Romney and Virginia

The signs are starting to pop up on lawns all throughout the DC Virginia suburbs.   As I've driven my young and idealistic/liberal/politically aware fourteen year old son to and from family and school events this last week, he's noted them.   "Why would anyone in this area vote for Romney," he asks.   "Don't they get it?"

I've tried to explain that there is much to commend conservatism, and that there are conservative values that are both rationally defensible and profoundly positive.   A sense of duty and personal responsibility, cherishing and defending the best of your faith and your heritage, valuing putting your best into something, caring for family and community and commitment: these things are a net positive for our culture.

But I do wonder about Virginians voting for the Romney/Ryan ticket.   I don't entirely get it, either.

Virginia appears, on the surface, to be a conservative state.   Our governor is conservative.   Our state legislature is conservative, sometimes to the point of being a little Talibanny.  We're business-friendly, with a laxer regulatory regimen than the People's Republic of Maryland that looms in all its stark Stalinist horror across the Potomac to our Northeast.

Virginia has, as a conservative, business-friendly state, weathered the recent recession quite well.   So you've got this prosperous, conservative state...and yet Romney is increasingly down in the polls here.   Why?

I think, quite honestly, because on a practical level many Virginians realize that our recent prosperity is entirely a function of the federal government.   Our state has two distinct economies.   There is the agricultural/industrial economy that dominates the southern part of the state.   It's stable, but not really growing.  Economically, it's basically East Kentucky.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  It's a more easy going life, or would be if you didn't have to work three jobs.

Then there's Northern Virginia.   NoVa has been the driving force behind the growth of the state economy.   In my own county, for instance, there are 500,000 more residents than there were when when my family moved here 35 years ago.  NoVa has grown as government has grown.   Government and military workers are part of that, but so are government and defense contractors and the service and retail industries that have thrived here.

The Federal Government is the main industry of Virginia.  It is an inescapable empirical reality, one so present that it inhibits our GOP governor from heralding Virginia as an example of the success of his economic policies.  McDonnell is no fool.  He knows where things stand.

So when I see the Romney/Ryan signs popping up around Virginia, I get it.  We're conservative.   But on another level, it's a bit fuddling.

Everyone is entitled to have a political perspective and vote accordingly.  And I do grasp the desire for sane, right-sized, non-intrusive government.

But if Romney and Ryan win, and they actually do the things they have committed to do, the net effect on the Virginia economy will be devastating.   A decimation of the federal workforce...which Ryan has promised...would have disproportionate impacts here, as would radical reductions in spending.  Beyond increased unemployment, there'd also be a massive reduction in housing demand and a crash of home values.  Those things combined would cascade, leaving state coffers as empty as the abandoned homes, offices, and storefronts that would become the norm in the state.

For many Americans, thems would be the breaks.   If you believe in reducing the size of government, then so be it.  Que sera sera.   But for Virginians, a vote for Romney and Ryan is a vote to collapse the economy of our state.   It's a fascinating abandonment of material self-interest in the interest of a broader ideology.

Heck, on some levels it might even be noble, were it being done intentionally.

House Rules

Back when I was the age of my kids, there weren't endless scads of screens to suck up every last moment of our lives.  You had to make do with appallingly low tech things like, say, decks of cards.   On the bus, on the way to school, we'd play War, or Poker.  It was pleasant, a simple distraction, a social pastime.

There was one card game, though, that I just wouldn't play.  I remember a group of boys getting all into it on the bus, and being pressed to join in.

The game was called "Bloody Knuckles," and the rules were basically this:

1)  Player 1 holds out their fist, knuckles up.
2)  Player 2 holds a pack of playing cards, tight and all together.
3)  Player 2 attempts to strike the knuckles of Player 1, as hard as possible, with the edge of the pack of playing cards.  Player 1 attempts to get his knuckles out of the way.
4)  They trade positions, and it repeats, until one or the other gives up.

I just couldn't see the point.

If I lose, I'm in pain.  If I win, I'm inflicting pain on another.  Neither eventuality is positive or desirable.  The game is...well...just...what's the word....stupid.  And as it's just a game, something that has no real hold over us, you don't need to play it.  So I wouldn't.

I explained my position to the kid asking me to play, at which point I was pronounced a wuss by one and all.  I simply shrugged.  They went on hitting each other.

I feel much the same way about global capitalism.

Economics is just a game, after all.  No no, you may say, but that's what economics means, after all, if you care about the root meaning of things.  Oiko-nomia, it comes from, in the Greek that we Presbyterians learn so you can doze off while we preach.  Oikos meaning "house," and nomos meaning "rules."   Yeah, that's house rules, just like in Vegas, baby.  It's not science.   It's not math.  It's not faith.

It's the game we choose to play to pass the time.  

For all of its dizzying complexity, global capitalism is a remarkably stupid game.  And it is a game, certainly as it manifests itself now, a whirling mass of derivatives and quantitative easings and reshufflings of the deck.  The level of anxiety and psychological pain we're inflicting on ourselves is entirely something we're creating.  It's not something that has any foundation in the real.

What is real is that the harvests in the United States of America have been solid for the last several years.  Thanks to climate change, they're not as great as they could be, but they're still bountiful.  In point of fact, there's enough food produced every year that no one need ever go hungry.

What is real is that there is adequate housing for everyone.  In fact, more than adequate, so much more than adequate that we're tearing down some of the excess.

What is real is that there are is enough clothing so that none need go cold, enough shoes that none need go barefoot unless they choose to do so.

And yet in the game we have created, we are fearful that we will not eat.  We are anxious that we will not have a home.  We watch the numbers on CNBC flutter back and forth wildly, a mad flock of trader pigeons spooked to exhaustion by the slightest movement, and we fret about our futures and our retirement and our children.

I look out at the bloodied knuckles of our collective psyche, and at the fear, and at the hunger in the world, and I think...what's the point of this game, again?