I'm Back and I've Brought a Political Agenda with Me!!!

OK. Been a minute. This is a far more taxing of an activity than I had anticipated. Waking up every single morning and trying to find something in the world that is worthy of being mocked is, in and of itself, not a difficult thing to do. We live in vacuous times, after all. The act of dredging up skepticism and scorn, no matter how happy you are, on a daily basis is liable to put a bit of a crimp in your outlook on life, though. Consequently, I hit a bit of a wall. I realized that there were many things going on in my life that I was neglecting while I busied myself with fairly unimportant things like Carl Paladino, Juggalos and "breige" and so I took an unannounced leave of absence to further muddy the waters of my the runoff ditch I call my lifel. While I never want to make this blog a soapbox for me to whinge endlessly about my petty first-world problems, I must say my life isn't the easiest thing to deal with. I'm living in NYC, rounding the curve into my 30's, single, without a traditional career, tending a bar whose business level could best be described as "mehnifficent" and fighting a pitched battle against nicotine addiction. For example, this past Wednesday morning greeted me with the realization that I had broken up with the woman I was dating, cracked the screen on my cell phone and was now living in a country where the Tea Party had a substantial voice in the Federal Government.Needless to say, I was less than chuffed.
Only one of those items is really important, really pressing, really worth addressing in depth, so let's get right down to it:

NOOOOOOoooooOOOOOoooooo.......!

It's OK! Mine's not cracked nearly as badly as the one in the picture (my High School English teacher just contracted dropsy because of that sentence). In all actuality, if I hold my phone just so, most of the cracks aren't even visible. It's a very minor problem and yet, it's one that has been pressing on my mind even more than the fact that one of Ron Paul's barghest whelps is now elected to the US Senate.

Pictured: Rand Paul as a D&D reference

It would seem that I, and what feels to be the vast majority of America, am so turned off by the puerile dog and pony show that we have standing in for a political system that I have ranked it beneath "slightly damaged consumer electronics" on the scale of shit to be worried about. And why not? What was there that I could have possibly done about Rand Paul getting elected except make a very ill-advised trip to Kentucky to have my head stood on my some hick? Call me selfish, but I somehow feel that would not be my best contribution to the democratic process. To be perfectly honest, I would much rather have my impending, night terror-inducing visit the Genius Bar be at the top of my list of "What is Fuckered About My Life Today" but sadly it is not. So, like many other Americans, I bury my head in in the sand on the Beach of Mundane Horseshit and try to forget the fact that this world is going to hell in a handbasket just as quickly as some douchehammers with gaudy lapel pins can (edibly) arrange it.

