Slip, Slipping Away

When I was younger, I flirted with the idea of taking a degree in Political Science. I was going to become a professor in that discipline at the college level. Then one day I gave up that aspiration when I realized that I would be teaching nothing short of fiction trying to pass itself off as fact.

In reality, the lofty ideals of our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are at best something we attempt to achieve. However, because we are humans, we will never even get close to realizing those ideals in any sustainable reality. This is not an argument to chuck the whole idea of the American representative model of government. My only point is that we should never be too disappointed if the whole system doesn't always work as well as we would like it to work. Whenever humans get mixed up in any endeavor, you can count on some aspects of it to get totally screwed up.

Case in point: elections. In pure theory, an election should express the predominant will of the people, so long as whatever is being voted on falls within the constraints of what is allowed under the constitution currently in force. As I am so often forced to say, that is a nice theory. But elections can be coopted in so many ways. Up until a few years ago, money or favors granted was the usual culprit in corrupting the election process. These days, manipulating the technology of elections seems to be the technique of choice. A recent television reported that the computerized Diebold election balloting systems could be tampered with by hacking into the memory cards that are used to store the election data. A computer hacker demonstrated that the memory cards for the system could be modified so that anyone with access to the cards could swing an election any way he or she wanted to. So much for technology as being the equalizer in making the election process more honest.

Where is the bottom line to all this? Too often, the key players in an election do not respect the rules of the game or are willing to do whatever it is going to take to win, however unethical. When that becomes the reality in our elections, there seems to be less of a point to having elections. The results will no longer be anything more than a reflection of who spent the most money or who slung the most mud at the other candidate. Anymore attack campaigns, long on attack and short on substance, do more to win elections than any other strategy. It is allowable to destroy a candidate's character, career or reputation in order to win an election, so long as one can establish plausible deniability that one had anything to do with the borderline slander. Operant rule: don't get caught. It is even okay, if someone else is smearing one guy, on behalf of the other candidate. Again, plausible deniability. The new set of election etiquette seem to imply that all is fair in love, in war and now in politics as well.

If all that were at stake here was which candidate won or which resolution carried in an election, I might be able to accept this as the cost of doing business in a free society. But this corruption of the election process begins to poison the entire political system, because now candidates seem to be campaigning long after they have been elected. The political campaign just goes on and on and on... until the next campaign. I thought that once the candidate won, they were supposed to go to work and get laws passed and problems solved. I guess I was simply wrong about that. One more of my illusions about how the world works shattered. Oh, well.

And inject guys like Karl Rove into the equation and all bets are off that the system can function properly at all.

This country started out with a great idea... and those American ideas embodied in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are still great ideas... great ideals. But I certainly do not like the direction we are taking now as a people. And if the recent elections in this country are a measure of any one thing, it is that a lot of important aspects of our way of life are slipping away, a little bit at a time. The US is still the best place to live in the world today. Roland, a friend of mine from Cameroun, who understands the alternatives to living here, told me that he believes it to be definitely true. It would be the most catastrophic tragedy if we did nothing about putting this country back on track. It would be an enormous tragedy if we woke up one morning to find that so much of what has made this such a great place to live just slipped away when we weren't paying attention.

A Different Sort of Tyranny

Tonight I was having one of those nights when my mind was on overdrive and pumping out ideas for me to write about... and I was in the car, driving home on the freeway. I was having all of these random thoughts about the political scene and I had to keep some key words in my mind so that I would not forget what I wanted to say. Just some random thoughts for a crisp night in November.

A Different Sort of Tyranny

When this country was founded, there were a lot of dangerous minds on the scene. Thomas Jefferson. John Adams. Thomas Paine. Alexander Hamilton. To name a few. Speaking the mind of the fledgling American people, they were taking to task the British government for what were then perceived as grievous abuses of power. Our country was born out of huge outcry that we did not have a say in the way we were governed. And so in that spirit, we rebelled and won our independence from what was then probably the greatest military and political power in the world.

