…the missing pieces of the econo-disaster puzzle.

We’ve already told you, as if you didn’t already know, that the “macro” economy, and the lifestyles of the rich and famous, grew substantially in recent decades whilst the well-being of most of the rest of us stagnated or declined.

But Tasini figures that the wage collapse directly caused today’s macro-economic crisis:

“People had no money coming in in their paychecks so they were forced to pay for their lives through credit–either plastic or drawing down equity from their homes…”We will never fix the economic crisis, whether through short-term economic stimulus and certainly not through tax cuts, until paychecks are re-inflated. Dramatically.”

Of course, doing that will likely require even more political guts and popular demand than Obama’s got now.

I’ve known Thomas Frank’s work since his cultural-commentary zine The Baffler and his first book The Conquest of Cool. As the Clinton era and the tech bubble gave way to Bush’s Reign of Error, Frank’s focus morphed from “hip” youth-marketing shticks to the early-oughts’ financial speculation mania, to the deepest darkest heart of conservative malevolence. This is the setting of his latest treatise, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.

Frank’s premise in a nutshell: Many of your worst conspiracy theories about the right-wing sleaze machine are true, and he’s got the voluminous research to prove it. Legislation is sold to lobbyists for big money at golf courses and expensive restaurants. This lobbying industry’s made DC’s Virginia suburbs one of America’s wealthiest enclaves.

Among the results: tax and regulatory breaks for the rich and connected, the outsourcing and even offshoring of many government functions, the hiring of well-connected incompetents at business-unfriendly agencies such as FEMA and the Department of Labor, official support for overseas sweatshops and oil drilling in national parks, the decimation of consumer protection and endangered species listings, etc. etc.

Frank particularly enjoys tracking all this through the career of uber-influence peddler Jack Abramoff, who seems to have been everywhere graft and sanctioned bullying have been within our time. Abramoff’s depicted as helping turn the College Republicans into a gaggle of liberal-bashing shock troops, as coordinating apartheid South Africa’s US PR drives, and of turning the post-1994 Republican Congress into a highly organized machine for legal and quasi-legal bribery.

Like Naomi Klein (whom Frank qoutes and name-drops at one point), Frank’s current work covers a few sectors of the VRWC (vast right wing conspiracy) in excruciating, mind-numbing detail, but is silent almost to the point of nihilism about what progressives might do to reverse these plutocratic trends.

This is particularly ironic considering one of Frank’s chief argument points, that Republican corruption and mismanagement increase public cynicism toward government—an opinion Republicans actively want to promote. (Frank calls this situation “Win-Win Corruption.”)

At the opening of the Obama era, this everything-sucks attitude on the part of the left has simply got to give way to more practical (and, yes, hopeful) strategems.

(Apologies to Lynda Barry): A coalition of local government and nonprofit groups has issued its fourth triannual Communities Count report, documenting how King County residents live and/or survive. The full report’s online; a highly condensed version was issued as a tabloid circular in Thursday’s local dailies.

A lot of it’s not pretty, as seen in these headlines from the report’s newsprint version:

“The gap between rich and poor continues to grow.”

“Almost half of all jobs available in King County do not pay a living wage.”

“The richest fifth earn nearly half of the county’s income.”

“Public transportation doesn’t work for working parents.”

“Too many lack health insurance.”

“Domestic violence continues to be a major problem.”

These research-backed statements are based on long-term trends that far predate the current crap in the “larger” economy. The material lives of non-zillionaires have sputtered, stuttered, and slowly sank WHILE the urban condo towers and the suburban McMansions sprouted, while the financial markets boomed, while countless purveyors of “luxury” products and services emerged, while upscale slick local magazines came into print hawking fabulous leisure lifestyles.

My mother told me that she’d once heard my late father tell of the delightful and luxurious time he once had staying in the Taj Hotel in Bombay (now Mumbai), as he was about to be shipped home at the end of WWII. Now, the place is a battle zone instigated by one of those thug bands that think blowing stuff up + killing people = victory (or its emotional equivalent). How macho; how dumb.

Forty-five years after JFK’s slaying, it’s still poignant to view the initial TV coverage. CBS happened to be the only network feeding programming to its eastern/central affiliates at that hour. As the World Turns was such a ratings powerhouse in those days, NBC and ABC didn’t bother to program against it.

Thus, the catastrophe that (according to some perverse nostalgists) jump-started 12 years of further catastrophes first came to the nation’s attention by interrupting the most sedate and reassuring TV series yet devised.

