Skip to main content

Flying on one Wing

We have two political parties.
You might think one would be on the left
and the other on the right, as such things are measured.
One liberal, one conservative.

That isn't the case.

The Republicans are on the far right,
with their Tea Party members pulling them
out to where the right becomes divine right.

The Democrats have been pulled right, too.
We have only one socialist member of Congress--
Bernie Sanders of Vermont.  The most liberal
Democrat is over there where the Republicans used to be,
and some of them are righter than rain and the Pope.

We can't even call socialized medicine, "socialized medicine".
We have to call it, "a single payer system".
We dare not admit that public education is socialistic,
that police and fire and military are governmental.
We say they are "public", as in "vs. private".
We aren't even sure we ought to have public education.
There are efforts to "privatize" schools, social security,
retirement plans, fire departments (If you don't pay for
the insurance, let the house burn down!).

Republican love to talk about meeting Democrats
"in the middle", by which they mean halfway between
Mitch McConnell and their Tea Party members.

The major reason for this skew to the far right,
in recent decades, seems to be a leftover fear of communism.
We have one socialist.  The last communist was sighted
rowing an inner tube out to Cuba, in 1959.

Add to that ludicrous fear a distrust of government,
a distant memory of the lawless west, with posses and
Wells Fargo stages and Marshal Dillon and John Wayne,
and you have a country that will not be able to talk sensibly
about a public school system, or universal health care,
about providing a safe and secure retirement, and that is not
even sure that a public freeway system is better than
a privately owned toll road.  And who needs a postal system?

Taxes become something to hate, not a way of doing things.
Public parks become a burden.  Mercenaries replace
a military draft.  Blackwater becomes our army.

And the aim becomes to cripple our own government. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more