Under a headline in the New York Times, "As Democrats See Security Gains in Iraq, Tone Shifts," the lede observes the Democratic Party "trying to shift the focus to the lack of political progress there, and highlighting more domestic concerns like health care and the economy." Foreign prospects up? Try short-selling back stateside. Two more headlines, in coincidence to both the moment's politics and the 2008 general election, mark points that through triangulation instruct where the electorate might be found in one year.
The second announces a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the Salvation Army. Though philanthropy may be a dialect of love's universal language, the 142-year-old charity — aside from its enumerated Christian doctrine — believes the local needy ought be addressed in more than grunts and gestures. So just as Army soldiers in Kiev speak Ukrainian, the Framingham, Massachusetts detachment enforced a prerequisite competency in English. This it qualified: a pair of employees, limited to Spanish, had to learn the language in one year or look elsewhere. They didn't; were fired, then, in 2005. The EEOC sued.
Such news impresses first on the gut, then the intellect. The two employees were immigrants, and in the restrictionist's book good examples of bad, refusing the common tongue a sine qua non of non-assimilation. For the many more of us unwilling to hold the émigré culpable for what is arguably a dysfunction of the postmodern American establishment, the EEOC looks silly. Foreign nationals inimical to modern culture? No, thank you. Charity denied court-affirmed workplace standard? Now you are in another place entirely. Polls substantiate what high value the country places on the ratification of English.
Headline No. 3 comes from the United Kingdom. Briton Toni Vernelli is a broadly affiliated environmentalist radical. She, if you permit, had herself spayed two years after a terminated pregnancy. Vernelli, known for such aphorisms as the one about serving a family hamburgers — "You might as well give them weed killer" — has not yet burnt down orphanages but was proud of her own vivisection for greater good. "Having children," she declared, "is selfish." There are the childless, and then — Ms. Vernelli. Again, impressions are swift and in the heart. The mot juste for it is: weird.
Each headline, traced outward, could converge next November. The former does so pretty directly, inasmuch as Democratic leadership was vilified by a party caucus for letting a Republican bill amendment, precluding similar actions of the EEOC, remain on a bill. The latter's line isn't too sinuous, either. Among those promoting depopulation is Alan Weisman, whose insistence that solutions to supposed ecological crises shouldn't "depend on our untimely demise" is contravened by the title of his bestselling book (The World Without Us) and proposal (one child per familial unit, of an uncomfortable likeness to China's own order). Notices for book club readings of The World Without Us could, as of last week, be found on the Democratic National Committee's website.
If the electorate is repelled, national moods could resemble those of 1993 and 1994, when a gauche Clinton administration gave the body public something laugh about and vote against. Maybe. James Carville, onetime janissary of said house, is on record drawing parallels of 2007-2008 to 1991-1992. Pollsters confirm that the newspapers and wires can still persuade majorities of their readers to think full employment and accelerative economic growth all for nothing if, say, petroleum doesn't carry the same guarantee as manna gathered between Elim and Sinai. But there is some comfort in speculating that leftists in power are also under a floodlight, and it isn't what we prefer to see. Twelve in and two out is as steady as any drive rightward.