ATWT creator Irna Phillips had sensed that TV was, by nature, a more ambient medium than radio. (Former ABC exec Bob Shanks called TV “the cool fire.”) So she toned down the melodrama and the histrionics, and devised an extremely quiet, low-key drama, in which an average Midwestern family discussed its average Midwestern daily doings.

Thus, the media’s most lulling, calming tribute to Ike-era ideals gave way to Walter Cronkite telling us, indirectly, of that fantasy America’s violent demise.

This year, T-Day week sees the nation in another cusp between eras.

A “perfect storm” of economic collapse has yet to reach bottom.

An unneeded, unending war continues to destroy lives.

Yet tens of millions of us still bathe in the afterglow of that great joyous moment three weeks ago.

There’s a feeling in the social zeitgeist. A feeling of optimism, of unashamed sincerity. A feeling that we really can turn the corner on all our crises. A feeling that the world really canturn, into a better place.

I share this feeling, and hope you do too.

(Not necessarily in that order):

I’ve spent the last seven days, with one brief exception, essentially doing five things:

• Working,
• Commuting,
• Sleeping,
• Eating, and
• Coughing.

I hadn’t planned on having a minor but pesky cold for the past three weeks. The rest of the ordeal was known.

When I signed up for King County Elections’ tabulation detail, I knew I’d miss the big Election Day hoopla. I’d work in the distant south-end suburbs from 6:30 in the morning to 7 at night, then go straight back by 7 the next morning. Not only would I miss the big action in person, I’d miss it by proxy–we weren’t allowed cell phones, iPods, or other potential media-receiving devices on the sprawling ballot-processing floor. I’d left a cheap FM-only radio with my stuff in the coat-check room, hoping to catch news from the outside world during a dinner break.

As it turned out, there wasn’t anything worth reporting when the dinner break came, shortly after 4 p.m. PST. The NPR airheads simply blathered tastefully about what might or might not happen within the subsequent hour.

Back inside the secure enclave of the tabulation room, the folks in charge decided to hold us for an extra hour. But they gave us tabbers an extra 15-minute break.

Two sheriff’s deputies sit guard at the only entrance to the ballot floor whenever “live” ballots are on the premises. Unlike all the rest of us on the floor, they get a laptop PC with Internet access. So it was thanks to them that, upon leaving for that extra break at 7-ish, I saw the electoral-vote headline OBAMA 200, MCCAIN 85.

We finally got out for the night just before 8. I was carpooling the long lonesome highway back into Seattle when the droning NPR voices announced Obama as the projected winner.

Our vehicle made it up to First and Pike in time to see the overflow crowds starting to form outside the Showbox’s election party. But I chose to head for the Westin Hotel, where the Democrats had their regular post-election shindig. Even before I got there, I witnessed happy shrieks and saw people hugging and fist-bumping all along Virginia Street. Inside, the size of the crowd was exceeded only by its joy. Not only had Washington voters helped Obama over the top, but Gov. Chris Gregoire was winning an unexpectedly not-close re-election campaign. The money issues for parks, transit, and the Pike Place Market were all comfortably in the “Yes” column. The only close big race in the state was Darcy Burner’s second drive to unseat U.S. Rep. Reichert on the Eastside.

I decided to spend someof my little remaining energy trekking to another election bash, at Spitfire. It was also filled close to capacity, and was also outrageously happy. I stayed there just long enough to hear Obama’s oh-so-elequent acceptance speech. During it, the previously raucous crowd stood and sat in total silence, only to wildly applaud at the end.

So that’s what it’s like to to have someone, something, to vote for, not just against.

By 10 p.m. I was already on my way home toward a waiting bed and an alarm clock set for 5 a.m.

It took six days for our county tabulation crew to work through the massive backlog of mailed-in ballots. (The ancient (1994 vintage) server hardware and MS Access database software didn’t help speedwise. The county’s got newer and faster equipment, but the feds haven’t certified it for use.)

People tell me they saw me on KOMO-TV’s election night coverage, gently pushing ballots through a scanning machine. It was one of three stations that sent camera crews to the elections complex that day.

Hundreds of us (mostly temps) worked this election, at the Renton complex and (for probably the last time) at in-person polling places. For me, it was the chance to go somewhere, do something, do it well, and get paid for it–and to apply my compulsion for geeky detail to a worthwhile cause.

As a tabulator, I had about as much to do with the election’s outcome as a stadium scoreboard operator has to do with the making of a big play. I could only properly document what had been done.

Still, there’s some sense of accomplishment in having played one small part in perhaps the most important election of our lifetimes.

