- Jonathan Golob
“You know, people get pistol whipped, tied to a post and left to die for saying a thing like that around here.”
“Yeah, I’m aware.”
My provocative statement?
“I actually like Obama.
I’m a little disappointed—and in retrospect I might’ve preferred Hillary—but overall I think Obama’s done well enough, given the circumstances.”
For about a month, I’m working in an emergency room in Southeast Wyoming. I made it about a week and a half before outing myself as one of those damnable liberals.
During W’s presidency, I wasn’t fond of people who blamed everything that went wrong with their lives, and the country, on Bush. It’s one thing to disagree and argue on policy—to grapple over the best way to deal with the myriad of problems our country is facing. It’s destructively lazy to pawn everything wrong on one man. I have about the same patience for this sort of thinking when it’s Obama being blamed.
Wyoming is an interesting State—particularly this part of Wyoming. As I write this, I’m above (perhaps) the world’s largest seam of coal, one of the largest collections of natural gas and stocks of Uranium. The wind blows nearly continuously; from my window, I can see a massive wind farm that is powering my lights, heating my room. I can also occasionally smell a waft of complex organic molecules from a nearby oil refinery.
Most of the people here have tough, body crushing, industrial jobs. I’ve helped pick steel out of quite a few eyeballs already—steel flung off of metal lathes and pipeline being welded. A sizable percentage are from elsewhere, emigrating from rusting industrial towns in the Midwest and Southeast, looking for work.
“He’s a communist…”
“Naw… he’d probably prefer you call him a socialist.”
“… just wants us all to live in his commune.”
“If it’s my commune, you’re all taking me for a ride. For every dollar I pay in federal taxes, I only get about $0.88 back. For every dollar someone in Wyoming sends, you get $1.11 in spending back.”
“Bullshit.”
“Look it up.”
The general impression is that liberals are good at identifying problems—particularly problems in the way other people accomplish useful things. Yeah, yeah, climate change could be terrible. But, what’s the alternative? Sitting in the dark and cold, hungry and unfed—isolated in a little town in middle of a giant plain? Being successful takes more than recognizing something is less than ideal; it requires coming up with a credible alternative. I mention the windmills dotting the plain.
We talk a bit about the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster. It isn’t right, I say, for Don Blankenship [the corrupt, sociopath CEO of Massey Energy] to pontificate in tears days after he refused to replace broken safety equipment days before the preventable accident occurred.
“The bosses have enough damn advantages. Shouldn’t the government stand on the side of people who work for a living?”
“Since when do democrats stand up for working people?”
And you know, they’ve got me there. Aside from (the long deceased) Paul Wellstone, Barbara Mikulski and a handful of fellow liberal democrats, for the most part the contemporary democrats are as pro-corporate as their republican counterparts. It doesn’t have to be this way.
….
“C’mon. Obama is inexperienced? Explain how President Palin could’ve been a good idea?”
“Yeah, picking Palin was poor judgement.”
“Exactly. Would you want to be president? Lord knows, I wouldn’t want to be president. It’s a terrible job, drawing the worst imaginable people.”
“Let me tell you something: If Powell ran, I would’ve voted for him.”
“Me too. Precisely because he refused to run.”
From a conversation starting with warnings about pistol whippings, we ended in a relatively benign place.
“So, is it legal to drain ovarian cysts in this state?”
Hey Dr. G, it’s nice to see your good writing and analytical good sense grace these pages again. Please keep reporting back.
Yeah, it has become a fairly common joke in Wyoming anytime someone says something liberal.
If you’re in rock springs I really feel bad for you. Be careful and don’t do the meth…
I guess I just don’t understand how people can think that Obama’s “done well enough, under the circumstances.” Have the Republicans lowered the bar to such a degree that killing hundreds of civilians with drones and holding suspects indefinitely without trials and invading countries without consulting congress and raiding medicinal marijuana dispensaries and prosecuting more government whistle blowers than in the last 40 years while ignoring the crimes of the previous administration is doing “well enough?”
What would the guy have to do to NOT be doing well enough?
Ha, my sister was doing her ER rotation in Wyoming during the 2008 election…she said that was a bit awkward. Though apparently some of the nurses, when they were sure no one else was listening, admitted to her they were closet liberals.
I can’t help but be glad you’re getting out and about a bit more. The state of panic your simple trip to Bellevue threw you into last year really had me worried.
