My recent political introspection started as far back as the 2002 elections. I asked some friends of the family who are in politics why rural Colorado is so consistently aligned with Republican leaders in spite of policies which favor big corporations and the super-rich -- most of rural Colorado would not benefit personally from those policies. Behind that question was a hope of understanding why and where my values differ from those of my conservative relatives.
On Friday, June 10th Terry Gross interviewed Thomas Frank who has written a book entitled: What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Frank asks the same question in his own way. "Why has the conservative movement won over so many working Americans when the movement's policies are just making the rich even richer?" In a separate interview from the same program, Terry also put the question to self-described conservative P.J. O'Rourke. Between the two of them I've finally got satisfying answers to my question.
According to Frank, Republican intelligentsia have redefined social class by creating what Frank calls "the authenticity divide." The class stereotypes have been shifted from an economic divide between the rich and poor, to a social divide between the authentic salt-of-the-earth types and the liberal elite. Paraphrased:
On the one hand are the average, salt-of-the-earth, blue collar Americans, who live in the heartland, the grassroots people, middle America -- people who have authenticity, who aren't ashamed of who they are, who work with their hands, they're humble, god-fearing, patriotic, and hard-working.
The others are effete, uprooted, driven from fad to fad, they tend to have very pretentious college degrees and funny little affected pets, they drink lattes and French wine.
Frank claims the Republican leaders have positioned themselves as the defenders of these authentic, small town folk against the snooty city slickers. He exaggerates the stereotypes in order to cast the Republican intelligentsia as manipulators. Nevertheless, he's on to something.
My question assumed economic class lines. Republican policies favor big corporations and the super-rich. Rural Coloradans by and large are neither, yet support the Republican Party. That is only a paradox because I assumed it was economic divisions that mattered. Separating the classes along non-economic lines weakens the paradox implicit in both Frank's and my questions.
O'Rourke, who describes himself as very conservative, had different answers. Again paraphrased:
While it may be morally right for us to support the poor and the elderly, it is inappropriate for the Government to force us to do so by levying taxes with an implied threat of force if you fail to pay those taxes. Average people assume government will abuse its power. They believe that Democrats will increase government more than Republicans will -- there's more power to abuse if Democrats have their way.
Now I think I understand. Frank has revealed incorrect assumptions in my question. Then O'Rourke basically answered the question I should have been asking. My conservative relatives and I are equally concerned about government power and corruption. I just happen to be especially appalled by the the Bush administration's abuse of power.
Hey Tim, use the Find command.
While pointing to Joel's excellent discussion about the API war, Tim asked why we don't have full text search close at hand
We’ve had good full-text search technology since the Seventies, and in the last ten years more or less everybody has become a regular user of full-text search. Why isn’t there good built-in full-text desktop search available right now today on both OS X and Windows, out of the box?
Tim, I know you're using OS X:
1. Type Command-Tab until you get to the finder
2. Type Command-F.
Search for items whose Content includes your search string.
Update: then there's the part about indexed full-text search. In the context of Joel's piece I can't help but restate Tim's point: one particular web application is insanely more useable for search than the most usable OS on the planet. Announcer: "Those richUIs are looking a little exhausted as the webapps score one more."
I'm stewing on an JavaScript idea. I'm short on tinkering time, so I haven't built an example. Maybe it's a job for the lazy web. ;-)
How about stripping all of the navigation clutter out of a web page and using JavaScript to insert it for web browsers. Instead of just extracting a pullquote or adding paragraph anchors, add all but the most essential navigation via JavaScript. It would be a more extreme separation of form from content. Give the Googlebot and its colleagues only the relevant content in the page and none of the tangential navigation.
I'd also want to make use of
The JavaScript code could extract data from the link tags to produce content-related navigation in addition to the common header and sidebar.
A number of things have inspired this idea. Simon has been pushing out some interesting JavaScript goodies lately, and I have my own experiments with a JavaScript animation language in SVG. But the clincher for me was a masterful piece of JavaScript that I bloghopped to a few weeks back amid the purple-link, plink buzz. Unfortunately I failed to bookmark it or blog it or copy and paste it. Surprisingly I cannot find my way back to it via Google, nor by retracing my footsteps through comments in various blogs.
I'm left describing it in words. Seems to be a theme today: words without examples. Sigh.
It was a page of latinesque gibberish, if I remember correctly, with light grey pilcrow marks at the end of each paragraph. Nothing notable at first glance. But then a small UFO enters the page and bee-lines it to a position just above the first pilcrow on the page. There's a small shadow of the UFO which creates the sense of depth. Once in position, a beam extends from the UFO to the ground and the pilcrow mark floats up within the beam into the UFO. Then the UFO bee-lines it to it's next abduction victim.
I glanced briefly over the source and it was all done in JavaScript. A really fun piece of work. How I wish I'd bookmarked it. How I wish I could find my way back to it. If you saw it too and know how to get back to it, please speak up in the comments below.
Update: Hoorah! Simon provided the link in the comments. Thanks, Simon. the plink abductor
The search itself exposed one of the other sources of inspiration. I'm tired of landing on sights because they happen to mention one of my search terms in their side bar but nothing in their content is related to my search. There's just enough in the Google snippet to lure me to click, but only disappointment to be found when I get there.
There's a fun way that the search engines and web practices are growing symbiotically. Replacing tables and dot.gif image tags with CSS leads to more clean and perhaps even meaningful markup without loosing beautiful designs. Is this idea a useful extension of that idea? Maybe I'll have to actually tinker with it before I can get a good answer to that question.