June 1, 2007
Bernie
Sanders for President
So
Bernie Sanders was on the radio this past Friday morning, as he always is
on what’s left of Air America, sounding sane
and reasonable, pragmatic and determined, intelligent and altruistic – in sum,
the antithesis of our Decider, our Commander Guy, our Mass-Murderer in Chief.
- Where
a key role of government was elevating the poor and powerless while
punishing the abuses of the elite; providing first-rate K - 16 education
and free, merit-based access to grad school; running a single-payer
universal access medical system that takes the profit out of human misery;
helping small business while severely penalizing the anti-humanitarian
abuses that are standard practice throughout corporate America?
- Where
mass media informed rather than deceived?
Where "the best justice" wasn't a commodity available
only to the rich? Where the war
budget was used to give assistance to national liberation movements rather
than propping up right wing mass murders who happen to be friendly to
American business interests? Where
the war on (some) drugs targeted international supply networks instead of
penniless, desperate crack users in failing physical and mental
health? Where the police actually
"protected and served" the entire community, not just the rich
and politically connected?
- Where,
because of the effectiveness of the aforementioned excellent, free public
school system and the restoration of critical thinking skills it fostered,
it would be literally impossible for a dangerous joke like George W. Bush
to be elected to any position more significant than county clerk? Where
naked resource grabs tarted up as
"freedom on the march" were treated with the contempt and
hilarity they deserve, and never allowed out of the planning room? Where
coffins aren't called
"transfer tubes," and where blown apart or otherwise slaughtered
little brown people aren't called "collateral damage?"
- Where
Howard Zinn's "A Peoples' History of the United States" was the
national standard history text, while the current batch of bloviating
boosterism mainly serves as an inexhaustible source of material for
stand-up comics – you remember that version of American history, where the
genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of millions of
kidnapped Africans are necessary little bumps in the great road to
capitalist progress, and are nobly identified as "Manifest
Destiny" and "the key to the successful Southern economy."
- Where
Noam Chomsky appears more often on pundit fests than do David Brooks and
Pat Robertson? Where economist
Kevin Phillips wins a Noble Prize, while the radical libertarian and
ruthless, unregulated, free market zealot Milton Friedman was consigned to
the slagheap of laughable economic theorists?
- Where
regulatory agencies actually regulate something besides the inflated
salaries of upper management? Where
climatologists and meteorologists dealing with global climate change
produced reports that caused changes in national energy policy, rather
than being gagged and threatened with job loss if they deviate publicly
from acting as industry or governmental apologists?
- Where
the religiously insane (or "jesus freaks," as we used to call
them back when the language was more honest and descriptive) were laughed
at, marginalized and generally ignored, rather than forming a key element
of a powerful political bloc which has forced national candidates to feign
religiosity and actually espouse the bible as literal truth to appease
these lunatic reactionaries?
- Where
societal religiosity was on a long-term, steady decline -- as it has been
in Europe for decades -- rather than rising precipitously over the past 30
years to a current estimate of 85 percent of the general population, a
number not seen in modern times except in primitive, hunter-gather
societies inhabiting isolated corners of the planet -- and even those
small tribes profess belief in a kind, earth-friendly set of deities
rather than the slash-and-burn god of rapacious capitalism and right-wing
repression popular in America -- and predictably reflective of this
society's ecological and economic value systems.
- Where
a high-speed rail system the equal of Western Europe's or Japan's provided
an attractive alternative to the interstate highway system. One that was
so fast, comfortable, affordable and stress-free -- and took people just
about anywhere, from rural communities to Penn Station -- that people rapidly
began to abandon the misery of traffic jams and ever-escalating gas prices
for this fast, efficient alternative?
- And
where the Bill of Rights was sacrosanct, uncorrupted by political
expediency, immune from the constant attacks of right wing judges, applied
universally throughout the population and enforced by an
"activist," human rights-oriented judiciary.
This
would mean a return to truly radical concepts, such as keeping religion from
polluting public schools; no wiretaps or email captures; no double jeopardy
or self-incrimination; due process back by popular demand; no rotting in
off-shore hell-holes without charges or access to a lawyer; and trial by
jury of one’s peers makes a comeback, as does the
proscription against cruel and unusual punishment (see you in hell,
waterboarding fans).
A country based on Bernie Sanders' political and
societal principles, and his belief in the role of government as a positive
force in the lives of its citizens, would be so remarkably different than the
one in which we're currently serving time as to be unrecognizable in all
aspects but geography.
The Rockies would still pierce the clouds; the
oceans would still pound the left and right coasts; the Mississippi and its
tributaries would still drain half the country and send immense volumes of
valuable agricultural topsoil to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico each year;
the vast repellent wasteland of west Texas would still be an abysmal piece of
scrub desert that only a Gila Monster and a brush-clearing sociopath of
severely limited aesthetic vision could love.
Unfortunately,
we live in a country led – if
that's the right word – by a collection of dangerous misanthropes who have made
an art of peddling the big lie, the big con, the big payoff, the big campaign
extortion -- or "contribution" as it's often called in our
euphemistically rich native tongue -- the big sop to big business, the big
raised middle finger to those with functional brains and reasonable ethical
expectations, the big move to bumper-sticker politics and the big denial of
fact-based policy and critical thinking.
