Okay. I’ve been ruminating on this since my last entry. I don’t want this blog to be a sad little reflection of my daily life. But what, I wondered, moves me enough to want to write. Well, politics, for one thing. I like to think of myself as an independent. Before you roll your eyes, let me explain why:
I tried being a Dem for a while, but it soon became clear to me that these smug, smarmy bastards don’t really believe in one damn thing they say. Their positions on various issues are not based on a principled, but pragmatic assessment of what will make good policy, but rather on a cynical, self serving perception of what looks good, and what will stir the emotions (rather than the intellect) of the people – whom they consider sheep. These are the people who grew up during the hippie days of the late sixties and early seventies (which, as a Gen-Xer, I am so friggin’ sick of hearing about), and have nothing better to offer than the infantile and discredited Conflict Theory arguments of Karl Marx and Gloria Steinem. These are people who are more interested in trying to destroy the United States from within than they are in really helping the “less fortunate” (read as “absolved of personal responsibility”) in the world. In fact, they’d like everyone to be absolved of personal responsibility so they can rule without fear of accountability for the catastrophic consequences of implementing their ill-conceived policy agenda. These folks have read Eric Fromme’s Escape From Freedom, and cynically exploit its revelations about human nature. Even though I support environmental conservation and respect for animals, the extreme environmentalists have made it so we can’t build more refineries, but we also can’t build solar or wind farms to achieve clean energy independence. PETA and their ilk have made it so I can’t adopt an unwanted dog from an animal shelter without the informational equivalent of a rectal probe. (It’s probably easier to adopt a starving orphan from Rwanda than to get a dog from the animal shelter). So I find myself looking at the other party, and thinking that on the whole, my values place me more on their side of the fence.
But wait! While I agree that government (and social programs) should be smaller, and that taxes should be lower, and that the U.S. needs to quit taking crap off the loser nations of the world, I don’t agree that we should vacate Roe vs. Wade and ban all abortions (late-term and partial birth abortions should be banned; first-trimester and morning-after pills should not). While every conservative publicly decries judicial activism (at least, so long as it is against what they want), I believe there is a necessary place for it: Sometimes the judicial branch needs to do what the legislative branch lacks the political balls to do, for the common good or to protect a minority from mob rule. I don’t believe we should rape the natural world to enrich ourselves. I certainly don’t agree that the narrow margin of victory George Bush enjoyed in 2004 gives his extreme base a “mandate” to dictate national policy, as the pontificating bloviaks on far-right radio stridently assert. The continued, deliberately self-inflicted ignorance and anti-scientific stance of the fundamental Christian extremists makes me want to puke. “Intelligent Design”? What a joke. It’s simply literalist dogma poorly attempting to masquerade as science, taking advantage of the uneducated, who wouldn’t know real science if it crawled out of the sea and started building condos. (They never got over Scopes and Epperson, I guess.) Stem cell research? Forget it under these guys. They obviously care more about upholding an apocryphal religious conviction concerning the questionable humanity of an undeveloped clump of cells (with the potential to grow into an ovine, fundamentalist voter), than about curing distinguished and brilliant contributors to humanity like, say, Stephen Hawking. Moreover, these folks are all about prayer in school – so long as you’re praying to Jesus. (To be fair, the freaks on the Left want to, in the name of religious tolerance for all, tolerate no public displays of Christianity – an equally absurd position.)
Which brings me to a third group who allows these fools to run the country: the vast body of American “citizens” who don’t bother to educate themselves about the larger issues that affect them, or anything beyond their immediate personal needs and wants, for that matter. These are the idiots with whom Glen Beck likes to get on the phone and play “moron trivia.” These are the people who justify the politicos’ perceptions of the electorate as a flock of mindless sheep. Sometimes, I think there should be a basic knowledge test in American government and American jurisprudence before anyone is allowed to vote.
Jesus said the poor will always be with us. Well, here’s the corollary: The hopelessly ignorant will be there, too. (And here’s the point that nobody wants to acknowledge: for the most part, the poor and the ignorant will be one and the same). What drives me and many others batty is that some of these people have convinced themselves that being stupid and poor is cool. So much so that they do everything they can to keep each other from achieving anything, all the while screaming that their destitution is someone else’s fault, and therefore the someone else in question needs to pony up everything that they want. Even better, when foreigners of their particular ethnic stock arrive in their neighborhoods and achieve success, they attack and assault the new arrivals. (Residents Say Beating Fits Widespread Pattern)
I read an article appearing in the Arizona Daily Sun yesterday that struck a chord with me. Erin McClam of the associated press may have gotten it wrong on Katrina (all that crap about race and poverty being at the root of the human disaster there), but he did make a couple of good points:
- Quoting Yale international politics professor Stathis Kalyvas: “‘In the U.S. today one gets the sense a lot of people have difficulty just discussing things with one another,’ he says. ‘There seems to be a lot of bad feeling. The bloggers, the public -- you get a sense that people are much more fanatical.’”
- “(Guy) Burgess, of the Conflict Research Consortium, says he'll continue working on the political help-wanted ad he constructs in his daydreams. He wants a candidate who will stand up to ‘political manipulation,’ and explain to Americans how opportunistic politicians are distorting real debate for selfish purposes. ‘Somebody's got to get up and explain to people how they're being manipulated,’ he says. ‘I think there's an opportunity for someone to run against it.’”
I like that idea – a third party. Unfortunately, in reality, as soon as someone moderate stands up, the ruling parties annex his or her position (at least, they say they do), and when the third party has lost the election, the other extremists out there (did you really think it was a bipolar political spectrum?) take the new party and convert it into something that pleases them, but absolutely fails to catch on with normal folk. This is good, in a way, because it keeps the real crazies (like the American Nazi Party) out of power, but it also prevents there from ever being a powerful third party. Current electoral laws and redistricting ensure that third parties never stand a chance; they never appear on the ballot, and the media never really gives them much credibility or positive attention. A lot of these groups are single issue parties, and you just can’t go far as a political party that way – although you can form a PAC and do some lobbying. (The Republicans started out as a third party, by the way. Of course, the Whigs that preceded them were imploding as a party, anyway.) If you really want to see evidence of how hard it will be to bring up a serious challenger to the current order, plot the electoral results from any recent presidential race with number of votes on the y-axis, and all candidates (in order of most votes to least) on the x-axis. What you get is a power law distribution of votes.
The Republican and Democratic candidates will have received a number of votes that is orders of magnitude greater than that of their nearest rival. Power laws manifest in systems of entrenched inequality. In this case, the votes tend to go to the folks who are most well-known, and not necessarily to those best qualified. In turn, those with the most votes become more well-known, in a vicious cycle. Moreover, the actual voting public is only a fraction of the total population. It really is a screwed up system. But it needn’t be so if every American would become personally involved in the business of the nation, and vote for the right person – not the most familiar, and not the one our parents, our unions, or anyone else tells us to vote for.
What it comes down to, boys and girls, is that we have – through our own laziness and ignorance – allowed the lunatic fringe on both sides to set the policy agenda, and made it possible for them to enforce their nutty ideas on us. We as a people have become politically polarized, ethnically segmented, individually isolated, and intellectually complacent; and all of it – ALL of it – helps schmucks like Bill Clinton and Karl Rove to reach positions of power. Social Entitlements Programs? Vote-buying economic traps. Morality/Faith Based Policies? Instruments of social domination and control. ALL of it designed to rob you and me of any control over our lives, and make us hopelessly dependent on the schmucks in power. Extremists are the greatest political and social threat we face. They all need to be set on fire and put out with an anvil. Oh, wait. That’s kind of extreme, isn’t it?
