Trick or Treat!
I ran across an enticing note in a Digby column yesterday regarding a revolt of educated conservatives in a major suburb. It being sourced in Bellevue brought it all back home. I was delighted to find the original was an article in the Times (that's NYT) by NW local. I clipped and saved both, as potential material for post.
What originally grabbed me, aside from local connection, was the reality that there probably are more than a few folks with science/technology background throughout the country who tended to feel that voting their interests in the past meant necessarily voting republican. Hell, my record has a blemish or two on it also, from a time when an over-idealized concept of what a free market meant and an embarrassing naivete about the "ethics" of the corporate world and bottom-line mentality had me blind. It is encouraging to think they too may be beginning to see the light even if there is still a somewhat narcissistic rather than community emphasis. And publicity via NYT has to help in spreading the idea that maybe there are alternatives to those votes that could be more in line with their education and work practice.
But before I could get around to posting tonight, here came that topic again, so I will now be posting a post about a post about a newspaper article, each in my opinion adding interesting value. Now, hmm, how would I add further value? I guess only in the sense of setting up and with proper panache working the catapult.
With apologies, to you and Neiwert source both, I am featuring entire post. It is too much of a piece to be well-served by some arbitrary parsing on my part. And do check out at least the Digby and NYT full texts.
The New York Times' Jodi Kantor has a profile of Bellevue voters and the race between Darcy Burner and Dave Reichert today that is remarkably tuned in:
"I am a Republican and have traditionally voted that way," Tony Schuler, an operations services manager at Microsoft with a Harvard M.B.A., said as he sat with his wife, Deanna, in their home above Lake Sammamish. But Mr. Schuler abhors what he sees as a new Republican habit of meddling in private affairs.
"The Schiavo case. Tapping people without a warrant. Whether or not people are gay," he said. "Let people be free! It's not government's job to interfere with those things."
In Bellevue, the professional is political. Rather than religion or culture, what unites the diverse population -- a quarter of residents are foreign born -- are the values of their workplaces: technological innovation, accuracy, efficiency.
And this year, one issue incenses them above all others: restrictions on embryonic stem cell research.
It is a matter of concern across the country, even across parties. But for many engineers and their ilk, restriction of stem cell research is what gay marriage is to conservative Christians, a phenomenon so counter to their basic values that they cannot vote for any candidate who supports it. After all, for Bellevue's professionals, science is not only a means of creating wealth but also an idealistic pursuit, the most promising way they know of improving the human condition."
For hundreds of years, science has had its own jurisprudence over the truth. It's called peer review, and it works pretty well," said Mr. Mattison, whose father had Alzheimer's and his uncle Parkinson's disease. "I'm outraged that a mere politician would interpret science for me."
As Digby says:
The Republicans and the Christian Right are leading America on a backward march into the Dark Ages --- and that is stepping on our dreams. As a culture, we have always been idealistic about progress and inspired by new discoveries to improve the lot of the human race. We're about invention and reinvention. It's one of our best qualities.
These people are telling us that those days are over. We have to depend upon brute force, superstition and ancient revelation. Science is dangerous. Art is frightening. Education must be strictly circumscribed so that children aren't exposed to ideas that might lead them astray.
It isn't just suburbanites who recognize what's happening to the Republican Party -- it's true of farmers and small businessmen in rural areas as well. And the abuse of science by religious fanatics throughout the "conservative movement", and most of all within the ranks of the Bush administration, is the kind of thing that will shake them out.
Still, in a place like Bellevue -- full of engineers and technology folks -- Reichert's recent stumbles on global warming (he says he's not so sure that it's being caused by human activity) only make him seem a captive of the fundamentalists.
And then there's been his waffling and posturing on stem-cell research, despite his claims to "maverickdom" on the issue. Goldy, as always, has the scoop.
My first few years in the Seattle area I spent as news editor of the old Bellevue Journal American (the paper didn't pay enough for me to afford to live there) and my most recent book, Strawberry Days, is about the early history of Bellevue and the roots of its suburban transformation. I continued to work on the Eastside up through 2000, and my wife worked there until this month. Many of my friends live there, and a chunk of my social network is based on the Eastside.
Much of Bellevue's modern reimagining, as I detailed in my book, was based on a whites-only vision of suburban life, so in between its incorporation in 1952 and the mid-1980s, it tended to be a white-flight kind of community with well-funded schools, neatly tended cul-de-sacs, and a real racial homogeneity. But the emergence of the technology industry on the Eastside made it no longer the place people commuted from, but rather one that people commuted to. And the resulting orientation of the area's growth has meant that many, many more minorities (particularly Asian and South Asian) now call it home. More importantly, many of them are well-educated and have a view of science that reflects it.
One of the things a strong Democratic showing in the coming elections could bring about is a panicked response by the "conservative movement," which I think will drive them further to the right in search of their base; further into the arms of the religious right and their self-imposed faith-based ignorance. In which case Digby's right: this could effect the long-term identification of the common-sense segment of the voting population with Democrats.
