Proposal for At Least a Third Party, Plus Sarah Palin

We need a third political party, convention and all. Not a pretend, make-believe party appealing to people who are allergic to crop dust and taxes and in favor of whales, but a credible alternative to Republicans and Democrats.

We have Libertarians, but they are all dentists and used car salesmen, and maybe there is actually a Green Party barely visible in the smog. Lots of people call themselves Independents, but that usually means they are just disgusted Republicans or Democrats. Disgust does not make a party. Disgust makes blog entries.

If we had three or four Parties, plus Sarah Palin up in Wasilla, who all alone could be the membership of the Rogue Party, then when Congress met it would have to decide how to get a majority together, and that would take conversation and compromise. And while the arguments might be ludicrous, it might happen that we will begin to realize how we really think about things.

Let us not pretend that paralysis would result if we had three minority parties. Paralysis is what has happened already. And even if the process of trying to form a consensus in order to get a working majority, just for a while, turned out to be a mess, it might happen that trying to work with people you disagree with, mostly, would shake up the alignments enough to get some general agreements on something, almost anything!, and that would be such a pleasure that it might be tried again.

We aren't going to do that, of course. We are going to pretend that the Republicans are the Party of Abraham Lincoln, and that Democrats are the Party of Ordinary Working People. We will ignore facts and argue that paying people a living, minimum wage will result in massive unemployment, that some people do not deserve health care, and that if we do not send troops into another oil field we will lose our right to carry AK-45s into a bar.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

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

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