>Yes, I don't know why there has been so much discussion and even puzzlement
>about Sanders and his "socialism." He's an old story and everyone knows
>Vermont is close to Canada and so long as he remains a rare bird in American
>politics, he is regarded as a harmless and even exotic curiousity.
*nod* That's it exactly. I was actually surprised to tune in to the list after being on no-mail to read you dewds going on about Sanders like this is anything new. And yeah, Vermont is a mixed bag. People like my mother and former stepfather move there and dig the leftish counter-culturish vibe but get enough yuppiedom -- and it's all cast as, not the People's Republic of Vermont, but as the grand tradition of the town square, freedom of speech, good old patriotic love of the myth of u.s. colonial roots when men were men and sheep were scared. heh. There are some who move out there, like people move to urban areas and gentrify, who love the rural charm, but end up wanting so much modernized that they undermine what they loved about the place to begin with. (Beetlejuice, a film sort of about that, was filmed just a few month up the mountain from where my mother lived at the time.) There are other, old time rural Vermonters, cataloged in a fictional book, title of which completely escapes me, who are much like the Appalachian poor -- and the target of genocidal eugenics attacks early in the 20th century, in the classic pattern: the white middle class saw its birth rate declining but saw the po' peeps fucking like rabbits -- the degenerates, drunkards, drug addicts, and layabouts ('coz they lived a task-oriented rural life, not that of the time-oriented industrial life). It's all, fascinatingly, documented here: http://www.uvm.edu/~eugenics/
it's an excellent in-depth look at what Angela M (used to subscribe to LOB(tm)) calls racialization
I'd say the same holds for the socialist mayor of Ithaca. I've forgotten his name. He was pretty harmless, too. But Ithacans, which has similar mix as described above, has enough people who aren't afraid of the word socialist and as long as they're not doing anything too outlandish....
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