Ex Omni

McCain and Palin have made “eliminating earmarks” their single solitary economic policy this election season. Of course, earmarks, which amount to 18 billion dollars of federal spending, account for just 0.6% of the budget. Even if Palin and McCain were able to indiscriminately eliminate every earmark, they would still have to drastically increase taxes to get our federal budget under control.

But what’s been most amusing about the McCain/Palin campaign, is their desperate struggle to find any earmarks that are worth cutting. Sarah Palin tried again this week:

“Some of these pet-projects that really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good things like fruit fly research in Paris, France, I kid you not!”

Now, the research Palin is talking about is actually being conducted jointly by scientists in Palier, California and Montpellier, France, neither of which are in Paris. But I’ll forgive Sarah her lapse in Geography.

The research is around agricultural pest control, and reducing the impact of the Olive Fruit Fly, which threatens 39.9M in California. Being an invasive species, the research revolves around finding parasites of Bactrocera oleae, which is not native to California, but which is found in countries like France, where Olive trees are agriculturally important.

Now, the prospect of saving millions of dollars in crops (and thus taxpayer dollars that subsidize those crops), is certainly worth a look at. But how confident are we this research will have a positive effect?

Well, pretty cofident. Similar research performed by the USDA-ARS in the early 90’s on the alfalfa weevil saved American farmers and taxpayers $90 million dollars a year. Work on the silverleaf whitefly in the 90’s led to savings for mostly texan farmers and the US taxpayer of $1 billion dollars a year.

How much for this “pet project” that promises to save around $40 million dollars in farmer and taxpayer dollars? The earmarks tally up to $500 thousand dollars. You do the math.

Research like this, which has kept the GNP up by more than a billion, wouldeven at a tax rate of 1 percent, give the government back at least $10 million in revenue, which seems like a worthwhile investment of around $500 thousand dollars. (Actually I’ll do it for you: that’s an 8,000% return on your investment.)

 

But the inanity of Sarah’s remarks don’t stop there. She entirely scoffed the idea of “fruit fly research”, as if to say that doing research on fruit-flies is somehow ridiculous or “doesn’t make much sense” (in fact, that’s literally what she said).

But Fruit flies are actually one of the most widely used Model organisms in biology, especially in genetic research. Recent work in the University of North Carolina discovered a protein that hinges nerve-functions, a breakthrough discovery in our understanding of Autism. Indeed, the Fruit fly’s importance and prevalence as a Model organism is perhaps second to none other than the lab mouse.

That Sarah Palin is unaware of Drosophila’s importance to biology research, is frightening. That she would mock advances in science that have brought us to the prosperity and quality of life we enjoy today, is even more frightening still, especially when one considers Palin’s already tenuous relationship with science, including her support for teaching Creationism in schools, and her recent statement that she would not attribute any Global Warming to man-made activities, a radical position even the most conservative of environmental scientists would not stand behind.

While in the 90’s, America led the world in scientific advances, and thus led the world in a booming economy, under the anti-Science administration of Bush, we have cut promising research programs and legally opposed promising new fields of research. Imagine where we might be today if programs like the work on the silverleaf whitefly, which has been saving taxpayers and farmers a billion dollars a year ever since, had been properly funded since Bush’s inauguration?

 

But it’s not just the need to invest in agricultural or medical research that will face the next president, an understanding of the vital importance of scientific research to the prospects of our energy independence, will be of utmost importance to the next president. Our next administration will need a clear understanding of science, and its importance in our modern world. This clear understanding is something Sarah Palin entirely lacks any semblance of.

 

For more information on the important research Sarah Palin mocked this week, see the USDA Agricultural Research Service: http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/apr01/world0401.htm

 

At the opening months of the presidential primaries, a movement was stirring. The cult of Obama was rousing, inspired by moving speeches, uplifting sentiment, and an optimistic rhetoric calling America to unity and progress.

 

The feeling was tangible, to some, like myself, it was a bit noxious.

 

To this jaded cynic, hope and optimism was naivety and gullibility. Where others saw unity of purpose, I saw credulous obsession. The constant chanting of “change”, with less focus on what that change entails, and a chorus of “yes we can”, stripped from the content of its speech, to a bare carapace emptied of meaning and repeated ad nauseum, did not win me over.

 

Throughout the campaign, this sentiment has started to fade. The base has come down from its high, and the calls to unity are few and further between. While attending an Obama rally, a speaker pressed “we can’t take four more years of the same”, to which a jaded Obama supporter yelled out “yes we can!” in reply, to the laughter of the crowd around. After the economic downturn of September, a sinking realization that had already been bubbling over began to spew from the pot and into the flames of pessimism and doubt.

