<I>CATE GABLE photo</I><BR>Richard Schroeder provided professional security for Don Nisbett's "Fishermen" - enlarged inset - at the recent Ilwaco Columbia Heritage Museum auction.

Was that frost on the pumpkin this week? Well, almost.

The weather report on election night was just as perturbing in our bifurcated nation and county. Those results either gave us a toasty feeling creeping up from our toes, or a case of frostbite.

Our national governance system – the one so carefully crafted by our founding fathers – is mired in big money over-riding the will of the people and twisted by bitterness and incivility.

Bart Stupak, Michigan Democrat, stepped down this year because “it’s so hateful now.” In Jimmy Carter’s new book “Sharing Good Times,” he remarks, “Our country is more seriously divided now than any time since the Civil War. A lot of it is attributable to the enormous impact of financial contributions during political campaigns, and the adoption of negative advertising. And that, thanks to redistricting, members of Congress are now almost impervious to challenge.”

“It builds up in average Americans a sense that candidates aren’t really reputable or trustworthy. And that creates divisions.”

You Are Here This tangle we call government is further hindered by an electorate, which can’t agree on the facts.

Here are my facts. President Bush presided over the biggest decline in the stock market of any president in history. The day Bush left office the Dow stood at 8,281; that’s 2,306 points off where the index stood, at 10,588, when he took office.

Bush started a war on false pretenses (there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) and grabbed Saddam Hussein who, though wicked, had no connection to the terror of Sept. 11.

This war is costing us an average of $9 billion a month or roughly $5,000 a second. It costs $390,000 to deploy one person for one year. We’ve spent $1.1 trillion billion as of 9:18:45 PDT Nov. 8. (See the aggregated cost of both wars, rolling along in real time, at www.costofwar.com.)

The Deficit The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities states, “Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration – tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs.”

This doesn’t even touch the wealth lost during the housing crisis when our government looked aside while regulators fell asleep at the switch and allowed mortgage brokers, mortgage bundlers and bankers to make fast and slick with our money; such that even banks are having trouble figuring out who really owns these mortgages/houses now.

And why was Washington Mutual allowed to crash into a pile of rubble (affecting the wealth of thousands of Washingtonians), when Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, AIG and others were handed the goods?

Obama has stumbled too. Some of us think he’s stumbled too far to the left, some say too far to the right. We’re all angry – the election has proven that – but we’re angry with both parties.

The Left Coast As one of the panel members on Enrique Cerna’s CNX show last Friday said, “The Republican tsunami stopped at the West Coast.”

Eight incumbents were returned to their seats in Washington state. Jerry Brown (D) was returned to the governorship in California (after 26 years!), beating Meg Whitman, past CEO of eBay, who threw $140 million into the race.

Harry Reid won by five points in Nevada, beating the polls largely because the pollsters didn’t talk to the Hispanic population. (Most polls and interviews were in English only.) Hispanics make up 12 percent of the population in Nevada and 90 percent of them voted for Harry.

Murray held onto her Senate seat in a hard-fought race with Rossi, who just couldn’t get the votes he needed in King County. One pundit said, “Rossi nationalized his campaign. Murray ran a local campaign which resonated with local voters.”

Another bright light was the passage of Proposition 20 in California, which puts redistricting into the hands of an independent commission. (Maybe we can save our democracy after all.)

Got Shellacked?

It’s hard to say yet what the results of Obama’s “shellacking” will be.

“There are going to be some examples of where we can tweak and make progress,” he said. “But I don’t think if you ask the American people, ‘should we stop trying to close the doughnut hole that helps seniors get prescription drugs, should we go back to where people with pre-existing conditions can’t get health insurance’ … I don’t think you’d have a strong vote from people saying, ‘Those are provisions I want to eliminate.'”

Yes, please boss, don’t let them take our healthcare away.

And that batch of idealistic newbies packing for D.C. and ready to rearrange the universe? Haha.

I love Rand Paul (Tea Party) saying, “I’m running to represent Kentuckians and to dismantle the culture of professional politicians in Washington. I don’t think I’m really open to having Washington change me.”

Enter the belly of the beast, Rand, and prepare to be digested.

Welcome to the Plutocracy Just before the election, Bill Moyer gave a talk as part of the Howard Zinn (the people’s historian) lecture series at Boston University. He echoed what many of us have realized – we are living in a plutocracy where political power is controlled by the wealthy.

You don’t have to look far to see the signs, from the recent Supreme Court decision that granted corporations, as “individuals,” the right to contribute, without attribution, to political campaigns.

Moyers cites a Citibank report that unapologetically talks about the plutocracy and creates a new word, “plutonomy,” for the system in which the government makes sure the rich get richer.

It’s basically a marketing document; Citibank wants to make sure its staff understands the rules of the game.

The document reads, “Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper … the top 10 percent, particularly the top 1 percent of the United States – the plutonomists in our parlance – have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surged in the U.S. … [and] from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor.”

Moyers said, “Since 1980 the economy has also continued to grow handsomely, but only a fraction at the top have benefited. Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years.”

For another source, here’s the Economist, “The typical unemployed worker has been jobless for nearly six months. Collapsing share and house prices have destroyed a fifth of the wealth of the average household … About a fifth say their mortgages are underwater. One in four of those between 18 and 29 have moved back in with their parents.”

For another shocking view, read Nicholas Kristof’s “Our Banana Republic,” New York Times, Nov. 6.

You Must Change Your Life* In the midst of these tragedies, several of us attended the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum’s annual fundraising auction last Saturday. We had a blast.

Bruce Peterson, the auctioneer, was a brilliant and hysterical master of ceremonies. Security was provided by Richard Schroeder, the unsmiling man in black. His assistant, the white-gloved Dian, handled the art Sotheby’s style. Ellen Wallace and Rosemary Hickman of The Two Monkey Catering Company (nudge nudge, wink wink) provided pulled pork and accoutrements, while husbands Dick and Cliff manned the bar.

Karla Nelson handled the international bids coming in by phone (she speaks 12 languages) and assisted an otherly-abled sock monkey to win, in dramatic fashion, the last item of the evening.

Our amazing local artists – praised for the quality of their work by visiting Portland friends – donated their time and art gloriously.

The museum doubled what they made last year, in a time of scant resources.

Why do I put these disparate topics together in one column? Because I believe in people and I believe in community. With our ingenuity, humor, intelligence, talent and compassion, surely we will be able to figure a way out of this.

*From the “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” by Rainer Maria Rilke