That and the unrelentingly malevolent influence of the big Dick, reactionary
numero uno, slithering his way up the org chart, a glistening slime trail
marking his decades of progress from wingnut Congressman into even more
rarified layers of governmental bureaucracy, finally lurching and snarling his
way to the pinnacle of the testosterone-poisoned BushCo hierarchy.
All
this and President Malaprop, too, the human spoonerism, The Decider (when
he's not busy being "The Commander
Guy"), the man laid low by a pretzel who, when juxtaposed against
Washington or Jefferson, presents perhaps the single most compelling argument
against Darwinian evolution ever to assume human form.
So here we are.
Adding insult to broken cheekbones, the boot belongs to a gang of
third-rate corporate suck-ups whose life’s work is increasing their own vast
personal fortunes, improving the already luxurious life-styles of their
corporate employers, and adding to the loot acquired via their class war
victory by that small elite cadre of insanely rich white guys whose status
seems to derive from having other Really Important White Guys on speed-dial.
And
to serve these objectives, these venal screw-ups, these historical footnotes,
these O’Brien wannabes – these miserable
small-time felons and serial liars are willing to dismantle Constitutional
government piece by sanctified piece; entrench themselves and their regime of
big lies by fomenting free-floating fear in a gullible populace; allow
intellectual non-entities and unqualified cronies to administer, and inevitably
destroy, formerly useful regulatory agencies; provide gainful employment for
an asexual android like Karl Rove, whose primary job qualification is a pure
sociopathic personality, presenting as shrill antipathy for pretty women like
Sheryl Crow, and for whom nothing is too debased or morally repugnant if it
serves his dream lover and boss, The Commander Guy.
- Or how
about creating an army of lethal mercenaries called Blackwater, accountable
to no one but their paymasters, who are currently shopping for domestic “training” bases
in California and North Carolina – and those are just the ones we know
about.
- Committing
two counts of grand theft election, and getting away with them while the
happy complacency and corporate agendas of mainstream infotainment
combined to provide cover and marginalize dissent.
- Willingly
dumping America’s former position atop the moral high ground – though
mainly a product of an effective PR campaign rather than a reflection of
actual US behavior in the real world – and embracing instead an
aggressive, imperialist foreign policy, enabled by the widespread application
of massive military power, that has, in six short years, made this country
the world’s most hated and feared rogue state.
Hell, you know the litany. We’re simply comparing and contrasting a
country governed by a party based on Bernie Sanders’ principles with a country
governed by a party based on the principles of Torquemada. We have a fine example of the latter, close
at hand and readily observed. We have
been privileged, if that’s the word, to watch at close range the destruction of
both national and state treasuries, the disaster relief infrastructure, both
houses of Congress, government of law, international codes of behavior and arms
limitation treaties, statesmanship and diplomacy, the Democratic party – and
we’ll throw in the English language as a special acknowledgement of our Texan
Mush-Mouth in Chief.
We have never in our history, PR and happy text
book boosterism notwithstanding, been governed by a party with altruism as its
organizing principle. In fact, it’s
unlikely that such an anomaly has ever occurred anywhere in the modern
world. If it had, the CIA would have
quickly put an end to that kind of nonsense.
So
maybe it’s about time to give it a try. Government by malevolent kleptocrats
certainly hasn’t worked except for those very malevolent kleptocrats -- nor has
government by national security apparatchiks, government by raging corrupt
imbeciles, nor government by a tongue-tied faux Texan with giant globs of
melamine-soaked wheat gluten for brains and the sunny disposition of a piranha
with a toothache.
One
of my favorite definitions of insanity is Benjamin Franklin’s, who says insanity
is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different
results. We
exceeded that standard some years back; now we’re just waiting for the attendants
to haul the lunatics out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
So
here's Bernie Sanders, democratic socialist, longtime Congressman and now
first-term Senator from Vermont, a populist of the first order, a man whose
idea of good government is so completely out of sync with that of the current
nest of vipers masquerading as the executive branch… Well, this bunch doesn't
actually have a concept of good government, just one of ever-broadening
totalitarian powers and an ever-tightening steel-taloned grip on the collective
throat of American citizens here and another six billion live targets
abroad.
In
Orwell’s prescient "1984," O'Brien,
a highly placed though pragmatic functionary with Oceania’s security state,
challenges Winston Smith -- prole, thought-criminal, rebel and eventual
co-opted drone -- to isolate the underlying motive for the indiscriminate
exercise of violent, overt and largely random state brutality.
Since Winston is unable to conceive of limitless
power, or how a state might exploit it to do limitless harm, O'Brien himself
supplies the answer: "If you want a
picture of the future,” he says, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face –
forever.”
# # #
Comments? Email the
author at war_on_peas@yahoo.com and win great prizes.
Like… First place is an
all-expenses-paid (by you) weekend in Orlando, Florida. Second place is an entire week there on your
own nickel. Third place is a month, and
so on until you place tenth or worse, at which point you have to live there the
entire rest of your life.
And
because we at Bush-bashing headquarters aren’t heartless, we provide alternatives; here’s a
particularly stout beam spanning the 20-foot ceiling in the formal living room,
over there’s a convenient balcony just a short reach away and, already looped
over the beam with one end tied in a noose, is a sufficient length of genuine
hemp-based rope.
"Make no mistake about it"
Bush and Cheney Suck