Jackhammer days

"It's better to be holding the gun than to be the one running from the gunman!"--Ozark

A couple of days ago we rented a big dumpster on wheels to collect waste from our home renovations.  We put in a big pile of dirt from the back yard where we'd been dumping it from the basement.  Some of it was frozen--the first dirt got covered with a layer of snow, which got covered by new dirt--so John had to use his jackhammer on it!

When I first saw the dumpster, I thought, "We'll never fill that!"  But we did fill it in two days!  Besides that dirt pile, we put in some mortar and brick fragments from the former chimney. Then yesterday, we toted some more mud from the basement straight to the dumpster.  As we progressed, the mud got wetter and wetter, and Moira and I had to put our filthy coats in the washing machine afterward!  Oh well, it's the least we can do considering how hard John's been working at it.

Yes, I am depressed about the British election.  But I can't help feeling that even if Labour had come out squarely for leaving the EU or squarely for remaining, or had been led by a more "electable" leader than Jeremy Corbyn, they'd still have lost.  I felt the same way after the 1992 election.  The bottom fell out of John Major's government with the currency crisis four months later (if only it had happened four months earlier!), but the next election only happened after Tony Blair had taken over.  

New Labour embodied an avoidable sellout:  if they'd been led by Stalin they'd still have won in 1997.  (Beware the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy.) I worry that history will repeat itself.  But before you swallow the electability myth, consider the popular vote figures.  Corbyn in 2017 got a share just three points lower than Blair in 1997, and not much different from Blair in 2001.  Corbyn in 2019 got just three points less than Blair in 2005, and a somewhat higher share than Brown in 2010 and Mandelson in 2015.  But the earlier elections had higher Liberal Democrat and lower Conservative shares.

I'm also reminded of the 1972 election when the working class chose Nixon over McGovern, leading the Democrats to embrace the electability myth and introduce super delegates.  Again I doubt that any other Democrat could have won.  At the risk of seeming elitist, I'd have to blame the voters themselves!  And once again I'm blaming the knee-jerk blue-collar Brexiteers, who've made the wrong choice for the wrong reasons, and are likely to regret their choice pretty soon (as with 1972!). And don't forget the pro-EU Conservatives who held their nose and put party loyalty first.

As for the mainstream press' anti-Corbyn bias, some people have said, "But the press has always been against Labour." True, and over the last century that's made the difference more often than not.  And one last point:  things would have been different if the Liberal Democrats had agreed to install a caretaker government under Corbyn a few months ago, but for Jo Swinson keeping Corbyn out of power was a higher priority than preventing Brexit. (As it was for all too many voters.)

Finished the second season of Ozark last night. (My favourite character's Ruth.) One thing that bugs me about Netflix is that they'll move you to the next episode only 15 seconds after the previous episode's closing credits start, so I didn't have time to read them until the very last episode.  I noticed that the redneck patriarch and the cartel lawyer were played by Peter Mullan and Janet McTeer, both British actors!