Chewing my cabbage twice

We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year, running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears… Pink Floyd “Wish You Were Here”

Have you ever got on a topic, and seemed unable to get away from it? This was frequently the case, according to Mark Twain, in the South following the Civil War. Everything, no matter how seemingly remote the subject, always led back to the war somehow. On one occasion, a friend made a bet with Twain that he couldn’t introduce a topic that wouldn’t get back to the war in less that thirty minutes. As it was at night, and there was a brilliant full moon out, Twain put two and two together and surmised that no topic could be farther from the war than the moon, whereupon he commented on the beauty of the scene that the full moon produced. “Bless your heart, honey child,” the hostess at the gathering said immediately, “yes, that is some moon, but it ain’t nothing like the moons we had befo’ the wa’!”

I am beginning to feel that way about the Governor’s race this year. Everything seems to lead me back to it, no matter how I try to find something else to write about. A couple of columns back, I speculated that there would probably be a runoff for both the Democratic and Republican primaries. Turned out I may have spoken too soon, at least where the Republicans are concerned. Of course, this may be turn out to be true of the Democrats, as well, but more about them later.

There used to be a tradition in Pike County, especially concerning the Board of Education races: If an incumbent found himself in trouble with the voters, so that a single strong candidate might replace him, that incumbent, apt as not, would employ a unique strategy. He would induce a friend to enter the race along with any serious candidate for the position, thus ensuring that the anti-incumbent vote would be split up, and making it less likely that he would lose his seat.

This may or may not have been a strategy that GOP incumbent Ernie Fletcher and opponent Billy Harper came up with, but really, it couldn’t be working out better for the Governor if they had. In an opinion poll commissioned by WHAS of Louisville, and which can be found on their web site, WWW.whas.com, Fletcher has forty-six percent of the prospective vote, challenger Anne Northup has thirty-four percent, and the alleged spoiler, candidate Billy has fourteen percent, or just enough of the anti-incumbent vote to keep Ernie not only on the ballot this fall, but out of a runoff this spring. And with only five percent undecided, it looks like Ernie may be home free.

On the Democratic side, not much has changed, except that the field became smaller by one candidate this week. Contender Jonathon Miller read the writing on the wall, and did a Lundsford by bailing out of the contest. His reasoning for abandoning his campaign was that by staying in, he could give the race to a candidate that would be unelectable this fall. No name was mentioned, but you can only guess he was referring to frontrunner Bruce Lundsford, the man who unknowingly allowed me to make his name into a verb that means to leave a race when realization sets in that you are not going to win.

Miller did throw his support to former Lt. Governor Steve Beshear and his running mate, Hazard physician, Daniel Mongiardo. This adds weight to the speculation that the candidate Miller is attempting to thwart by leaving the race is indeed the aforementioned Lundsford. The same opinion poll cited earlier shows a tight race on the Democratic side, with Miller still included in the affray. And Lundsford comes out on top, as he has the support of twenty-nine percent of the Democratic faithful. Close behind, with twenty-three percent, is the by now favored-by-former-candidate-Miller duo of Beshear and Mongiardo.

Sadly, even if all seven percent of those who had intended on voting for Miller and companion could be persuaded to back Beshear and Mongiardo, that would give them only thirty percent of the vote, and for all practical intents and purposes, unless another of the stronger contenders can be persuaded to do a Lundsford, and get all of his supporters to back either Bruce or Steve, the runoff following the Democratic primary is, in all likelihood, still on.

Miller had attracted the support of several luminaries in Kentucky, including author Wendell Berry because of his stance opposing the practice known as mountaintop removal (MTR). Unfortunately those glowing endorsements just weren’t translating to votes. And even in Eastern Kentucky, where MTR hits home the hardest, the issue of MTR is what pundits call “controversial”. That means that while a lot of people disagree with it, the practice will continue because the well-heeled amongst us support it.

Those who speak glowingly of this method of mining coal always speak of the jobs provided by it, overlooking the fact that these jobs seldom last all that long, and despoil one of the region’s chief assets, the scenery that should be attracting tourism. This dubious claim is backed up by the old lie that by knocking down the mountains, flat land is provided for “factories”, although there are at least two real problems with this argument. One, no coal operator ever put a dollar more into reclamation than the law requires him to, and that means that the “flat land” created by MTR is absolutely worthless, as it is nowhere nearly capable of supporting the weight of any building that could house a factory of any size. (If there are doubters, let them take a tour through the relatively new East Ridge High School. This was built on land that was supposedly compacted enough to hold these buildings, yet there are cracks throughout the building cause by the settling of the land on which it was built). And two, at least in Pike County, no factory has ever been built on any former MTR site, so I suppose that means that this question is essentially moot.

Still, the supporters of MTR can rest easy. So long as the issue is “controversial”, they can, at will, strip any mountain side of its plant life, set explosives to blow the top of it to the moon, bury any number of local streams and valleys, remove whatever coal they find, then do their minimal reclamation, and go on their merry way with happy heart and full bank account. And in the end, isn’t that all that really matters?