Heard an interesting quote from an Egyptian lawyer in Cairo, who in a convoluted roundabout way managed to clarify the appeal of our uniquely American view of democracy...or whatever the hell the current system calls itself. He said, "I want my children to grow up and be able to elect leaders they can criticize."
Loved that statement. It seems that much of the struggling world admires our messy, inefficient, corrupt form of government -- certainly not for our ideals, which are rarely practiced in real time -- rather, because it allows us (in proper middle eastern form) to throw shoes at people with a certain degree of immunity. Concurrently, these same admirers of the system also despise us as a nation -- certainly with good cause -- for the way we tend to bully-boy our way around the world's neighborhoods. This is further complicated by our definition of 'friend.' Actually, we don't have a working definition. We only befriend inanimate objects...oil, copper, natural gas, bauxite...someplace to park an aircraft carrier. We only ask that you refrain from killing our people. Killing your own, well...
The point here is the Egyptian lawyer's comment and how that defines an outsider's view of America. What are we doing right now in this country other than overthrowing ourselves? Elements of the conservative right, the Tea Party, attacks on unions and public employee pension funds, no federal budget, pissing contents in several states...blah, blah. This is all indicative of a reactionary response to a whole lot of socio-political discord at just about any level you care to identify. An economic schism is breaking this country into self-protective camps of not-so-special, but almost desperate interests.
Maybe we need to put this country in dry dock and scrape the shit off the hull. What happened to the middle of the road anyway? A lot of rumbling has always existed about our chronically broken two-party system -- yo-yo democracy as I call it, but some middle ground did seem to flourish occasionally. Now we have gone from yo-yo democracy to the heaven and/or hell system where the only badge of inclusion is the ability to disagree with anything and everything that has an ounce of common sense wrapped around it. All in the mighty interest of dogma. It's not wrong because it is a bad idea, it's wrong because a Republican didn't think of it...or a Democrat, both of whom find themselves hiding out at the radical outskirts of both their party and their thinking. This is trench warfare.
America has always been the dog pound of the world. This country was founded by folks who found themselves persecuted in other lands. People who experienced economic privations, religious intolerance, feared for their lives or their sanity -- sought at extreme peril to give their children something better. And to stand in the bright light of personal freedom -- of thought, of ideals, of a God of their choosing. And an opportunity to break out of poverty and ignorance and hell, make a buck.
What's happened to that? The middle class has virtually vanished -- more accurately downsized, or in the creative economics of voodoo math, the bar has simply been moved upward. Middle class now means that you have to make 250k a year. Think I'm kidding? Trot down to the bank and find out for yourself. Our venerable Congress, duly sworn to uphold something -- nobody is sure what -- boasts a stunning list of accomplishments, topped by virtually legislating the foreclosure on your house -- because, "some things are too big to fail." And others are too small to matter.
Now that they've taken your home and your retirement portfolio, they want your pension. They also want to keep your children stupid and your elderly neighbor shopping in the cat food aisle. Certain people want to dismantle Obamacare because they say there is a difference between something that might be broken and the alternative -- which is non-existent at the moment. They want to throw the baby out the window with the bath water rather than trying to improve on the efforts of people that actually had the guts to take on the deficiencies inherent to our health care system.
And education? It's comparable to mugging children on Halloween. We're supposed to be a nation of ideas -- doers, thinkers -- cutting edge stuff. What are we really doing? We specialize in under valuing the need for education through chronic under-funding. We then fire teachers in order save the asses of the very bastards that just stole your house! And people in government brag about the salvation of General Motors, while your kid sits in a classroom with 43 other students, half of which can't speak English, much less spell it. But that's a good thing. Because they may never really understand that half the bigotry in this country is not aimed at them -- or some group, or a different race, or opposing ideology or religion, but at intelligence itself. We are producing far too many children that have the intellectual curiosity of a dead spider. Disagree? Spend ten-minutes watching Maury Povich open DNA tests for an audience that actually applauds the antics of people with the collective IQ of a fence post. And we celebrate this garbage as entertainment, instead of recognizing it as a symptom of something far worse.
I see much of this as a 'self-deserving prophesy.' In far too many cases we fail to elevate both the ideals and the principles that others seem to champion in our place. We seem to be a broken dynasty that has never embraced, in full appreciation of the stakes, that all systems require maintenance and perseverance as an element of a living society. We are all standing alone, paralyzed in our sacred individuality, while the nation slides forcibly and imperceptibly toward the opposite poles of reason.
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