The radical centrist party

I truly have not decided whom I am going to vote for. Fortunately it doesn’t matter. I am currently resident in South Dakota; if Bush cannot carry South Dakota he will have achieved an electoral triumph rivalled by George McGovern and Wendell Wilkie.

Having lived in MA for forty years I have come to despise liberals – close experience with the breed does that. One of the virtues of moving to SD is to acquire first hand reasons for despising conservatives.

Gore is familiar – one needs cataracts and and blocked nasal passages to support him. Bush has the advantage of not being known for what he is. If he plays his cards right he will be elected before the public discovers the horrid truth.

Buchanan appeals to prefrontal lobotomy crowd. Nader is a preacher in a secular church – he has all the faults of the liberal without the good sex. The libertarians have a good program for some other species on some other planet.

As you can see I am one of that sizable sector of the electorate that ends up supporting the insurrectionist of the day, be it Anderson, Perot, or McCain. It never does us any good; the insurrectionists fight the good fight and go down in defeat every time. We never tire, however, of holding the bridle of Don Quixote’s horse.

One of the difficulties is that our sector of the electorate is that it is united only in its dislike of the Republican and Democratic establishments. Beyond that we are a congeries of disparate views and issues.

Beyond that there is the difficulty that third parties tend to either start out as or rapidly become extremist parties. The republocrats have divided the center between them, forcing the protest vote to the margins. The solution is for the protest party to capture the center and force the republocrats to the margins. I am working, therefore, to establish the Radical Center party. Our motto (courtesy of Paul Gans) is:

We radical centerists DEMAND a return to today’s values. We violently espouse compromise. We are in favor of forcing people to walk the thin line between reasonable and intelligent. We are RADICAL centerists.

Mothers and Sons

My mother is seriously stricken with CPD (Chronic Pulmonary Disease) which is to say that she is missing most of her breathing capacity. This is ungood. A year ago last January she had a severe bout of pneumonia which ripped out most of her breathing capacity. She, her kin (she has six living brothers and sisters, three daughters, and an errant son), and her doctor were all of the opinion that her demise was imminent. Her kin gathered to help, taking turns staying with her and helping arrange her various affairs. Contrary to received expectations she did not die immediately. However her need for continued medical help increased and she went into a nursing home in late August of last year.

As it happens I am more or less retired and had already planned to move from Massachusetts (that happy land of high living costs and inordinate taxes) to South Dakota (that happy land of low living costs and low taxes). I do not recommend SD to everyone but I have roots here. It was convenient, therefore, for me to move into my mother’s house, particularly since I am an executor of her will, a trustee in her family trust, and am managing her affairs.

I did this last fall and resided here during the winter. The weather by the way cooperated admirably with this plan. Instead of having a typical SD winter with twenty degrees below zero temperatures and howling blizzards we had rather balmy weather with scarcely a trace of snow. There is something very satisfying about enjoying seventy degree February weather in SD whilst reading about blizzards in Boston.

This was all very well but I had a house and affairs back in Concord. I made two extended trips back to MA this spring to sell my house, close out various bits of business, and to rip out roots and lay them out to wither on the sands of time.

A side consequence of all this running about and doing is that my web site, nominally a monthly e-zine, has suffered. The June and July issues haven’t come out yet. I have decided to bring out the August issue first and bring out the June and July issues later. It may seem a bit odd but in due course nobody will notice.

My mother, by the way, continues to do quite well, much to the disconcertment of her doctor and herself. She had no expectation of seeing the year 2000 in, let alone her 86’th birthday in May.

I have acquired a domain name www.varinoma.com. It purports to be the home page of Varinoma Press, a non-existent publisher which publishes a number of non-existent books. It is part of my campaign to collaborate with the web in establishing alternate realities.

The Darwin Awards still haven’t been updated. Have no fear, it will happen. Fans of the mutant letters will be pleased to hear that I have a backlog of letters to post. They should appear in the forthcoming weeks. USW.