Some in this country believe that our leaders lead. They do not. Some in this country would have us believe that our elected representatives represent. They do not. Our government and political system are much more akin to a high stakes game of chance then to any management or service organization. In this context it is clear that big money and special interest groups are the bank, and the American people are the chips, the thoroughbreds on the track, or the dice tossed in an alley. Our politicians function like chronic, degenerate gamblers forever hedging their bets. Thus, a prolife platform is supported by the pharmaceutical companies that make birth control preparations and the surgical supplies companies that create the tools to perform abortions. Accordingly, an anti-immigration candidate is funded by business people who count on the labor of undocumented workers, used shamefully and forced to toil for next to nothing. Gay bashing right wingers will take money from the Log Cabin Republicans if they can get it. While Conservadems intent upon undermining a woman’s right to a safe clinical abortion will accept campaign donations from prochoice feminist groups stupid enough to contribute.
None of this is about the American People. To paraphrase the words of an old Bob Dylan song, when will we ever learn? We are like children fed donuts by diseased parents who spend money for good food on the games. But, we are not children. We don’t have to accept sugar in place of nutrition – lies and propaganda in place of a functioning government. We don’t have to accept parents who sink deeper and deeper into addiction. The next time someone promises change we need to demand the kind of change we want. The word change is not a magical mantra. It isn’t magic that we need. It is common sense. We can start by demanding real, meaningful and enforceable campaign finance reform. Let’s get the big money out of politics so the little guy has a chance to have an ethical government. Let’s demand that our leaders stop their compulsive gambling and earn their keep.
Because money buys power at the heart of this stupidity is greed. Some people think that greed is a disease, like gambling. I think that greed is a character flaw parallel to deceit, arrogance, bigotry, hatred, manipulation and egotism. This Blog was inspired by Kitty Hunt’s work on Blogger at Kittisplace. Her most recent Blog is about spending Veteran’s Day, called Armistice Day then, with her father. Kitty’s dad seems to me to have been a man of great character and decency, the kind of character and decency that got this country through WWII. The Blog that follows is about the internment of the Japanese people during that same war. This is truly a black spot on our national soul, driven by the character flaw of bigotry. While reading these Blogs I started thinking about what I remember of the American character years ago. It was different. I recall a character with flaws. Today we suffer flaws with no character.
We must change this if we want to survive as a society. We must reclaim our soul that has been covered in lies, twisted to serve arrogance, battered with bigotry, harassed with hatred, nearly murdered by manipulation, and eaten alive by egotism. We must reclaim our character by demanding an end to the partisan propaganda, the viciousness, the cruelty, and the ugly slander hidden under the First Amendment. We aren’t starving children dying for the sins of our parents. We are We the People.
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. . . Oscar Wilde
If the great Irish playwright was living today, I believe that he would not be speaking of men and women who really love their country; men and women who understand that what is right for the human community that is their nation will be right for them. I trust that he would be pointing out the cruel absurdity of yapping dogs turning up at Presidential venues with guns. I believe that he would be indicating the idiocy of Neanderthals waving the Gadsden War Flag in front of the White House, implying that we are at war with our president as we were once at war with England and George III. He would know this for what it is - racism. I have faith that he would be directing our attention to the monstrous malice of vote whoring politicians waving that same flag from a balcony of the U.S. Capitol. He would be commenting on the sociopathic self promotion of people like Palin, waving the Constitution and stirring up her following with nothing more than vitriol and bitter resentment. Oscar Wilde spoke the truth. It was his job. It is the job of all serious writers.
I am a lifelong conspiracy theorist, and like Chris Carter’s Fox Mulder, I believe the truth is out there, and that it wants to be heard. I am not a glass-half-full woman. Some have called me a professional pessimist – true enough. Expect the worst. Why be disappointed? Still, in these days when Wilde’s vicious patriot has taken control with more money, more noise, more rage, I have a great sense of optimism. I hear the truth fluttering at the window.
