Andy Carpenter

So, the markets are soft … mortgages are a mess … Bush and Rove killed the conservative movement deader than dead … a woman might be president …

Some people are seething about this and they are taking it out on …

Me?

Cool!

I can handle it, even if takes a piece on happiness to inspire you to pour forth your ire in email after email after email.

That’s exactly the response IDE received to my “Happiness” commentary, which ran in this space last Thursday.

That brief item generated a lot of feedback, some of it well thought.  Most of it, however, represented the kind of anger and frustration that’s so prevalent in America today.

Some of the feedback was, however, a tad over the top.

So to those who responded to my thoughts on happiness with threats of violence, I have one more happy thought for you.  Be careful whose life you threaten, and whose ass you want to kick.

He could turn out to be your worst nightmare - a cranky 6’3” 290-pound very liberal Vietnam vet.

That could make the outcome of your violent yearnings to be very much the same as if you played grab-ass with a lesbian biker chick.  Whoops!

Still, I understand why you’re angry, though I don’t empathize with it.

The Last Word

The encouraging news is, that as you can guess, those who would wish me bodily harm were a vast minority among the plethora of responses the “Happiness” piece generated.

I’d like to address some of your responses, but it’s kind of a new deal for me to do that.

You see, my career in daily newspaper-ing taught me that the reader always has the last word.  Always.

The only time I ever violated that tenant was when some KKKers threatened Lynn’s life and mine.  This was when Lynn was in grad school in North Carolina.

The KKK was all over us because I had the temerity to suggest in print how weak a murder defense it would be for the county sheriff’s nephew to claim that he – a white guy – accidentally, through a 2 a.m. mist, at 400 feet, with a hunting rifle mounted with a night scope, fired a shot that exploded into a black guy’s heart

Of course, getting the last word in back then meant demanding that the kooky Klan send its entire klavern by our house so I could engage them in – what one of my drill sergeants once referred to as – wall-to-wall counseling.

So, Enough About Me
Let’s Talk About You
What Do You Think About Me?

I love that joke.  It’s so meta.  But clearly appropriate under the circumstances.

You see, facing multiple deadlines last week, I inadvertently stumbled upon a formula for invoking the ire of neo- and old-time conservatives, libertarians, and people who think that America is built upon a foundation of symbols and rhetoric … and not the strong desire for tolerance.

That formula is to write something that has as part of its structure a reference to a Clinton (preferably Bill or Hillary), a Reagan (preferably not the gay one), a war (preferably the kind where kids don’t die because old guys are too frail to fight), the action in Iraq (preferably not the one we’re mired in), a Romney (preferably the one who can win), a Limbaugh (preferably the one who can keep a wife), fear (preferably not the kind politicians use as an excuse to raise your taxes and erode your freedoms), and happiness (preferably a state in which we all find ourselves).

Man oh man, maxing out on that formula gives many people so much to hate.

As I noted, it generated a ton of response.  Some was even supportive.  But the sheer mass of vitriol was impressive.  Those emails, along with others that deal with financial and economic matters, are why the IDE Unplugged edition was established. It’s a venue through which you and IDE editors can share a conversation… no matter how loud or vociferous it may sometimes get.

So here we go. Some quiet responses to last week’s “Happiness” emails.

First, A Mea Culpa

In my rush to meet the Unplugged deadline last week, I did expose a cultural bias of which I am not proud.

Gary the Ph.D. and Greg each pointed it out.  That is the fact that the Civil War was a righteous one.

I was wrong not to add it to the list.  But until I moved back home to Massachusetts 23 months ago, I had spent 35 years living below the Mason Dixon Line.  In that time I had been indoctrinated to believe that the War for Southern Independence was about state’s rights.

I had forgotten that there was really only one right the states went to war about.  That was the right to own slaves.

Those were slaves such as William Wells Brown (notice the slick State of the Union Speech construction here).  In a 1847 narrative, Brown matter-of-factly described the utter powerlessness of the slave when he wrote about the time he simply went back to bed while the overseer on the farm where he was enslaved whipped his mother.

He could conjure no other physical reaction to the atrocity despite the fact that he could “hear every crack of the whip, every groan and cry of my poor mother.”

So, Greg and Gary were right.  I was wrong … really wrong.

Rapid Response

One of the other things that surprised me last Friday morning was how many rapid-response cut-and-paste lists – chocked full of facts – that allow conservatives to instruct perceived liberals on the folly of their leftist leanings.

And apparently there’s little doubt in certain quarters that I’m a liberal weenie, despite the fact that I worked on the 2002 campaign that elected Maryland’s only GOP governor in the past 44 years.  Excuse me, not worked, but was paid to work (as in cashing $1,750 a week) on the campaign.

Or the fact that back in 1978 I held a paying job at the Republican National Committee.  I even worked for George Bush back then.

But to tell the truth, despite those jobs, I am a screaming liberal.  That fact has never seemed to matter to my good friends, among them a former cabinet-level under Secretary for President Reagan and cabinet-level deputy Secretary under President Bush.

Still, Pete from Michigan sent me a rapid response from the right with the sentiment that I should “get real.”

Among the items on his list was that “under Clinton the CIA and the defense department were gutted by hundreds of billions of dollars, a policy that has had to be reversed to deal with the terrorism he ignored on his watch.”

Thanks for straightening me out there, Pete.

But I was wrong to consider these found-on-the-Internet-so-you-know-they’re-truthful lists to be the sole purview of the right.  The left has theirs, too.  Miles of them.  Of course you know those are nothing more than pinko propaganda and lies.

