"Your Time Is Gonna Come"
"Your Time Is Gonna Come"
Somethin's Happenin' Here...and what it is ain't exactly clear, so let's talk about why Wisconsin's Senate race result was my least favorite. And in The Music Box: The Best Guitar Riff of the '80s!
WHAT’S HAPPENING: The results of the 2022 midterms are still up in the air as the weekend after the election sets in. Democrats over-performed overall, although don’t overlook Republicans’ domination of not only ruby-red Florida, but royal-blue New York. And Georgia, the state that may end up determining control of the Senate yet again, is headed for a December 6 runoff election.
(Senate control is riding on Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, which have yet to be called. If Dem incumbent Mark Kelly, who’s in the lead in Arizona, and Dem incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto, who’s behind by only 800 votes as of this writing, both win, then Georgians are off the hook and Dems win the Senate. A Georgia win would then make it 51-49 instead of 50-50 like it’s been for the last two years.
SIDE NOTE: It’s been TWO WHOLE ENTIRE YEARS since the presidential election and the introduction of Trump’s “Big Lie.” Holy crap.)
It’s tempting to name Georgia’s results as the most unsettling of this election cycle. For folks in the Peach State to have so much trouble deciding between a competent, if unspectacular reverend and the wildly incompetent and morally challenged Herschel Walker is…well, “unsettling” is a bit of an understatement, isn’t it?
(And I say that as someone who holds a special place in my heart for Herschel the football player. I’m an Ohio State fan, but when I was little one of my dad’s really good friends who lived in Georgia sent me a red, silver and black University of Georgia baseball jersey at the height of Herschel Mania, the year he won the Heisman Trophy. I’ve pseudo-rooted for the Dawgs ever since.)
But the outcome of the Wisconsin Senate race this time around is what’s really getting to me the most. I have to admit, I didn’t know that much about the Democrat who was defeated this past week, Mandela Barnes. I knew he was progressive enough for Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution org to endorse him in the primaries (and then obviously in the general election). And each time I’ve seen non-partisan video of him, he seems like an impressive-enough guy.
His website suggests he was fighting for the typical Democratic agenda—stuff like reproductive justice, safeguarding Medicare and Social Security, safeguarding democracy, strong unions, LGBTQIA+ rights, health care, climate change. The first issue listed on his Priorities page, though, is lowering inflation and lowering taxes—favorite Republican causes. Although…his emphasis is on lowering taxes for the middle class, not the wealthy, as Republican tax cuts usually end up prioritizing.
Upon further review, some of the dings against Barnes that may have led to his loss appear to be more about tying him to typical culture-war boogeyman issues like critical race theory and Defund the Police.
After evidence pointed to at least some passive support on Barnes’s part in the past for abolishing ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Reinforcement) and aggressively redirecting police funding, Barnes finally addressed those and other potentially damaging accusations. He released an ad saying—not too super-convincingly, in my opinion—that the accusations of any far-left agenda for his campaign were all “lies.”
It was a move he had to make, since he certainly didn’t want to be aligned with the Defund the Police movement at a time when the public was extra-ouchy about crime. (I still maintain “Defund the Police” is the worst-named political campaign of all time.)
But I don’t think any such ad was going to save Barnes. The New York Times writer and editor Michelle Cottle, whose work I’ve gotten a lot of my information on Barnes from, also pointed to a conservative pundit’s “gotcha” tweet of a video of Barnes saying about the birth of America, in the pundit’s cherry-picked words: “Things were bad. Things were terrible. The founding of this nation? Awful!”
Barnes wasn’t saying the country is awful. Or even that the overall principles behind the founding of our nation were awful. But he was disagreeing with the idea that we should somehow shy away from teaching the history of slavery and American colonization in schools. Before the above quote, Barnes said:
"Imagine being so ashamed of how we got to this place in America that you outlaw teaching it."
Which, I mean, yeah! It’s a wokeishly phrased statement, I suppose. But in the context of what he was actually talking about, which was how the founding of the country relied heavily on slavery, calling the founding of the country awful is awfully accurate, I’d submit.
But voters appear to be tired of hearing it. The first three responses I found to the pundit’s gotcha tweet are telling. The first and third utilize the trusty Republican retort of, “Well if you don’t like it, you can go move somewhere else!”
But the second one is particularly interesting because it focuses on something much more nuanced.
In his caught-on-iPhone speech, Barnes did go on to allude to the same go-to notion many politicians fall back on when it comes to racial justice, be they Black or white, or even Democrat or Republican: that there is “a lot more work to be done” when it comes to race relations in America. He said:
“…we should commit ourselves to doing everything we can do to repair the harm [of slavery], because it still exists today. ...The impacts are felt today and they're going to continue to be felt unless we address it in a meaningful way.”
The tweeter above argues that we’ve already addressed slavery in a meaningful way. And I guess he’s right.
First, we abolished it. (Well, Louisiana voted this week to hold onto slavery for prisoners, while Tennessee, Vermont, Oregon, and even Alabama voted out language in their state constitutions that allowed slavery. So, way to hold the line, there, Louisiana!)
But yeah, we all think slavery was real bad. In many people’s minds, though, like in the above tweeter’s, it’s all been figured out. He moans that “we constantly go over how horrible, morally bankrupt, and flat out wrong” it is.
Stating that slavery’s bad is not the work Barnes thinks still needs to be done, though. And I would argue that we don’t “constantly” address how bad slavery was, anyway. But yes, there are plenty of documentaries and news features and such that talk about slavery and racism being bad.
But Barnes said it’s the harm of slavery that still exists today. Black Americans have it worse than white Americans on the whole. And by a wide margin. We can debate the reasons for that fact all we want, but that is still a fact.