Soon the subpoenas will fly, the government will be shut down, and the Tea Party mongrels will begin to draw blood from the ankles of their Senior Senators and Congress People. Presently the structure will begin to shutter like a skyscraper built on an unstable foundation. Hate is weak and cowardly, as love is strong and courageous. It will crumble without doubt because its bricks and mortar are of an inferior material - greed. I refer you to 2008 to see how suddenly that rotten substance deteriorates once it starts. This lousy economy will jump start it.
Call me naïve – it has been done before. Call me crazy – it has been done before. Call me stupid – that has never been done before, but hey, be the first. Nonetheless, I intuit and believe that we are in the final stages of labor. It will be hard and painful, but we shall give birth to a better reality.
My father’s family came to this country in 1911 from Southern Italy. By the early 1920’s my grandfather, by all accounts a gentle man who wielded an iron sledgehammer of control over the lives of his wife and children, insisted that everyone be naturalized. He also insisted that voting was not an option for the male members of the family. Women were not allowed to vote, except for my Irish mother who did pretty much what she pleased. On the night before every election the men gathered for food and fighting, wine and fighting, sweets and fighting - sometimes fist fighting. Although, I could never figure out what the hell they were fighting about, they were all Democrats. Nonetheless, they were at it until time to go vote and sometimes report to the emergency room in that order.
When Grandpa died and my papa inherited the iron sledgehammer, Grandma came to live with us. Since my father was even more fanatical about voting then my grandfather he demanded that my grandmother vote. I remember the day he told her. The look in her eyes was abject terror. This was a peasant, born into a peasant’s world. She told my father that she was afraid the police would come and take her if she didn’t vote the right way. The old man in his infinite wisdom assigned me to help her because she didn’t read English and because my mother, the granddaughter of a Suffragette, was highly suspect of family sedition – being a Republican.
For several elections, local, state and off year, we struggled to gather information, think about it, make a choice and go vote. I went with her into the voting booth because everyone knew she could not negotiate the language. She would often say to me, "What do you think little rabbit?"
"What can I think Granny?" I replied. "I am nine."
Finally there came an election that she got very excited about. We gathered all the information we could from newspapers, television and the radio. She wore a campaign button everywhere she went. I bought her a poster for her bedroom door with my allowance. She told people she met on the street that she was going to vote for the “little Irish boy who wants to be President.”
Four days before Halloween 1960, some 50 years ago on this day, my grandmother suffered a massive stroke and died. She never got to cast her vote. I would have loved to cast it for her, but that wasn’t possible. I am sure there are cynics out there who would say that the election was rigged in Chicago by Daily, or that he didn’t need her vote anyway. I think he would have been happy to have it.
I loved and respected my grandmother. She was a courageous woman, genetically predisposed to optimism and hope. She was born and raised in an Italian vineyard. She worked there much of her life, giving birth to two of her sons on the ground next to the vines. She came to this country with her husband and gave birth to eight more children, burying four of them along the way. She left her quasi
feudal world and traveled several centuries into the middle part of the 20th all in one lifetime. Yes, I think Kennedy would have been happy to have her vote.
Even though her love was unconditional, I don’t know if she would respect the woman I have become. Our sense of duty, family, honor and loyalty are light years apart. She would be terrified of my religion as she was terrified of my mother’s mother who taught me. Still, I believe that wherever she is she understands that every vote I cast is cast in part to make up for her lost vote and all the lost votes of the generations of women who were kept from voting. The Franchise is not a right; it is a legacy, a light in the darkness, a path out of oppression. My grandmother was a peasant who learned to be a free woman. Why in hell would anyone want to stop voting and go backward?
The Grateful Dead called its compilation album, "What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been." They could just as easily have applied that title to the election season of 2010. Long, oh yeah. It started roughly twenty-two minutes after the inauguration of President Obama by the media’s lights, and for the right very soon thereafter as the Republicans began to publicly grind out a chorus of mantras and allegation aimed at his political demise.
