Carl is beginning to get political. If you don’t like that, fine, but you should stop reading. Just remember that this story was written in 2011-2012. The Republican Party and American politics are vastly different now.
I heard from the Tea Party about Carl. Carl isn’t a fiscal conservative. He is apparently a socialist, communist, liberal, or Democrat (take your pick). First things first – in 1987 there was no Tea Party! If somebody had said ‘tea party’ to Carl, it would have been one of his daughters inviting him to an imaginary tea party with their dolls and stuffed animals. Carl would certainly have joined that tea party!
In many ways I found the Tea Party an interesting, if strange, result of a number of separate things. First and foremost, of course, was the really desperate and screwed up financial situation the country was in. We owed trillions of dollars to China and other places, money we had no hope of ever repaying, and had deficits planned as far as the eye can see. This really fucked over the middle class. Their jobs and money went overseas, and there was a lot of pain left. Believe me, I felt that pain, too!
Second, we had a liberal president. Obama beat McCain not because of the strength of his arguments, but because Bush 43 was so incredibly unpopular and could be blamed for the economy and a couple of bad wars. Unfortunately, he radically misread his mandate. He thought people wanted a liberal, when they really wanted anybody but a Republican. Combine that with being black, an incredible number of people didn’t want him. Find yourself a Tea Partier who is white and only has a high school diploma (from what I can see, the vast majority of them, but that’s a separate topic) and get a few drinks in him; the racism comes out! ‘We have to get the nigger out of the White House!’ – unquote.
Carl is a fiscal conservative. He is an old school business Republican, the type of guy who is on the Chamber of Commerce, hates regulation, and isn’t real thrilled with his taxes, but likes a fair bit of what government provides, like cops and roads and bridges, etc. He isn’t all that socially conservative and is willing to work with others. He is smart enough to know that to get things done you will probably need to compromise – which is how you do things in business. This is one of the reasons the Tea Party and conservative base of the Republican Party don’t like him.
Carl is the kind of Republican that can’t understand the Tea Party and can’t figure out how to get them to do anything constructive. Look at John Boehner in Congress and you saw this type of business Republican. He couldn’t control his own party and didn’t understand them. Like a lot of us, he saw them complaining about Obama’s government-run health system and then complaining ‘Leave my Medicare alone!’ – and can only scratch his head at the reasoning.
I received a huge response to recent chapters, about half for the story and about half for the blog. That was about what I expected. Some really interesting responses. Some agreed with me, some disagreed (violently in a few cases), some were in the middle. One really good email (actually quite thoughtful) referred to the Tea Party as Morlocks (nice image there, bonus points for everybody who gets it!)
I did get a warning to stop any discussion of politics, since it will turn my readers off. I also got lots of emails from people who want Carl to go into politics. Anybody want to tell me how to write such a thing without discussing politics or getting political? We have, as Carl the mathematician would say, a mutually exclusive binary set.