Problem with that line of non-thinking is, while we all are worrying over our digital personality accouterments, we lose sight of the fact that rationality is being poorly represented in the halls of power. We have let a ludicrously small, yet obnoxiously vocal segment of our society seize a modicum of control over our daily lives because the Democrat we elected to the White House wasn't made of magic and couldn't whisk us back to whatever glory days we think used to exist in this country. These people represent a dangerous blend of aggressively blind patriotism, toxic xenophobia and willful ignorance that would feel right at home in North Korea. When that mentality is corralled into some rogue state such as North Korea it presents a fairly limited threat to the rest of the planet, albeit one that should still be dealt with gingerly. Yes, North Korea has nukes and Kim Jong Il appears to be a crazy person but I suspect he knows that heading too far down that road would be the end of him and his family and the country they have effectively turned into their own private cult. So they act like the ADHD kid having an fistfight with his imaginary friend on the playground of the world: leave them alone and they'll keep playing by themselves. When it manifests in the 6' 4' 285 lb. football player with a chip on his shoulder because he got beat up by his dad (British Empire) when he was a kid and who goes around picking on anyone he deems to be even the slightest threat, well, then we, as the whole of humanity, have a real problem on our hands.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here. This is probably not a new idea but it's definitely one that is not being implemented and one that I feel needs to be implemented with all due haste. After the 2008 elections, the freshly disenfranchised crazies of the Republican Party formed the Tea Party, yes? In the following two years they managed to steer that party's ruling establishment on a path of their own choosing in exchange for not breaking completely away and voting for their own on an independent ticket. Why, pray tell, is this not happening within the Democratic Party? Now, I'm not saying, "Let's round up all the far left whackjobs and throw a national screaming match". What I'm thinking is a liberal mirror to the Teabaggers, and I do mean mirror in the sense of "an exact opposite reflection". Where they are irrational, let cooler heads prevail. Where they are reactionary, we should be progressive. Where they are ignorant, we will be informed.
The one and only thing that should be copied from the the Tea Party should be it's aggressive stance on what it believes. I watched two years of a Democrat-controlled congress repeatedly bow down to the whims of their minority opponents and allow themselves to be brow-beaten with political epithets like "unpatriotic" and "elitist". The Democrats have been by turns apologetic, uninspired and self-divided for the better part of the last two decades, no matter how much control they exert in the government. If anything at all is going to get better, that behavior has to stop and it has to stop DAMN skippy, too. The Obama campaign of 2008 proved that grassroots political movements are highly effective in the Information Age and the Tea Party reiterated that point last week. What we need are progressive political candidates that are from the people they intend to represent. If they focus on core progressive issues that effect everyone while remaining apart from the "moral" issues that the right wing gets so riled up about, I think there's a better than even chance of turning this thing around. After all, what farmer in Oklahoma is going to be against regulating commercial agricultural conglomerates that force him to buy GMO crop seeds that won't reproduce, thereby hiking his yearly overhead to a point where he can barely make ends meet? What factory worker in Ohio is going to to complain about higher EPA standards at his plant that effectively add years to his life expectancy? Who in the entire country could not get behind a system of tax incentives to corporations that keep jobs out of third world sweatshops and in the hands of a country that used to be known for what it could build instead of what it could buy? Who in any of the deeply Republican states on the Gulf Coast would vote against politicians who would jointly tell BP that they could not do any business in their states whatsoever until they had fully repaired the damage they have caused? Who, on either side of the political divide could call putting the country back together "unpatriotic" or looking out for the best interests of the Working Class "elitist"?
Look at it this way, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert got the ball rolling with their rally. They proved that, if nothing else, there are more people out there willing to attend a rally for sanity than there are to listen to Glen Beck's fear-mongering. You want that change that Obama promised? Then we have got to stop playing the game. We have to look at our surroundings and form real strategies for fixing our very real problems and we can't do it without the people that have been co-opted by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Fuck "hope", let's shoot for "results". Hope is a real hard sell in a country that is this bankrupt and broken. Fear is a much more powerful emotion, after all and right now the Reeps are wielding that sucker like a battle axe.
Let's fight them where they can never win: fundamentally changing the lives of average citizens for the better. Yeah tax cuts put more money in people's pockets for the short term but it also leaves our children uneducated, our environment undefended and our infrastructure unattended. Do you really think if we made a society where it was economically attractive not only to keep jobs in the country but to make them environmentally stable and to pay living wage, that all the corporations would flood out of the country to open up sweatshops? Some of them, maybe, but certainly not all and, knowing this country, the void left by the defectors would be filled rather quickly. The Golden Age of the 50's and it's resurgent Middle Class that people like Bill O'Reilly wax so eloquently over would never have been possible without an economy anchored in jobs exactly like this. Whether Republicans like it or not, well-regulated, Unionized corporations are what put this country on the peak it used to claim and deregulation and the gutting of the Labor Unions in the 80's triggered the nadir in which we now find ourselves. Tell me, what is patriotic about making it convenient to ship jobs overseas and disenfranchise a generation?
It's time to call the greedy bastards out on their lies. If they want to point to liberal eggheads hiding in their Ivory Towers then we can point their landed gentry and moneyed industrialists hiding in their gated communities, as well as what appear to be our tax dollars in their bank accounts and the deed to what's left of the country in their back pockets. In the rural areas, we focus on the economics of everyday life. In the cities we do the same but we push for the social issues such as gay rights and reproductive rights that don't play in the sticks. After all, just because someone doesn't approve of abortion doesn't mean their only voting option is for a party that repeatedly bends them over a counter while reading from The Bible. Reasonable compromises can be made while still achieving the goals that will better not just Democrats or Republicans but Americans as a whole and it's high time someone found their voice (not to mention their cojones) and went to work instead of backing up every time Ann Coulter gets shrill. Guess what? EVERYBODY is angry at the state of the country! That's probably why so much of middle- and lower-class America jumped on the Tea Party bandwagon in the first place. I mean, when I'm pissed off, the last thing I wand to see is Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation. Let's drop the whole hippie-shrinking-violet act and go about the work of fixing a country that is so deeply broken that it's future, and quite possibly the world's future, is rapidly becoming our worst nightmares. No one else is going to do it for us. Please remember that: NO ONE.


Whew. I do apologize. That was a lot of words without a funny picture with a pithy caption included for levity's sake. Here you go:

At least California came out of the elections OK.

Well there you have it. I don't know how in the first place to begin implementing my angry political screed but I am definitely open to suggestion so feel free to bring anything you can think of to my notice. Unless it involves canvassing for NYPIRG or GreenPeace. That way lies madness.

-NMFP


(but actually it all really is...)