So do we want that to continue to be a fact? Or not? No? Then we need to continue to address it. To ask why this is. And to decide on how we fix it.
WOW. The above tangent was not what I wanted to focus on. Here’s what I really wanted to focus on. Sheesh.
Barnes’s opponent, the victorious incumbent Senator Ron Johnson, consistently runs neck and neck with Ted Cruz as America’s most-reviled Senator. Some of his greatest hits:
He pushed a list of fake Wisconsin electors to Veep Mike Pence when the January 6 fiasco was going down (he disputes that’s what he did, but…);
In his humble opinion, the January 6 rioters were “jovial,” “friendly,” and not really there to overthrow the government, per se. It was mostly a “peaceful protest,” with a few bad apples getting violent. (Now if the mob had been Black Lives Matters folks, he said, that would’ve been a cause for concern.)
His thoughts on Covid remedies: Why not try hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, or mouthwash? (And this was after those methods were proven ineffective. ...Actually I don’t think anyone bothered to prove mouthwash ineffective, it was just assumed.)
He thinks climate change is “bullshit,” and/or caused by sunspots. And hey, all that extra carbon dioxide we’re spewing into the air “gets sucked down by trees and helps the trees grow.” So chill, everybody!
He likes the economic approach called “creative destruction,” where American jobs are shipped overseas so that new jobs can (obviously) be created here in America. He also helpfully notes that “poor people don’t create jobs.”
Despite all those gems and many more, Johnson will be sauntering into his third six-year term as one of Wisconsin’s two representatives in the Senate in January. Poll after poll confirms Wisconsinites don’t even like the guy. So how does someone so gross keep winning?
This is where I really wanted to get to with this piece. I wanted to bare my soul a little bit here and say what my true gut feeling is on why Johnson won, and why Barnes lost.
And hey, I first just wanna say that I love Wisconsin. (“Uh oh, here it comes,” says everybody from Wisconsin.) Such nice people there. So much to like. They have the coolest little music festival ever in Appleton every year called Mile of Music. Their beer is superior. Their cheese is superior. Their Great Lake is Superior…
(Get it? Like, it’s literally called Lake Superior. I prefer Lake Michigan, myself…although Wisconsin owns a whole side of that lake, too!)
But the Midwestern mindset, in my experience, can only take so much change at a time. Change is hard for everybody. But on the spectrum of being set in one’s ways, I have observed—being a proudly born-and-bred Midwesterner myself—that Midwest folk get attached to familiar ways of life as much or more so than any other American demographic.
Add to the equation that they’re conservative—not even in politics, necessarily, just in their general ways of thinking, and of being. (And yes, for a lot of them, in their politics.)
So when life norms are, in their minds, threatened, they get that much more fearful of a change coming that they don’t understand. And when folks get backed into a corner, they tend to make dumb, desperate decisions. Like voting for Ron Johnson.
There is racism in Wisconsin, of course. Like everywhere. Maybe a little more in Wisconsin than in some other states, but, then again maybe not. Either way, there were some Wisconsinites who voted for Ron Johnson because he was the white one. Some did so consciously. But I choose to believe many more did so unconsciously.
Wisconsin’s other senator, Tammy Baldwin, is a Democrat. She’s a woman—the first woman, in fact, Wisconsin ever elected to Congress. And she’s gay, the first openly gay woman to serve in the House and the first gay person ever to serve in the Senate.
So to your average everyday Middle American living in Wisconsin…that’s quite something! They’ve really stepped outside their comfort zone, there! So, that’s good. And I think the majority of Wisconsinites like Baldwin, and are proud of her. I mean, they must be! They’ve been electing her without fail to the House, and then to the Senate, since 1998!
Point being. Mandela Barnes was a very good candidate. But I think he would’ve had to have been a transformational, superstar candidate on the scale of Barack Obama to win this election.
Wisconsin just isn’t quite ready to devote both their Senate seats to people who do not happen to be white men. Whether they’re conscious of it or not.
I’ll tell ya what, though…next time? Maybe next time they’ll find that they just can’t hold their noses tightly enough to vote for someone who betrays their traditional Midwestern values as thoroughly as Ron Johnson does.
I’m tired, I’m hungry, and it’s Friday night. So I’m just gonna give it to you straight.
It’s not “Back in Black.” I don’t even consider that an ‘80s riff anyway.
It’s not “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Lord in Heaven, is it not “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” I am eternally sick of “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” And even if that Slash line could be classified a riff, which it can’t, the Best Guitar Riff of the ‘80s shouldn’t be so damn annoying.
And it’s not even Steve Lukather’s riff in “Beat It.” Even though it is, actually. That’s the best guitar riff of the 1980s.
But for our purposes the Best Guitar Riff of the ‘80s needs to come from a rock band. And it makes sense that the band that unleashed the Best Guitar Riff of the ‘80s modeled themselves after the band that unleashed the best guitar riffs of the Seventies, or of any decade for that matter—Led Zeppelin.
There are about 75 Jimmy Page riffs better than this one. But this one is the Best Guitar Riff of the ‘80s. I give you the first single off Kingdom Come’s self-titled debut album…”Get It On.”
I.
Mean.
Come.
Effin’.
ON, people!
Right??
Yours,
~Dean
P.S. - Every time I read about this year’s Republican gubernatorial candidate from New York who got beat on Tuesday by the state’s incumbent governor, Kathy Hochul, my brain automatically thinks for a split second that it’s about to read about the greatest hard rock band in history (not my personal favorite, but, they’re clearly the best ever).
Does your brain go there, too, when you see the name Lee Zeldin?
P.P.S. - Why is the word gubernatorial? What orifice did we pull that one out of??
P.P.P.S - Oh.