Now two hundred and thirty years later, "We, the People..." are in control. At least, that is what we believe. And we also believe that what we now have is a "...government of the people, by the people and for the people." A corollary of that notion is that the individuals who are elected to political office are supposed to be the servants of the people... not the rulers of the people. Additionally, the underlying supposition is that the true power in this political system resides in the "People" [with a capitol 'P'] and that the institutions and the leaders of this country are ultimately answerable all the way down to the man on the street.

That at least is the theory. A nice theory. But, in reality, it never really has been entirely true. In any political system, there are going to be elites. In our system, the elites simply fit a slightly different profile than those in the monarchies that used to exist or those in the political systems that exist in other countries today. Our power brokers include the huge multi-national corporations that have enormous influence over our government and which ultimately impact every aspect of our lives... whose influence goes far beyond the borders of our country. We also have political parties that usually seem more intent on promoting the agenda of their respective parties than on serving the needs of even the neediest of our citizens. And then there are the special interest groups and their representatives, the hordes of the lobbyists, who have their own narrow and usually self-serving agendas. And then there is this new breed of power brokers, like Karl Rove, who believe in winning elections and successfully implementing policies at any cost, no matter if what they do ends up permanently corrupting the political process itself. And guys like George Bush and our governor, Rick Perry always remember to stay with the people that brung them to the dance... i.e. whose money, whose influence and whose votes got them elected. Well, so much for the theory.

[ A small digression: Texas would have to be the only state in the union to have a governor whose first name is Rick!]

So where does that leave the rest of us? We are in no different a position than we were back in the days before there was a United States of America. For most of us, the decisions made inside the beltway or in Austin, Texas, are beyond the realm of our ability to have any real impact. Laws are made, either in our best interests or not, and there is usually very little we can do about it, notably in the area of tax law. And you know who is going to benefit by those laws. Not those of us in the middle class and down. Occasionally, as in the mid-term elections just past, we have really been pissed off by performance of the powers that be and we make our dissatisfaction known loud and clear. But usually we are our normal apathetic selves and just sort of go with the flow.

I was going to say, we just get screwed by those in power. But since, collectively, we have allowed most of these incompetents to be put into power in the first place, I don't think we have any real right to complain... at least not until we are willing to get more actively involved in the political process. That takes a certain level of commitment to getting involved and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of that happening these days.

Anyway, back to the point. We threw off the yoke of the British monarchy because we saw British rule as the worst form of tyranny and our forefathers chose not to live under the British thumb any longer. So what are we dealing with now? May I modestly suggest that what we have now is simply a different sort of tyranny, one of our own choosing.

An American Tragedy

After we have gotten over our sense that the downfall of guys like Tom DeLay or Newt Gingrich is justice achieved, we need to realize that what has happened is a great American tragedy.

This comes under the heading of power can corrupt even the most well-meaning of men. Take Tom DeLay. If you ask the folks down in Sugarland, Texas, not far from Houston, they will tell you that at his best, Mr. DeLay did some really remarkable things in his home town. He and his wife were responsible for ramrodding a project to build a comfortable dormitory for kids who were in the child-welfare system. They would live there with caring supervision while they were in the system, rather than being moved from one foster home to another. They would have a place that they could call home and a place they could return to after they grew up. So these men are not by nature bad people all the time. Sometimes they simply confuse the raw exercise of power with the idea that they are supposed to be serving the needs of their constituents.

And in the cases of Mr. DeLay and Mr. Gingrich, they paid a very high price. When Sonny Bono was serving in Congress about the same time as Mr. Gingrich, he warned Mr. Gingrich not to become too full of himself and his accomplishments... that there would be a price if he did. The Honorable Mr Bono came from the world of show business and knew only too well that what he was saying was true and the the high and mighty have often been taken down a notch or too when they lost their sense of perspective.

Reality bites. Reality bites even the behinds of the most powerful people in the world. It is not just a matter of there being justice in the world. It is also a matter of the way that things should be: there is going to be a price for everything that we choose to do in life... or in politics. In the process, individuals who have chosen to serve this country in government can lose their vision for what can be accomplished and squander the rare opportunities to make this country a better place in which to live, for all our citizens, great and small. That such a thing does happen... that is a great American tragedy.