What originally grabbed me, aside from local connection, was the reality that there probably are more than a few folks with science/technology background throughout the country who tended to feel that voting their interests in the past meant necessarily voting republican. Hell, my record has a blemish or two on it also, from a time when an over-idealized concept of what a free market meant and an embarrassing naivete about the "ethics" of the corporate world and bottom-line mentality had me blind. It is encouraging to think they too may be beginning to see the light even if there is still a somewhat narcissistic rather than community emphasis. And publicity via NYT has to help in spreading the idea that maybe there are alternatives to those votes that could be more in line with their education and work practice.
But before I could get around to posting tonight, here came that topic again, so I will now be posting a post about a post about a newspaper article, each in my opinion adding interesting value. Now, hmm, how would I add further value? I guess only in the sense of setting up and with proper panache working the catapult.
With apologies, to you and Neiwert source both, I am featuring entire post. It is too much of a piece to be well-served by some arbitrary parsing on my part. And do check out at least the Digby and NYT full texts.
The New York Times' Jodi Kantor has a profile of Bellevue voters and the race between Darcy Burner and Dave Reichert today that is remarkably tuned in:
"I am a Republican and have traditionally voted that way," Tony Schuler, an operations services manager at Microsoft with a Harvard M.B.A., said as he sat with his wife, Deanna, in their home above Lake Sammamish. But Mr. Schuler abhors what he sees as a new Republican habit of meddling in private affairs.
"The Schiavo case. Tapping people without a warrant. Whether or not people are gay," he said. "Let people be free! It's not government's job to interfere with those things."
In Bellevue, the professional is political. Rather than religion or culture, what unites the diverse population -- a quarter of residents are foreign born -- are the values of their workplaces: technological innovation, accuracy, efficiency.
And this year, one issue incenses them above all others: restrictions on embryonic stem cell research.
It is a matter of concern across the country, even across parties. But for many engineers and their ilk, restriction of stem cell research is what gay marriage is to conservative Christians, a phenomenon so counter to their basic values that they cannot vote for any candidate who supports it. After all, for Bellevue's professionals, science is not only a means of creating wealth but also an idealistic pursuit, the most promising way they know of improving the human condition."
For hundreds of years, science has had its own jurisprudence over the truth. It's called peer review, and it works pretty well," said Mr. Mattison, whose father had Alzheimer's and his uncle Parkinson's disease. "I'm outraged that a mere politician would interpret science for me."
As Digby says:
The Republicans and the Christian Right are leading America on a backward march into the Dark Ages --- and that is stepping on our dreams. As a culture, we have always been idealistic about progress and inspired by new discoveries to improve the lot of the human race. We're about invention and reinvention. It's one of our best qualities.
These people are telling us that those days are over. We have to depend upon brute force, superstition and ancient revelation. Science is dangerous. Art is frightening. Education must be strictly circumscribed so that children aren't exposed to ideas that might lead them astray.
It isn't just suburbanites who recognize what's happening to the Republican Party -- it's true of farmers and small businessmen in rural areas as well. And the abuse of science by religious fanatics throughout the "conservative movement", and most of all within the ranks of the Bush administration, is the kind of thing that will shake them out.
Still, in a place like Bellevue -- full of engineers and technology folks -- Reichert's recent stumbles on global warming (he says he's not so sure that it's being caused by human activity) only make him seem a captive of the fundamentalists.
And then there's been his waffling and posturing on stem-cell research, despite his claims to "maverickdom" on the issue. Goldy, as always, has the scoop.
My first few years in the Seattle area I spent as news editor of the old Bellevue Journal American (the paper didn't pay enough for me to afford to live there) and my most recent book, Strawberry Days, is about the early history of Bellevue and the roots of its suburban transformation. I continued to work on the Eastside up through 2000, and my wife worked there until this month. Many of my friends live there, and a chunk of my social network is based on the Eastside.
Much of Bellevue's modern reimagining, as I detailed in my book, was based on a whites-only vision of suburban life, so in between its incorporation in 1952 and the mid-1980s, it tended to be a white-flight kind of community with well-funded schools, neatly tended cul-de-sacs, and a real racial homogeneity. But the emergence of the technology industry on the Eastside made it no longer the place people commuted from, but rather one that people commuted to. And the resulting orientation of the area's growth has meant that many, many more minorities (particularly Asian and South Asian) now call it home. More importantly, many of them are well-educated and have a view of science that reflects it.
One of the things a strong Democratic showing in the coming elections could bring about is a panicked response by the "conservative movement," which I think will drive them further to the right in search of their base; further into the arms of the religious right and their self-imposed faith-based ignorance. In which case Digby's right: this could effect the long-term identification of the common-sense segment of the voting population with Democrats.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 9:55 PM
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