Are We Serious?

Assaulted in SUV, she
grabs his knife and pants
and flees the scene.

Thank you for the wonderful and appropriate poem, Consolation, it was much appreciated.

Is this a serious nation or not when it comes to government? I think perhaps it once was, but looking on the contemporary scene in American politics I confess to having serious doubts. I have no idea what the solution might be but I am pretty sure the current practices have reduced our national politics to the same level as electing the President of the eighth grade. I guess the problem is that anyone can run for high public office no matter how ridiculously ill-qualified they might be. The cases of Senatorial candidates Sharon Angle, in Nevada, and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware are the best cases in point. Neither of these women have any genuine qualifications for office whatsoever. At best they are fast talking phonies and at worst, raving lunatics. Yet they are actually running for Senatorial seats in our highest echelons of government. This is absurd. There are other candidates, mostly, if not all Republicans, that are equally unsuited for office (perhaps not quite as badly unsuited as Angle and O’Donnell).

What I find more disturbing even than our current crop of Senate and House candidates, is the situation when it comes to Presidential aspirations. Here in America it seems that anyone and everyone can run for the highest office in the land (also probably the world). All you have to do to be a candidate for President, I gather, is simply announce that you are a candidate, or want to be. There are no prerequisites, no qualifications and experience necessary. While it is true that most of these self-proclaimed candidates never get anywhere, the line between a respectable, legitimate candidate, and a nonsensical one is not completely clear. I saw somewhere today, for example, that there are memos in existence that suggest Sarah Palin is actually going to run for President. I don’t know if this is true but it easily could be. Sarah Palin is not qualified to be President of the United States, or even to presume to such office. Being a failed half-term governor of a small population state is simply not sufficient experience for the most powerful position in the world (to say nothing of the fact she is apparently as ignorant as a cedar post). But if Palin is unqualified, what about some of the others who are aspiring to run, like Newt Gingrich, for example, the world’s greatest hypocrite, already driven from Congress for blatant violations of the rules, a pompous ass who pretends to be a great intellectual leader of the Republican Party. While it is true he has at least some high-level political experience, his obvious, blatant, dishonest, opportunistic, hypocritical and self-serving pontifications should easily disqualify him from office. Then there are a number of what might at best be considered “third-stringers” who have expressed Presidential aspirations: Eric Cantor, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barber, Mike Huckabee, and others, not Tea Party types, but not much to brag about either. Even those Republican candidates that might be accepted as serious are not without serious flaws, take Mitt Romney (the lying Mormon, and Jeb Bush (of the Bush mafia) as examples. It is a mystery to me who the Republican candidate for President in 2012 might be but certainly none of the above would seem entirely suitable. But what bothers me about this is not that these particular candidates are so inappropriate, but that it seems to indicate a lack of seriousness when it comes to electing our officials. This is perhaps because whoever is President serves only at the will of corporate interests so it really doesn’t matter much anymore who the President is, being mostly just a figurehead (George W. Bush would seem to be a good example). I see that the guy who wanders around New York strumming his guitar and singing in his underwear has expressed an interest in running for President. Don’t laugh, he might win.

This is supposed to be the most powerful nation in the world, our President is supposed to be the single most powerful figure in the world, our Congress is supposed to be equal in importance, and yet we have an electoral system that allows even lunatics for compete for office (and sometimes win, witness some of our leaders who have already been elected and seem to have no sense of responsibility whatsover!). We seem to be no more serious about our government than we are about who leads the local cub scout troupes or the local knitting club. While nations in Europe and Asia have been moving ahead in technology and science we have been falling further and further behind as seen in comparisons now with other nations in education, math, science, and so on. In fact we are slowly being seduced into a nation of wage slaves, in debt to the “company store,” via credit cards, phony loans, and questionable laws that always favor corporate interests over those of ordinary citizens. We are seeing right now the results of the fixed Supreme Court’s ruling that corporations can make unlimited monetary donations to political interests they favor, a situation if not quickly corrected (somehow), means we will never be free of our corporate masters, “another day older and deeper in debt.”

LKBIQ:
The state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another--no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.
Friedrich Engels

TILT:
The U.S. Military is dropping mice laced with Tylenol by helicopter on Guam in an attempt to control the invasive brown snakes.