Strange? Believe me, this has been one of the strangest off year elections in my memory. Take for instance, the Tea Parties that seem to metastases faster than glandular tumors from state to state. They have no platform other than rage against a disenfranchisement that has not occurred. They see Communist-Socialist-Muslim-Nazis under the bumper of every car, and hate President Obama because he is a Kenyan-Muslim-Socialist-maybe Communist-Nazi. Their philosophy, if that is what you want to call it, is like something out of Serling’s Twilight Zone.
Through their psychosis they have the Republican Party on the ropes and the media in their pocket. I keep thinking of Salvador Dali’s painting, “The Persistence of Memory.” In his vision a clock is draped over a branch, another is wearing a suit and a third is sliding like molasses off a raised platform. Clocks are appropriate - how much longer will we have to deal with the false legitimacy of this distorted mental picture?
Indeed how much longer will we have to live out our political dreams in the theater of the absurd? Consider last night’s debate between Sharon Angle (Tea Party darling) and Harry Reid in Nevada. Ms. Angle’s stupidity is surpassed only by her arrogance, yet she is spoken of as a serious candidate for the Senate. Her entire performance last night seemed to revolve around insulting Reid, squealing about the need for an unrestrained Free Market and remaking Social Security in that Market’s image.
Reid for his part stammered and stuttered and demurred like a frightened debutant at her first dance. When Angle snarled at him to, "man up," he could have told her to, "grow up, consigning Social Security to the Free Market and Wall Street is tantamount to financial homicide." Did he? No, he did not. He just kept attempting to elucidate his achievements with ever diminishing effectiveness.
Throughout this election season of darkness and decay lies have bloomed in the halls of power and the hearts of the American people like wild flowers in a field. Obamacare - socialized medicine, death panels, increased taxes, stimulus isn’t working, Sharia Law is taking the place of the Constitution in this country, and our president is a secret Muslim, ad nauseum. In my estimation some of this stuff is laughable, and some is treasonable. Some of it is obviously nuts and some deeply offensive.
Take the fact that within the last day or so the Empress of Deceit, the Queen of Fraud, and the Demigod of Destruction, Sarah Palin, has taken a statement of Michelle Obama’s out of context and used it to imply that the First Lady has never met a member of the Armed Forces nor does she care about them. One of Mrs. Obama’s signature causes is helping the families of service men and women. She has taken more care and done more good for these families then most of us know. I would like to know what Palin has done for them recently other than using them as political fodder.
No matter how outlandish, idiotic, foolish, destructive or Nixonian, the media clings to these lies, these distortions of Palin and her ilk like drunks clinging to a wall because they can’t stand up straight. The media’s powerful voices hardly bother to correct the falsehoods, and this is yet another thing that has made it all so bizarre, so weird, so surreal over this unending election season.
C.S. Lewis said, "Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn." We Liberals have had a brutal political experience. There have been times when it seemed that even the Democrats had no use for us. Still we and we alone carry FDR, JFK and RFK’s banner. That is a heady responsibility and we can’t allow their standard to drop into the mud for buffoons with tea bags on their head to tread upon. We may need another party, a Liberal Party, but not now.
I have learned that many of our leaders are weak, and we must be strong for them. I have learned that our opponents gain strength daily from their deceit, their cruelty and their innate racism aided and abetted by the media. Eighteen days out from the November election and I am sure of one thing, the bitter lesson of the past two brutal years is simply this – if we don’t stand up now and turn out we are doomed to government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich run by Tea Party influenced or intimidated fanatics who consider love a failing and hate a virtue. Please vote!