@4 The best I can come up with, LJM, is do all that W/O any pretty speeches that make it seem like he is a worthwhile person with principles for an hour once every 6 months or so.
gus, one of my favourite diversions when I lived there was convincing a visiting author that Thermopolis was known as “Little Athens,” and that it had a souvlaki stand on every corner. Heh.
Must be in Laramie or Cheyenne, considering you’re in SE Wyoming. My younger brother and his family used to live there.
Yes, they still would prefer to settle their differences with a six-shooter, but I give them credit for not passing their recent bill to nullify same-sex marriage rights, performed in another state.
@ 4,
Thank you. His embrace of torture and his stance that he can execute American citizens anywhere at any time without charges or trial are reasons enough that Bammerz is a miserable failure of a president.
Aaaaaaaand then there’s handing over the carcass of our entire economy to the sadistic psychpaths and greed-crazed, Wall Street kleptomaniacs, resulting in the utter collapse of the former middle class while the super-rich rake in trillions from gang-banging the “Treasury.” Other than that, he’s been great.
Damn, Canuck. You’re terrible.
So, Google tells me Thermopolis is “Wyoming’s Hot Spot” – “Swim, soak or slide into adventure at one of our spas”…calls to mind a bathhouse, so here (obviously) is Bette Midler singing “Fat Stuff” during what she called her 800th Farewell Appearance at the Continental Baths, with Barry Manilow on the piano, 1971:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzwhgNyih…
@Everyone bitching about Obama – shut the fuck up and vote for him. Four years of one of these Republican candidates and we’ll all be really screwed.
Idiots. Read this:
http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/
Happy?
(Oops, the link was to her doing “Marahuana” that same night – here’s “Fat Stuff”, which I love for the banter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2HwloXqo…)
@12
Maybe you should read this:
http://whatinthefuckhasobamadonesofar.co…
Oh, and here’s one more link you should look at.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/cl…
But, hey, they’re only poor foreigners, right? You’ve got an election to win, gosh darn it!
Oh gus, I love her so much, thank you!! My mom had “The Divine Miss M” record back when I was a wee thing, I listened to it all the time. I never actually made it to Thermopolis, but I do like the way you think… 😉
Canuck, me too. I hadn’t realized there was footage taken at these iconic shows. One of the commenters said it best: “now this is the kind of thing YouTube was invented for”.
Please expand on this and turn it into a short story.
@16, you misspelled “nigra”.
You sound like an abused house wife Jon.
I attended an Obama rally in Wyoming at Arena Auditorium. The place was packed. My brother was an usher and shook hands with Obama.
Went to UniWyo for a spell. Two things:
1) Take away the campy shlock, Thermopolis is really pretty. Not much to do there, per se, but it’s pretty.
2) My favorite joke from my time in Wyoming: Why is the wind always blowing in Wyoming? Because Nebraska sucks and Utah blows…
(Geography geeks – yes, South Dakota and Idaho are also interchangeable in that joke…)
ROFL @ “STFU and vote for him.”
Silent treatment, silencing and aggression are common tactics in cults. I am now seeing legacy party affiliations in a similar light.
Aside from the majority political ignorance…Wyoming is beautiful. I like Montana too. This was a great post, btw.
Wow, you went to a middle American red state and announced that you were a pole smoker who likes our half-breed worthless president! You are soooo edgy! The left owns the media and academia but you guys still somehow find someway to be so daring and original. Big ups, bruh!
Wow, you called a half-black half-white guy a “half-breed.” Edgy! Racist, conservative morons own closet homophobia and scientific cluelessness, but you still manage to display mind-numbingly greater levels of absurdity and denial.
@24: If the left owned the media, don’t you think we’d be able to get an actual liberal elected to office?
The fact that you don’t even seem to know what constitutes “the left” is proof that your statement is wrong.
I’ve only ever been to Kemmerer-Diamondville in Wyoming, and the place seemed relatively liberal; there were Obama ’08 and Clinton ’08 signs up all over the place (this was summer 2007). Maybe it’s that Kemmerer is the 8th largest city in the state (pop. ~2651).
Basehead has as much to contribute to complex social discussions as a young earth creationist does to discussions of geology.
@31
Actually, the process will extract either one. Maybe you’re doing oil, in Alberta, fracking is mainly used for natural gas extraction.
@30: You are [—————–THIS———————–] mad.
Also, I don’t believe for a moment that you’re black.