A Slow
Death
Is the republic
happy? I sincerely doubt it. A year ago those under-appreciated
forgotten rapscallions who crawled from the lattice work like
termites with a bone to chew threw something at the fan that I think
they really knew would not stick. In doing so, they unwittingly (or
knowingly) left the door open a crack for the least desirable. They
let in so many arcane symbols of our unsavory past that it was hard
to see any shred of validity to what their red hats claimed, that it
was not just a platitudinal herring to cross a line, to look noble as
they gave the republic away to a billionaire celebrity, a former
Dem...igoge who played upon their rouge-like stupidity. The had an
alternative, an alt-left, even an alternative left candidate to
someday delete the right and its self-indulgent philosophy.
Beginning with—oh,
Jesus I suppose—the closer society got to really caring for one
another, I mean beyond your odd charity, really working together as a
whole, the person is either killed or cast aside in favor of—this
time—the exact opposite. Lincoln tried to bring together a country,
purge it of slavery, and he was killed. Kennedy tried to bring the
nation together, equate black with white in unprecedented
integration, he was killed. His brother espoused agendas of John, he
was killed. Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when one would “be
judged not by the color of his skin but by the contents of his
character.” He was killed. John Lennon sang about peace. He
implored us to imagine a world in which there was “nothing to kill
or die for...” He was killed. There is definitely a pattern here, a
fear of that old Cold-War bug-a-boo. . . SOCIALISM. The Marxist fear
that someone at some point may have to give up something, make the
fairest of concessions in order to “build a more perfect union for
ourselves and our prosperity.” That echos fro my past, from
Schoolhouse Rock. I think it was from the preamble to the
constitution. Lest the billionaire CEO of the giant insurance company
(yes Virginia, they do still exist under the ACA) forget that they
got there by playing a third party role. They got there by decades of
exploiting illness and misfortune of the middle and lower classes. In
fact, a few people I know are pharmaceutical representatives. Now, I
don't know how high they are on the food chain but as a member of the
middle-class I can say I made their boss. Without millions like me
buying their inflated drugs—that may inflate me causing me to buy
another drug—they would not be in the tax bracket that was designed
with loopholes.
I recognize the
independent senator from Vermont, the man who one day in 2015 walked
out of his office and declared that “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.” On
February 1 the following year, in Iowa, as I turned as old as the
number of cards in a deck, he lost the state in the primary to his
Democratic rival by two votes. It was early on and I really saw a
chance for economic equality, for the current iteration of the story
that had been the death nail for so many of his predecessors. He'd
been low profile (I had not heard of him before 2015) he was no Paul
Wellstone stumping on the senate floor, as I gather is often how it
goes, to an audience on-demand. He was the wave maker, the
instigator, the dark horse who had not the weight of the baggage ($$)
of his rival. He was the first of the last of the grass-rooters, a
horticulturist who grew things the way nature intends—from the
bottom up. I was among the thousands who offered $20 to his campaign,
to exist as a seed in the grass destined NOT to grow up like a Roy
Moore. I received my “feel the Bern” coffee mug. At 52 I had a
place alongside legions of millennial, voters I saw at my caucus who
could be my children. The progressive message, the alt-left, the
alternative to mainstream Democratic ideology was out there, placing
its neck yet again on the well-whittled and selectively heard stump.
“The loser now
will be later to win...,” sang our poet of the '60s, Minnesota's
sound-geist to the movement to end war and bring civil rights to
society. A parable of workers even claims in the bible that “the
last will be first and the first will be last.” A prophesy?
Something to put in the bank for another 240 years like a savings
bond? Was your bible wrong Mr. Moore? What are the chances a
pre-1970s Dylan, a Jew, would paraphrase a quote from the bible? It's
just been a battle between the red and blue since the Civil War.
Since Lincoln, the last in line, as he was shot in his theater box,
as the first Republican to realize something was wrong. He realized
that this nation could not survive half slave and half free. Over
600,000 died, black men fighting for their freedom, for democracy.
They fought to hold the union together.
It is 152 years
later and the loser of the Civil War is as close as it's ever come to
winning, maybe even at breeches too immoral for Jeff Sessions (see
11/11 SNL sketch). But I fear (I laugh) that the forgotten Who fans
that were fooled again in 2016, who were taken by a money laundering,
tax evading New York hustler, a bone spurred charlatan who figured
our that the best way to defraud the U.S. government was to act like
he was presiding over it, have mortally wounded the elephant in the
room—and everyone knows the penalty for that. As it lies bleeding
in capitol halls, as tortured as the metaphor it created, a
not-so-silent grassroots army of the democracy—the blue—has
judiciously gathered to rip apart its carcass. Republican senators
are leaving, bowing out or retiring, finding that screwing America
won't be any fun if the paradigm shifts. McConnell, the man who looks
like the Big Bang Theory's Sheldon when he was forced to
smile, and Ryan won't support a child molester in the senate. A
handful of blue states won big last Tuesday, electing a transgender
legislator and taking some business from bathroom contractors. But
Democrats should stay humble and not repeat the general election last
year. Remember when everyone saw many “paths” to 270 for Bernie's
successor and none for her opponent? Now is the time to merely sit
back and watch the seeds grow. Now is the time to cotinue to defend
democracy. Now is the time to watch the GOP poison itself more and
more.
No comments:
Post a Comment