What is the hope behind Citizens United and all the subsequent money poured into political campaigns? Is it that the vote of the American people is for sale? We know that our elected representatives have been walking upon and down K Street in their Joan Crawford hurt-me-pumps singing “Hey Sailor” for years. We know what they are, but is it possible that the Republican Front Man, John Roberts, and his masters on the Hill think that we are the same? Are we? If we aren’t does it matter how much money is pumped into cable advertising, internet soliciting or the ever gaping holes in the faces of the legions of pundits? If we aren’t for sale then money is just green paper, like a vampire it has to be invited in to hurt you.
Perhaps, it isn’t money at all. Perhaps, a myth or an outright lie is being perpetrated here. Since there is no real-time benefit for the voter from large amounts of money flowing into the political arena, can we believe that a man or woman will vote against a quality education for their children simply because an expensive ad campaign instructs them to do so? Is a slick commercial enough to induce a working person to vote for someone who opposes the minimum wage? In other words, have we got any reason to believe that people vote on the basis of the money given to others rather than their own self interests?
I ask these questions only because I am sick of the world according to media false prophets, as corporate driven as any Wall Street banker. It is my belief that the anti-intelligence, xenophobic movement is far worse than the money – it is the root cause of voter nullification. Deep, critical thinking, higher education, and a fluent use of the English language are discouraged by many on the Right. No reading Shakespeare – he was British. No reading Voltaire – he was French. The unwashed and malleable masses of the GOP are too extraordinary to ever bother with or learn from civilizations hundreds of years older than their own.
Every election season it starts, the new dummying down of the electorate. Don’t think, don’t question, don’t not do what you have always done. Your betters will tell you what to feel, what to expect, what you need, when you can organize. They will proclaim their love of your Jesus while worshiping their Mammon and calling it all Free-Market Capitalism.
I think of all of this as deliberate, slovenly ignorance. My dear friend Kitty feels that it is a lack of education. I defer to her on this, as I defer to her on many things. Still there are times when I hear some over paid twit disregard the adjective case and refer to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party that I would like to bitch-slap them back to the prom.
Thank you for listening.
My father’s favorite song was the old Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea." He was particularly fond of Sinatra’s version. I never could stand Sinatra. He always reminded me of a penis rolling down the street on a wave of testosterone without a body. Still in all, the lyric to the first stanza pretty much sums up how I feel about the Democrats these days:
I don't want you
But I hate to lose you
You've got me in between
The devil and the deep blue sea.
The lyrics to the chorus of one of Joe Egan and Gerry Rafferty’s songs are perhaps more timely and succinct:
Clowns to left of me, jokers to the right
Here am I stuck in the middle with you.
Over the last twenty odd months this country has slipped behind the looking glass. Right wing extremists have become respectable and capable of taking over the Republican Party. Liberals have become objects of ridicule, disdain and condemnation by the Democratic Party. The intensity of confusion within the Party leadership is superseded only by the befuddled notion that the Liberal Left can be brow beaten into compliance the way the far Right has brow beaten the Republican Party.
The leadership’s bewilderment stems from the idea that the Left is angry at and withholding its support for 2010 because of what President Obama didn’t do. I believe that the Left is angry about HOW he didn’t do it.
He courted bipartisanship for months with people who had stated their determination to see him fail, indeed who stirred up every vile element in this society against him, at the expense of his legislative agenda. He kicked the Public Option to the curb because a handful of so-called Democratic Senators in districts with a total population smaller than Brooklyn, New York, insisted upon it - even though 61% of the American people supported it. The myopic media won’t tell us this but that is a goodly number of the people who don’t support the Health Care Bill now. He let the Republicans carry the message from the summer of 2009 until recently, while he and his underlings mouthed platitudes like, "Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good." Goddess, if I ever hear that again I will kick the TV screen in. The Democratic agenda regarding Gitmo and the war in Afghanistan have simply slipped into the fierce whirlwind that has become our body politic.
This whole muddle reminds me once again of my father. He had the most astounding ideas which he insisted upon – "hot water freezes faster than cold." "Take one pound of pasta, break it in half and you have two pounds of pasta." "Power makes people hurt themselves." One out of three ain’t bad.