 

 

Now, something else is stirring. This time, it’s not hope and optimism. It’s not unity and idealism. It’s not faith, and it’s not love.

 

Over the past month, an intense brewing of anger, the vitriolic shouts of slander, the froth and scum of festering hatred, has risen above the breakers, flooding over the floodgates, and filling the streets like stormwaters rising from sewer drains.

 

“Obama’s a terrorist, don’t you know that?”

 

“Socialists! Communist! Terrorists!”

 

“Obama’s a muslim and a terrorist!”

 

“Commie faggots!”

 

The words spill forth from chiseled lips, the sweaty stubble of sun-chipped faces, hardened white men streaming along in line, the same shouts, the same obscene gestures and hateful stares.

 

“You should die!”

 

 

And from the podium in the center of the rally, the same rhetoric is heard “Who is the real Barack Obama?”

 

“A terrorist!”

 

The lips of vice presidential candidates spill forth incitements to hatred. “He had launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist!”

 

The words ring out across the battleground states. North Carolina. 

 

“Domestic terrorist”

 

Virginia.

 

“Terrorist”

 

Pennsylvania.

 

“Palling around with terrorists”

 

“I like reading their signs, I like hearing the message they’re sending back to me.”

 

The signs are crudely drawn. Waved above the heads of the crowd. The shadows of their hand drawn signs flicker as they wave along the crowd, like the long shadows of burning crosses.

 

“Obama Bin Lyin!”, the declare. Logos of the opposing campaign are adorned with communist insignia. The red scare is called back to full effect, compounded with the hatred and intolerance of “the other,” be it muslim, black, or liberal.

 

 

“I’m mad! I’m really mad! The socialists are taking over our country!”

 

The crowd erupts in cheers. A standing ovation. The anger permeates the entire crowd. Mad. Angry. Shouting. Raucous applause fills the hall.

 

“We are mad!”

 

The crowd cheers as the man shakes his hand, he thrusts his finger forward as he shouts, his body convulsing forward as he bellows from the bottom of his lungs.

 

“Go get ‘em!”

 

The crowd erupts again.

 

A smile snakes across the candidate’s face. He turns around at the crowd. Shouting, chanting together in their anger. He smiles and waves. They cheer.

 

“Mad.”

 

“Mad!”

 

The shouts form into a chant of “U.S.A!”, fists pumping in the air in chorus with the three syllables. Anger is patriotism. Hatred is patriotism.

 

“I must say, that gentleman is right.”

 

The white-haired presidential candidate bellows along in chorus “You’re angry and I’m angry too!”

 

Together, incited by the political candidate at the podium, their collective conscious tars and feathers a collective effigy, a Jim Crow, dressed in a madrassa and donning a towel wrapped about his head.

 

The crowd shouts, they boo, they scream “Nigger” at a black sound woman covering the rally. 

 

 

The devout reverend stands at the podium before the candidate enters, and leads in prayer. “I pray, Lord … because there are millions of people praying to their God, whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah–that [McCain's] opponent wins. They are going to think they’re god is bigger than you if that happens.”

 

 

The racial hatred we’ve imagined for years had faded, that we hoped and prayed had been abandoned, that we naively imagined was confined to the poor states, the rural counties, the uneducated few in remote farms where the light of the civil liberties movement had never shown through the darkness. But this hatred is alive and kicking, and not in the deep south, but in Pennsylvania, in Ohio.

 

“If he wins, the blacks will take over.”

 

“He’s not a Christian, this is a Christian nation, what is our country going to end up like?”

 

“When you got a negro running for president he ain’t a first stringer, he’s definitely a second stringer.”

 

The old and the young alike spill the caustic rhetoric. The fear and hatred.

 

“He seems like he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing to be honest with you, and I believe Palin, she’s filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she’s going to bring honesty and integrity to the white house.”

 

 

“He’s related to a known terrorist”

 

“Bomb Obama!”

 

“He is friends with a terrorist”

 

“He must support terrorists. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. And that, to me, is Obama.”

 

“Just the whole Muslim thing and everything I mean, a lot of people have forgotten about 9/11, you know, I don’t know it’s just a little, kinda, unnerving.”

 

“Obama and his wife, I am concerned they may be anti-white, that he might hide that.”

 

 

My heart sinks, the barometer in my chest matching the clouds of hatred billow in the skies. The remnants of a shameful 20th century tearing apart the last shreds of newborn innocence in the 21st.

 

 

“Off with his head!”

 

When will it stop? When will we move on? When will America redeem itself?

 

“Traitor!”

 

Who will stop it? Who will stand up to speak against the hatred? When will the politicians inciting these crowds to violence awaken? When will they look and see what they have wrought?

 

“Kill him!”

 

 

I open my ears.

 

And I wish I couldn’t hear.