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

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

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

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