Notebook entries, Aug. 2003

Notebook entry, August 17, 2003

The Men From MARs is finished -- or should I say, I'm finished writing it. I threw up my hands and shouted, ENOUGH. Overall, it is not the best of my writing...in fact, I would grade it about a "C" if it was submitted to a class on creative writing -- see the reason below. I think because of the importance of the subject, I will keep it online, but make additions to the essays as I go along. I plan to send a hard copy out to about 50 progressives around the country regardless of their educational knowledge of the evolutionary perspective. For those of you interested in reading the essay, Click Here

Notebook entry, August 5, 2003

I have finished the essay that I have been working on since March 2003. I have trimmed it from 23,000 words down to about 18,000 but it does not quite flow the way I want to. I have changed the title about five or six times and I think the reason for the difficulty is that when I began the essay, I had a different objective in mind for the piece as strictly a political message with no biology included. But, I find that the biological perspective is so embedded in my soul that I can not separate it from anything -- how can you?

The essay is about blue-collar workers and modern politics. I feel this in my bones that this subject will be the major battleground in 2004 and the essay is precisely on target. Therefore, I am even considering putting the essay up in lights within the next few days before the final piece is done. I am in the second edit, and does need more work, but it does make sense. To emphasis the urgency I feel, The New York Times ran an editorial about this very subject. I have placed the article below as a citation.

Nascar's Swinging Voters / The New York Times online edition, August 5th, 2003.
"If you've got to have a gimmick in politics, Senator Bob Graham may have found the next big thing. Mr. Graham, one of a slew of Democrats running for president this year, has spent as much as $500,000 to help underwrite a souped-up Jack Roush pickup truck that has been screaming around some of Nascar's racetracks. After the Bob Graham Ford won a race in Kansas City, his campaign got thousands of dollars in free publicity as TV cameras followed the machine for a full victory lap.

Politicians nowadays are setting their sights on "Nascar dads," as opposed to the oh-so-yesterday "soccer moms." Political consultants have no end of ways to slice and dice the always desirable uncommitted voter. Last time, she was a waitress. This year, he's rooting for Jeff Gordon.

While the emergence of the "Nascar dad" might suggest that women have given up their position as queens of the gender gap, in fact the enormous Nascar audience itself has grown more female in recent years, as well as more middle class and less rural. The fans have a reputation for being fiercely independent, and there is nothing presidential candidates yearn for more fiercely than genuinely independent American voters — ready to swing one way or the other at the drop of an argument, or perhaps a well-timed political pitch. Democrats are speculating that stock car aficionados are the very people whose jobs are in jeopardy in the sluggish Bush economy and whose families have been placed at risk by the administration's military pursuits overseas.

So far, Mr. Graham has been working the Nascar crowd harder than other politicians. Right now, he's doing better at the speedway than in the polls."

I have supplied the link for the ariticle below. The article is copyright, The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/05/opinion/05TUE2.html?th