Even if I didn’t get to personally witness its most exciting parts.

Here’s what I’m writing for the November Belltown Messenger:

Due to the vagaries of newsprint periodical publishing (a threatened but still noble industry), this is being written before the big humongous election, but most of you will read it afterwards.Thus, I cannot exhort you all to get out and exercise your citizenship (or, thanks to vote-by-mail, stay inside and exercise your citizenship).

Nor can I offer up expert analysis of what will surely be the fantastic and history-making results.

What I can give you are some verbal snapshots of the tense pre-election weeks:

• The sprawling beehive of activity that is King County Elections, in an otherwise quiet strip-mall and car-lot district just east of the former Longacres horse-track site, where I’ve worked as a temp this past month. The place was especially exciting on the last day of in-person voter registration, when the line snaked outside the lobby and deep into the parking lot.
• The reduction of the once-mighty right-wing propaganda machine into ever increasingly-shrill and decreasingly-sane appeals to naked fear and bigotry.
• The satire industry’s ease at mocking the McCain campaign’s crash and burn, combined with its collective inability to find anything to mock about Barack Obama. (That infamous New Yorker cover spoofed the right’s fictionalized Obama, which had already become absurd.) Bill Maher said it best when he pleaded with Obama to reveal at least one slight aspect of imperfection. (Fret not, Bill: His flaws will appear soon enough.)
• A tearful late-night phone call I took from a disillusioned Obama supporter. She was fearful that her year of activism and fundraising was all for naught, just because Obama had supported the Wall Street bailout. I tried to console her that bigtime politics has always been a realm of compromise and deals, but it’s far better to have a politician who sometimes betrays his higher ideals than one who doesn’t have any.
• The various fearful “we’re doomed” cries and sobs in the last weeks, with decreasing relation to the polling trends or the early-voting statistics. These desperate progressives absolutely know the Bushies will steal another election, no matter how improbable.Apocalyptic dread has been part of the American psyche, particularly the left-O-center American psyche, since before I was born. The Bomb was gonna doom us all; then it was the energy crisis; then it was inflation; then it was the Nixon junta. Since then we’ve feared nuclear meltdown, expensive oil, cheap oil, peak oil, the New World Order, Y2K, and the end of the Mayan calendar (not necessarily in that order).

  But what if we’re not doomed?

  What if every Bush-junta attempt to destroy democracy from within proves futile?

  What if we win?

  In the immortal words of Robert Redford in The Candidate, “What do we do now?”

I write this item most years. This year, my first impulse was to simply call for anything but Palin (or Joe the Plumber). But there are other alternate suggestions: Mad Men‘s retro-swank dudes and dudettes. Keith and Rachel. Rachel and Pat. Darcy Burner’s “” T-shirt. Wall-E. A ruined stockbroker. The young Kirk and Spock. The geezer Indiana Jones. And kind reader Eric Scharf suggests, “You gotta give props to anyone industrious enough to fabricate a giant acorn costume.”

…at ungodly predawn hours this past month, schleppin’ to a suburban temp job. Writing hasn’t been among my biggest compulsions upon arriving home. Sorry.

There are still things worth mentioning, to be sure:

• 
  ANDY’S DINER IS SAVED! Well, at least the historic building on Fourth Avenue South, assembled from vintage railroad cars. It now houses a Chinese restaurant, bearing the appropriate title of Orient Express.
• 
  OUR PAL DAVID NEIWERT has done his own Sarah Palin research, direct from Alaska. It confirms just about the worst you’ve heard about her.
• 
  I’VE BEEN SILENT about other election stuff, but someone else has handily provided a Sensible Guide to Voting in Washington.
• 
  A FOOD DELIVERY TRUCK tipped over on a Tacoma highway, spilling 45,000 pounds of chocolate, ice cream, deli meats, and hot dogs. Mmm, the four great tastes that taste great together.

…in certain paid political announcements, we know who the true original Mavericks are–James Garner and Jack Kelly.

Sometimes the Mariners win. Sometimes that perfect song comes on the radio just as you’re about to make your move. Sometimes the bus comes right on time, right when you’ve stepped out for it.

And sometimes the Seattle Times editorial board endorses the better candidate.

…they could get away with appropriating the music of Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne. But now they’re learning a bigger lesson–you don’t mess with Ann and Nancy.

After all the hate-mongering on Wednesday, McCain himself showed up on Thursday evening with a semi-informal, drab sequence of remarks. Some of it was conciliatory and even “friendly.” But the basic branding was still there–more war, more drilling, more giveaways to the rich, 9/11 and POW fetishism, offers of “bipartisan” cooperation with anyone who’ll totally accede to the far-right agenda.

