squareONE explorations

I’m a political junky. Over the years I’ve tried to keep politics out of the explorations here, but the personal is the political. I’ve thought about a political blog too, although the world probably doesn’t need another lefty blog. Far lefty in my case for I am a fabian, a digger, a radical humanist, and, perhaps worst of all, I can count. Think of me as a pointed headed auto-didact 52yo slacker. If I did have a blog I would orient it around the common cognitive dissonances which riddle political discourse. For example, when I hear the T-baller speak of the “desire for freedom in every human’s heart” while his administration ouskebombs and shoots up neighborhoods in Iraq, I recognize the U.S. is attempting today to destroy the village to save it. And, this means this universal urge for freedom is actively and concretely being extinguished in the heart of every innocent person ‘accidentally’ killed or grievously injured as the U.S. collateralizes the damage issued in its insane imperial dream.

The campaign button expresses my somewhat inchoate sentiment. As J.K. Galbraith told it, one expects the Republican Party royalists to serve their minute corporate artistocratic constituency wholeheartedly. Tom Franks is wrong to suspect great swaths of rural and suburban peeps don’t vote their interests. The cognitive problem in a nutshell is that they, obviously, do. The Democratic Party hasn’t with any rigor at all figured this out, yet it’s a good sign the insurgent Democrat today, (like John Tester, Scott Kleeb, Paul Hackett,) does speak truth to power, does recapture and co-opt mainstream values, and, does seem to have a sense of humor.

A little bit of ‘folk’ object relations and psychohistory can come into play at times like this. The poison container, projected upon ‘Islamofascists,’ “evil-doers,’ ‘terrorists,’ the Democrats, the vast left wing media, Hollywood, and professors and scientists alike, when it shifts, shifts irrevocably to a new toxic object. The new toxic object is, has always been, Cheney Inc.. The swing will be brutal for these whigs.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party may or may not be able to take back America. The first thing is that they should really want to, and in really wanting to, they should figure out what a post-cold war populism demands.

If I had a magic wand I would have them immediately address the cause of corruption and alleviate a cause of mendacity, by, at a minimum, offering a plan to publicly finance elections and make it easier, not harder, for us (!) to participate in elections. (The Democratic Party’s lunatic laydown over election reform in 2001-02, in the aftermath of winning the popular vote and losing the election by a single Supreme, and this while vote suppression was in six figures, counts as their biggest face plant.) Tomorrow I would move the country to paper ballots with BIG PRINT and BIG BOXES. Fundamentally, democracy is in peril when its primary (and radical) presupposition becomes: political influence and traction is best decisively correlated with financial standing; standing given by the meritocracy and corporatocracy.

The rich neither get to or deserve to run the country. Corporations are not people. They don’t get to write laws. Christians worship God above money and not the other way around. You can’t have it both ways: Christian values and cash manna sharing equally the human spirit and soul. …so-to-speak. If you are thoughtful about the jockeying for ultimate political power, you might ask yourself why there is this longstanding demand for citizen compliance underneath the blather about freedom.

Ahh, perhaps it is because there are conservatives who’d like to see the citizenry evolve into fit subjects! The ‘unitary executive’ is not a concept legitimized by an appeal to original construction of the constitution. Madison, Franklin, and Jefferson, later Marshall, carried the day and so George Washington did not get to be king! (Keep in mind it is William McKinley who is Rove’s paragon president.) Democracy is a matter of checks and balances with the final check and balance delivered by the vote for a representative.

Trickle down economics and its morphing into trickle-down PLUS risk-shifting is a scheme to take what little money the working class has, and send it upward into the investment aristocracy’s ‘investment accounts. BUT, overtime, these two trends will drive huge numbers of unhappy, financially overwhelmed people to the gates (and gated communities,) of this self-selecting, abject elite. Once there, they will demand restoration of the Republic and of their say. This is to say: if you play income disparity out the first shoe is the fat cat class’s attempt to guarantee their reign, and, the second shoe is their reign being denied.

I could go on and on, but I’ll take a breath and end by stating that the conjunct of the military industrial complex with the uncritical valorization of the fighting man with perpetual war against psychic enemies, (against the ‘alter,’) cannot end up to be a strong reinforcer of the cause of freedom being in everybody’s heart*. Why? Because you can’t free people by killing them and maiming them; and, by the way, Christians should be especially circumspect about any unrelenting effort to crusade against and crucify their opponents. It should also go without saying that emulating the old Soviet Union and its kangaroo courts and gulags and training your public servents who work on the front lines of the CIA to be sadists is evil, decadent and won’t work to make anybody safer. Doh!

*Incidentally, this idea-that we are wired to desire freedom-needs to be better defined and then demonstrated in the evolutionary psychological terms it seems to refer to. But, short of this, I would offer, at least, that every person basically wishes to survive and not come to harm, let alone have it rained upon them by autistic jihadists or hubristic manifest destinarians.