that could change.  O'Malley is praying for a change.

Edit: Apparently when I was writing out my picks last night, I forgot how to spell "O'Malley" and "Caucus."

The Bunker Party

So far as I can tell our system is made up of two major formal political parties and one informal movement.

Among the political parties conservatives (social and economic) make up the core of team Pachyderm, think Cruz, Rubio, Paul Ryan. Liberals (social and economic) make up the core of the second formal political party, team Donk, think Hillary C., O'Mally, Pelosi.

The third informal political movement is the "Nostalgia for What Never Was" party (Team Oscar the Grouch?  Team Big Bird? Team Archie Bunker?), it is running two candidates: Sanders and Trump.  They may be running in different primaries, but they share an overlapping base of support: whites who *think* they long for the days of Ike, Kennedy, and LBJ.

To my fellow "small l libertarians" and pseudo-anarchists, sorry, 21st century America just ain't that in to us, at least not yet.

From the NY Times: Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat.
National Review: Trump Doesn't Represent the Conservative Base
Politico: Can Bernie Sanders Win the Love of a Party He Scorns?

Roll Call: Sanders Asks Democrats to Pick Proud non-Democrat

Every time

Every time I listen to any of these yahoos running for President (from either political party) I start looking at the Newfoundland job market.

California's Country Kids

Victor-Davis Hanson takes a California perspective about the experiential roots of the city kid/country kid divide over at City Journal.

I don't know that all of his examples are as diagnostic as he makes them out to be.

In the manner of ancient genres of the pastoral and georgic, the more urban culture grows, the more it romanticizes the rarely visited countryside. What is the attraction of reality TV, especially of the white, blue-collar people that appear in Deadliest Catch, Ice Truckers, Duck Dynasty, or Axe-Men, replete with rural accents, bib overalls, short tempers, propensities to swear and to fight, and lots of broken-down and often dangerous equipment? Are the good ratings based on urban viewers’ vicarious desire to experience hard nature? Or is the draw anthropological, as if the rural white American in Alaska or the Everglades is a rare species not fully understood but fascinating in his natural habitat? Or are these shows therapeutic and condescending reminders that city folks are clearly superior and still have their teeth, solve problems without screaming, watch their weight, and speak a recognizable, standard English? 

Urbanites now prefer natural granite counters to tile, wood floors to nylon carpets, and stainless-steel appliances to artificial white enamels. But these supposedly natural tastes don’t lead to a greater appreciation of the miner, the logger, or the fabricator—much less of the abstract idea that before there exists a polished floor or counter in the city, lots of messy operations are needed to force nature to give up its bounty. Like bored Hellenistic court poets who romanticized shepherds’ lives in never-visited Arcadia, Silicon Valley techies like to wear heavy-duty hiking boots and flannel and drive four-wheel-drive SUVs with mud tires. The cause of the delta smelt or the San Joaquin Valley salmon fills a spiritual need for the Sierra Club activist; the livelihood of the Hispanic grape pruner in Caruthers and the poor children of the field irrigator in Five Points do not. 

Add all this up, and these days rural man is more likely to be conservative and thus Republican, his urban counterpart liberal and logically Democratic. Freedom is the former’s creed; the equality and sameness of the co-op are the latter’s.

I would argue that  the infantilization of the American youth voter is a cultural moment that will pass, as the children of helicoptering late Boomer parents find themselves thrown upon their own resources.  Maybe they will demand that government pick-up the tab of their upkeep, but I think they will learn what it means to be independent.  If, for no other reason, the size of the budget is already too large to add their upkeep and remain solvent.

Still, the message to city kids is that this is how the divide is viewed from the rural perspective and the land outside the suburb is populated by your marginalized fellow citizens.  Those fellow citizens are worthy of your respect and their voice should be heard, not silenced.

We should learn from their experiences and not force their views to conform with our own.

Different views rooted in different experiences united by mutual respect and local governance.

You Can Always tell a City Kid,

The conservation movement has been so successful that city kids are no starting to experience problems that rural problems are starting to creep into the city.