I felt like I was watching a victim of some delusional syndrome such as intermediate senility, occasionally lapsing into lucid human speech before reverting to nonsense.

(NO, this is not age-bashing. The late George Carlin was just a few months younger than Mr. McC., and maintained his wit and sensibility to the end. My mother’s older than Mr. McC., and could undoubtedly out-debate him.)

Just now watching the night’s parade of Repo Men and Repo Women.

Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani: They’re not even trying to convince undecideds, or to promote policy platforms. They’re only repeating the same old brand slogans. Strength. Patriotism. Military fetishism. POW. 9/11. Country. Leadership. Drill, drill, drill. Abortion. The sanctity of (only one kind of) marriage. Anti-intellectualism. Everything wrong these past eight years was them durn libruls’ fault. Daring to be racist. Daring to suck up to the oil companies. War, more war, war forever. The (nonexistent) Saddam/Al Qaida connection. Saint Reagan. Jesus (not quite as venerated as Reagan, but close). Washington DC’s broke and needs fixing, but don’t even think we had anything to do with breaking it.

Now for Sarah Palin.

I do not denigrate Palin for being from Alaska. I live in the city that’s the official jumping-off point for Alaska. It’s a great state. It would be even greater if it didn’t have so many corrupt Republicans running everything.

(And besides, I remember in 1992 when the John Carlsons pooh-poohed Bill Clinton as having been nothing but the “failed governor of a small state.”)

Nor do I denigrate Palin merely for being A Strong Woman.

Nor do I praise Palin merely for being A Strong Woman.

Having lived under the governorship of Dixy Lee Ray, I know that A Strong Woman can be just as capable of graft, cronyism, and regressive ideas as any man.

No, there are plenty of substantive reasons why Palin is a poor choice for vice president.

Just as there are plenty of substantive reasons why today’s John McCain is a poor choice for president.

As for Palin’s speechifying: Perfectly perfunctory by rabid-right standards. She held her own with the better-known demagogues who preceded her tonight. But by the oratorical standards of the party of George W. Bush, I know that ain’t saying much.

This year’s most famous (real) pregnant teen happens to live in a town that’s a homonym for the name of last year’s most famous (fictional) pregnant teen. The result, of course, is a Photoshopped movie poster advertising that quirky comedy hit, Juneau!

I watched part of the Repo Men’s convention tonight on my TV, while my computer was playing the first-season DVDs of Mad Men. As you may know, that’s the HBO-esque drama (actually on AMC) about an ad agency in 1960 that’s so behind the times, it still devises whole major national product campaigns around two-page ads in The Saturday Evening Post.

Like that agency and the Mad(ison Avenue) Men running it, the Republican Party’s retail marketing effort has, for a generation, been about a lifestyle brand image that presumes a target market that’s so different from me, relentlessly pushing emotional buttons I haven’t got.

Note the convention slogan, “Country First.”

In the first half of the last century, “America First” was a slogan of guys like William Randolph Hearst who advocated keeping our butts out of other countries’ business when it didn’t directly affect us. In practical terms, the America Firsters helped delay U.S. involvement in both world wars.

Today’s “Country First” means the opposite. It means war everywhere, war forever, just as long as somebody else’s kids have to fight ’em.

But “Country” could also be construed as implying the rural/exurban, lily-white, never-existed fantasy utopia to which the GOPpers, from Nixon on down, have appealed. A place that’s no more real than the world within a ’50s magazine ad.

Meanwhile, several blogospherians have noted that the most outlandish (and probably false) rumor about Sarah Palin (that she’d faked a pregnancy to hide that of her own teenage daughter) resembled a storyline in the past season of Desperate Housewives. As you may know, that’s the ABC drama set in a refined residential suburb where fantasies of The Good Life violently clash with brutal reality on a regular basis.

I’ll leave it to you to decide which Republican Convention celebrities are more like which Desperate Housewives characters. (To me, Cindy McCain looks like a Bree but acts more like a Gabriele.)

Other thots: Fred Thompson’s speech was all banal as heck, but at least he delivered it professionally. (Though the only Lawn Order star I like is S. Epatha Merkerson, whom I’ll always remember as Reba the Mail Lady on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.)

Same could not be said for George W. Bush’s satellite speech. NBC’s prime-time convention hour included an excerpt from Bush’s speech in D.C., without the applause audio from the convention in St. Paul. It just made this failed-head-of-state seem even clumsier.