Wednesday, October 05, 2011

There were scads of new people at last night's Otto's get-together. Two of them turned out to be a couple who had been in New York with the "Occupy Wall Street" mob getting arrested on Brooklyn Bridge. The guy was infuriated that I kept snickering at his righteous difference-making revolutionary status; apparently it makes up for his nowhere non-union job with the university. Funny thing is, he's being forced to work part-time because he won't join the union, and somehow that's the fault of The Man instead of the Teamsters. Real sense of cognitive dissonance there.

He's pissed about Obama too, and kept going on about not wanting "the lesser of two evils", and was yammering about how the Obamabots were trying to take over the Wall Street neo-commie campaign. Towards the end of the night, I said something about how I was a firm believer in the least of presented evils. One of the other new people asked in anticipatory horror who I'd vote for, and I admitted as how I'm still looking at Rick Perry. Apparently the WIC thing is a big to-do in Democratic circles. I got dragged into the discussion, but at the end I pointed out that in conservative new media, people are much more agitated about Green corporate welfare like Solyndra than actual welfare scamming, O'Keefe showboating about ACORN and similar organizations aside.

I should be more sympathetic to Joe Protester, because I had a rough late Nineties stuck in nowhere jobs, and I was pretty pissed and radical (for me, at least) about it. But the sympathy bleeds away when you start rambling starry-eyed about the wonderful "non-profit, non-profit" farming communes in Burlington, VT and how they give food away to the homeless and spend their free time taking care of the elderly and blah, blah, anarcho-commie blah. His wife/girlfriend was pretty quiet, and seemed to have a grad-student job with the Agriculture College with prospects.

The rest of the new people were law-clerk buddies of a friend of a friend. Wasn't able to talk much with them, I hate our usual table at Otto's, it's an echoing, exposed, cramped pen of a booth. You can't hear what somebody's saying three or four people over unless they're yelling across the table like Joe Protester.

2 comments:

which_chick said...

I'm politically underinformed. What's the WIC thing? (I know what WIC is, am not sure how this relates to Mr. Perry.) HALP?

Mitch H. said...

I don't know either, apparently she had read or heard a bunch of talk grousing about the welfare & food stamps burden, on the lines of the old "welfare queen with Cadillac" wheeze, and something about reforms to WIC. We ended up arguing about the social problems apparent among the welfare crowd, and I was complaining that the Clinton-era welfare reforms were being dismantled, then I went on to say that this was at best a tertiary concern in the circles on the Right that I travel in. My friend the right-libertarian Wiccan psychiatric social worker had been telling her usual horror stories about her socially hopeless clients, especially the drug-and-alcohol-abuse clients.

It didn't really have anything to do with Perry, that was a separate discussion, ie, "so who do you think is going to fix things", and I allowed as I was still sort of looking at Perry as the best of an indifferent lot.