In September, two dogs were killed by coyotes in western Wauwatosa. The first dog was killed by a coyote during the early morning hours while the dog and its owner were jogging. The dog had just been taken off its leash, according to police. The second attack also occurred in the morning, after a woman let her dog out of the house. There have been other suspected attacks.

Old Story, Still Relevant

Rest assured, there is going to be a meeting.  I suspect joggers will be told that not to let their dogs off lead in the woods and everyone will be told that coyotes eat dogs.  Welcome to earth: third rock from the sun.

As a rural kid whose lived with city kids much of his life, the rural/urban divide has been a chronic cultural hassle.

Homo Sapiens are great at discounting what we do not understand.  Rural kids can not escape some knowledge of the culture of the city.  City kids write our television programming, our movies, and most of our teachers and other leaders spent at least four years in a city.  Even when it is misunderstood, misapplied, and misconstrued, we have some knowledge of the urban experience.  We can't escape it.

The city kids understanding of the rural kid culture comes from shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and  our political concerns are usually understood through the lens of Daily Show Snark.  While the rural kid has some basis to understand the city kid point of view, even when we don't agree with it, the city kid lacks the resources to think rural kid concerns as anything short of irrational.

You can always tell a city kid, but you can't tell him much.

We're treated as foreigners and subjects to be approached with xenophobia rather than as fellow citizens in a heterogeneous culture.  Our President will say we're nothing but Bible and gun clingers.  We're objects of ridicule and if you live or work in the city you quickly learn to conform, shut up, or at the very least pick your battles.

As the story above suggests, however, rural kids have an important voice that should be heard.  We've been dealing with coyotes killing our dogs since the beginning.  We understand why Africans need to be given a reason to preserve the lion population.  In the Anthropocene hunting is an important part of conservation.

If we are to find a way forward together, if we are to overcome political deadlock, if we are to find effective solutions to real problems that account for regional differences in subjective culture as well as objective circumstances, then the abuse of the rural voice must stop.  City kids need to put at least as much effort in understanding and accommodating the country kid as they do the Islamic kid, the Latina kid, the homosexual kid.

That means you don't get everything you want.  Welcome to life in a republic.  Welcome to life in a diverse nation.  Homo Sapiens are by nature tribal.  I refuse to pretend any different.  The Anthropocene began, however, when tribes bound themselves together into nations.  A nation, however, we make account for a diversity of tribes to receive just treatment either by forcing subjugation to the most powerful of the tribes or inclusion.

The answer to "convert or die" is come sit among us as equals.  Right now the city kid's position is closer to "convert or die."  Welcome to the Anthropocene.

Bear Hunters: Watch Your Step

Gil faced a decision and had just seconds to make it.

The buck of a lifetime had crept up behind his deer stand and was angling away from him and about to slip behind some brush and disappear.  It was not moving the way other deer had as it came into the clearing.

This is probably how this buck had lived long enough to grow into the buck of a lifetime.

Gil was properly equipped.  He had the skill set.  The deer was, as we would later pace off, a mere nineteen yards away.  Gil took his shot.  It was a difficult shot but it was reasonable to believe that he was going to kill that deer.

I met Gil because there wasn't much of a blood trail and Sparta and I were called in to lend some assistance.  In retrospect, I think he hit the deer in the meaty part of the neck or the high back and it will likely survive.

After this experience the buck of a lifetime is liable to become a ghost buck, showing up only at night on random game cameras.

The last wound bed: Sparta took us another 250 yards before loosing it suggesting he went across a highway and into an open field.

Gil is a resident of northeastern Barron County Wisconsin.  His full-sized four wheel drive pickup truck is immaculately clean.  He wiped Sparta's paw prints off the dash within 20 seconds of the last time I got out. He works at an auto body repair shop.  He grew up a few miles away.  He's a hunter, a fisherman, and a land owner.

He is a good-old boy in every best sense of the word and he's had enough of bear hunters.

Specifically, Gil has had enough of bear hunters who use dogs to run and tree bear before dispatching them.

Black bear are an elusive species.  They avoid humans, and move in rather random patterns through the landscape.  Consequently, there are only two efficient ways to hunt them.  The first is to lay bait so that the bear becomes accustomed to traveling to a particular place and eat the bait.  The hunter than ambushes the bear when the season opens.

