Nothing against you, I was just slipping my mental clutch trying to come up with a visual.

That kind of mental disconnect is, I submit, part of the red-state/blue-state difference. I can’t comprehend your life, you can’t comprehend mine, and unfortunately New York has far more electoral votes than South Dakota so I’m left hoping Idaho or Montana can make up the difference.

As we concentrate in cities and towards the coasts, you can expect this whole red/blue thing to polarize.

And didn’t we fight a red/blue war once because one American didn’t understand another?

Sobering to ponder, it is.

– Max

I once hosted a Christmas Party at my apartment, guests being an entirely representative cross-section of upper-middle-class Manhattanites, and with about half of those present working at Big Name media companies (in whose ambiently leftish vineyards I also toiled for many years).

Well, it was a great night — plenty to eat and drink, a quarantine room for the smokers, and lots of high spirits.

Then, around midnight, one of the guest’s girlfriends walked into the wrong room, my home office, and spotted the bust of Ronald Reagan I keep on my desk.

The poor thig when berserk. It just blew her mind that she might be under the same roof as a conservative — even a pro-gay, dope-smoking, hard-drinking conservative libertarian like me. She was quite drunk by that stage, but that didn’t mitigate the vitiol or, worst of all, the bad manners.

Here was I, having spent perhaps $1000 on food, drink, party favors, being abused for respecting a president who had been elected twice by a majority of her countryman.

Since I was full of ink as well, I responded in kind (something about Monica jealousy and how, since Clinton wasn’t present, I could probably arrange for one of the bums who slept near the UN to come up and stain her dress). The party turned into a near riot.

While I shudder at the thought of an Obama presidency, I’m taking a perverse consolation in the fact that the same sorts featured in the video will soon come to learn what it means to live with the facade of leadership, rather than the real thing.

We New Yorkers — we grown-up New Yorkers — remember what happened to the city when David Dinkins substituted platitudes for policy during his disastrous tenure at City Hall.

An Obama presidency will be more of the same writ large.

God help those precious Upper West Sides dears. Obama certainly won’t make their smug, self-satisfied lives any better.

Humble- take thee to the interior of your country and get off the coast(s). Go into farming/ranching country and mountain country, and talk to regular folks. You’ll see and hear the stark difference. Or drive 80 miles north of PCOLA and learn how to hunt…talk to the locals of, let’s say,…Epps, Alabama. I did all that and was able to leave the grit of CT on my shoes forever. You can too. Do it before they lock you into Jacksonville or Whidbey or San Diego with stints inside the beltway the rest of your adult life. Manhattan is only a place to visit Rockefeller Center at Christmas, watch a Bway show and get a good meal..beyond that it is a city of hucksters and sneaks who don’t look folks in the eye…

Your generation is going to have to choose sides. There will be no other options.

b2

The construction of this election, as a conflict between absolute good, and absolute evil, by those on the left, has no equal on the right. It has manifested hate towards the McCain camp, without parallel — examples one, two and three. The left has eight years of pent up rage — “selected, not elected”. “Bush lied, people died”, and now, “McSame”. Axelrod is doing a masterful job of channeling that rage towards a pretty decent pair of folks. What you saw in Manhattan is just one more example, and not a good sign for the future of our country.

Ya know, seems for being a melting pot and all we’re all pretty good about thinking ourselves superior to somebody. This cannot have good implications for the body politic.

– Max