Mitt Oh Mitt, We Hardly Knew Ye

Sylvia and John were upset because they think I dissed Mitt Romney.  They were brief, and thankfully not profane.

I feel their pain.  It absolutely stinks when the voters speak and you lose.  The last four presidents - numbers 40, 41, 42, and 43 - are proof of that.  They signify that I’ve been getting b**ch slapped on Election Day for the past 28 years.  But I am not angry, just resigned.

Another pro-Mitt writer - Capt. Jim - was apoplectic over the fact that I suggested the Mitt-ster was an elitist.  The good captain gave me enough information so I could find out where he lived.  I mean hell, he gave me his entire CV.  Finding him was no harder than one Google click.

Turns out Jim lives in Utah.  So my guess is that he doesn’t think there is one darn thing that’s elitist about the fact that the man on the street is barred – as in forbidden, as in prohibited – from stepping foot into a Mormon temple.  And don’t get those confused with the tabernacle.

In other words, if you ain’t one, you ain’t getting in.  Boom!  That’s the door slamming in your face.  Can’t find another church in the world that won’t offer you the peace of its sanctuary.

More Mit Mitt

Then there was Paul’s passionate defense of Mitt.

“You call Romney an ‘elitist’ and proclaim yourself expert on what America
hates.  Who the hell do you think you are?” he wrote.

And this, “Romney's farewell speech was the best display of intelligence, leadership and values sacred to America.(sic)since Aleksandr Solzenitsyn(sic) spoke at Harvard's 1978 commencement(sic).  But you wouldn't know anything about it, would you...***hole?”

First, it never ceases to amaze me that most people have little problem spelling or properly punctuating around the word “***hole.”  And by the way, we put the “***” in there so you’ll know what the word is but your eyes won’t be offended by seeing it.  Or maybe because we know you forward these on to your sister who reads them at a public terminal in her convent.

Anyway Paul, I am at Harvard now.  So it’s kind of silly to presume that I "wouldn't know” what’s going on here, including the fact that Solzhenitsyn's speech was certainly one of the very top highlights in recent history to grace Tercentenary Theater’s shady lawn.

And not that I want to be overly picky, but since you brought anal up first, this is how you correctly spell Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn's name.

I Love Libertarians

I used to tell my good, and now late, friend Harry Browne that the dumbest, yet right-est, thing he said during one of his presidential runs at the top of the Libertarian ticket was that doing away with most laws would really lower the crime rate. 

It’s how I would derail some of the philosophical talks we had.

Harry was a true believer, and not one of the “I’m rich enough to in live in Europe or in a highly secure gated community, so let the strongest survive” sub-sect who so often today pass themselves off as Libertarians.

Still, I find modern Libertarians – even the GOPatraians – to be some of the sharpest-minded people in the current struggle to right the American ship.

All I can say to Libertarians is thank you for your well-thought comments.  I think about 80 percent of what you believe is right for this country.  It bugs me that most conservatives won’t give you the time of day.  I can’t figure out why.

Oh yeah, right.  It’s about power … and the right to wield it.

Hell Hath No Fury as That Aimed at the Hell Bent

This is getting long enough. And I’ve hit on all the major complaints about Thursday’s piece.

I must admit, only a couple of the responses actually pissed me off.  I probably shouldn’t even admit that.

But about 10 percent of the responses suggested in some way that via my liberal-leaning 400 or so words on happiness, I am hell bent on destroying America.

My first response to these guys was to treat them like Bill O’Reilly would treat someone with whom he disagreed.  Then I figured why be so classless.

So for those of you who think I – either as a sole agent of change, or as part of some vast liberal conspiracy – want to destroy my country … to defecate on my home … I have but one response:

“Que?”

Finally, Another Mea Culpa

Oh yeah, there’s one other item.  Seems like Rush’s gang didn’t like the way I portrayed his awesome power by suggesting that 299 million Americans don’t have a clue about what he says or thinks.

I was wrong, though I stand by my right to have framed that comment in a purposely inflammatory, propaganda-esque, even Limbaugh-ian manner.

Still, 299 million was incorrect.

I called a pal of mine at one of the Washington DC/Baltimore radio market’s leading conservative stations. 

It’s the one that dropped Rush last year because his ratings s-t-u-n-k.

I learned that outside of local ratings, Rush’s numbers on a national scale are measured by weekly listeners because so many people tune in for only five or 10 minutes.  But there’s general agreement among everyone in radio (who doesn’t work for Rush) that about 13.5 million people tune in each week, not each day.

But I am even willing to yield that it’s the very same 13.5 million people who listen every day, and to the entire show.  Being magnanimous is a liberal trait, by the way.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the population to be about 303.5 million people, or about five percent of the world’s population.

So I should write, when I refer to Rush, that each hour and each day when he broadcasts, there are 290 million people in the U.S. who haven’t the slightest clue about what Rush is saying. 

290,000,001 if you include Rush himself.

Looked at Life from Both Sides Now

So, that’ll wrap things up - my first ever shot at a response to reader response.

So much hate from a single thought about happiness … totally American, I think.  In the end, I am left with one thought.  It’s one that applies to all sides in America’s drive to defend its Democracy … and even some of it democratic ideals.

There's obvious comfort in staying with the herd.  But that also has a way of convincing you, over time, that the entire world is four-legged and hairy.

Viva la difference!

Andy Carpenter

P.S.  To let me know what you thought of today's article, send an e-mail to: feedback@investorsdailyedge.com