The second way involves using large fast hounds to catch the scent of recent bear passing and follow that scent to the bear who then climbs a tree to escape the hounds but where it is held until the hunting party arrives.

A neighbor with game cameras on his 30 acre woodlot tells me there a three distinct bear families that make our immediate area home.  I've never seen them, and I spend a fair amount of time outdoors.  I've lived in the area twelve years and I've never seen one that wasn't caught in the headlights of my car, though I run across bear sign and bear dens on a regular basis.

Bait works fine but as a dog man myself I am sympathetic to those who hunt with dogs.  It is an active and kinetic way of hunting.  You'll more than meet your daily step goal on your fitbit.

It connects us as human hunters with our oldest of hunting companions: our tribe members and our dogs.  Baiting bears is fine and I understand why people do it.  It just isn't something I, and those like me, are in to.

Not every abuse of rights comes from the government.

I was surprised when Gil adamantly and repeatedly complained about bear hunters.  Most, no all, previous objections to bear hunting I have heard comes from a place of ignorance, from people unconnected to the region's hunting traditions.

Given the state political situation, I'd have expected him to be more sympathetic and understand their plight.  I'd have expected him to reflexively support other hunters against the anti-hunting lobby, found primarily in the urban centers in the southern third of the state.

The fact is, his understanding of bear hunting was deeper than my own.

His complaint came down to a simple issue of trespassing.

On occasion the violators were hunters from out of state (Minnesota is a short drive from Barron County), sometimes it was a guy down the road.  The brute fact is that he is tired of catching stray hounds crossing his property; he is tired of giving his lecture to their owners.  He has experienced how difficult it is to match hounds caught on game cameras to owners from down the road or seen driving away without of state plates.

He's frustrated by continually finding gut piles next to his field or within site of his deer stand.

His property rights are being abused and ignored but not not by the government.  The problem is his fellow citizens.

He is weary of making the difficult decision to not turn in the fifteen-year old first time bear hunter to the authorities who chased an exceptionally large 450 pound black bear to his property where it was killed. He doesn't want the kid to face the consequences of what is, at root, bad parenting.

It is an age old conundrum, how to confront the assholes without becoming an asshole?

Gil wants to be asked permission.  That's all.  He wants to be respected as a landowner.  He wants bear hunters to go through the hard work of contacting landowners before letting loose their hounds.  Few people will say "no" if they know the people running the hounds. It means bear hunters need to put in the time in the off season of building relationships.  At least in Gil's experience, that is not happening at present.

He didn't say as much but the frustration I heard in his voice reflected a readiness to support the end of hunting bear with hounds if that is what it takes to win back his property rights.

We will always have the complaints of individuals who have nothing but a passing and ill-informed encounter with hunting. Veterinarians will and should continue to have a voice to help us keep our dogs healthy. I welcome canine advocates who may not be hunters themselves but can maintain enough objectivity to help keep us all honest.

Bear hunters are treated well in Wisconsin hunting tradition and law, if that is to continue, they need to keep land owners on their side.

Let's keep these hounds self-actualized
http://www.wvliving.com/Winter-2013/The-Great-Bear-Hunt/

If bear hunters loose rural land owners, hunters who care and know just as much about our wildlife as they do,
turn their backs on bear hunters, they will loose the privilege of hunting bear with dogs.

In the process they will have done harm to other hunters who use dogs in the hunt.  Once the political pendulum begins to swing, it continues to swing until it overshoots the rational middle.

The north does not have the traditions of the south, hunting with dogs is on a less stable foundation.

As someone who only recently was given the opportunity to track wounded game with his dogs, the question has a second order impact on me as well.  Every hunter has skin in the game when it comes to how hunters are portrayed in the political media and we all are at risk of shame when a negative portrayal is correct.

If we do not police our own, we will find that we are all being policed; and deservedly so.

Why should we be granted responsibility if we fail to act responsibly?

Gil had to make a split decision on whether or not to take a shot at a deer.  At least in one part of Northern Wisconsin Bear hunters need to take a long look at their ethical practices.  It is time for some of the long hard work of re-building a relationship of trust with landowners.  They've had to face this problem before and it is time to do it again.

The Debate We're not Having