Oi. Just finished writing an overlong rant/reply/comment (see the post below this one) on
Sirotablog to a mostly excellent post about
why nobody's really buying the Democrats' bullshit rhetoric these days.Most of the comments and (to some degree) the article itself seem to suggest that self-proclaimed Democratic Party loyalists are recognizing that Democratic politicians are mostly punching them in the back of the head and telling them that a Republican did it; but, unfortunately they must do this, because they have to stay in place until they have enough power to back up their rhetoric.
They also seem to suggest that, surprise surprise, people are noticing this flagrant lip service, and they need to stop cowing to the Repubs because people think they have no spine, and how are they gonna get the votes they need to get into power? As though their lack of power is a semi-valid excuse for being little more than damage control or riot dispersal for left-leaning Americans, and that they'll turn into perfect progressive populists with no motivation to act against the will of the American people if/when they return to greater power.
As if the (-D) next to their name implies innate goodness, and so long as they're a Democrat, the worst they can do is wander from the path of righteousness, and just need to be brought back into the fold!
I'm as fed up with the mindset that
"Democrats can solve every problem that Bush and the Republicans are causing" (that I admittedly held and trumpeted for a long time until recently) as I am with the
"Bush and the Republicans have Godly intentions and can save the world, but these damn liberals just misconstrue and pervert all of his Divine Edicts" mindset.
I know how hard it is to internalize that your favorite team is
paid by the same people as their rivals, and that neither team cares so much about the fans they invoke when asked about motivation as they do about
how much money they get from the gate. We train ourselves to take sides. I should know, I live in New England, and when you're from around here, you don't like the Yankees and the Red Sox. You HATE the Yankees and ARE the Red Sox (typical dialogue: "YEAH!
WE won the World Series!" "You did? Where's your Championship Ring and jersey?" "Shut up, you prick."), or vice versa. No in betweens. Yankees and Red Sox fans get into everything from friendly arguments to gang wars over which team is actually the one that SUCKS.
Meanwhile, the players mostly know each other, have frequently been on the same team in the past, generally don't hold anything against each other personally, and both get their revenue from both the people with an NY on their hats as well as those with a B. And the brains under both of these hats know this, but still persist in goading each other as if the choice had any higher reasoning behind it than greater proximity to a stadium or preference for team color.
And that's what it's like with politics, at least in a two-party system. We all know that whoever we vote for, things aren't gonna get done the way we want them to, so we just pick whatever guy seems nicest to us. But now, thanks to
electronic vote counting systems, the electoral college, and the Supreme Court, we really have little say (short of public outcry) in who plays for our team in the Major Leagues unless the
owners and
management happen to like our choice. For purposes of this analogy, the biggest difference between baseball and politics, really, is the whole baseball-not-affecting-our-lives-whether-or-not-we-pay-attention-to-it thing.
God, I can't believe I just made a baseball analogy. I hate baseball. And sports analogies are so cliche.
Speaking of cliche, a friend of mine once told me her theory that "Cliches are only cliches because they're always true." Ever since, I have been trying to come up with an example to prove that as not universal, and I haven't yet.
And we have all heard, internalized, and had demonstrated the cliches about all politicians being crooked, about nothing new under the sun, about absolute power corrupting, money talking, bullshit walking, etc. They fall freely from our lips with a wry smile when we see the latest outrage.
But we don't believe these cliches. Not always. Not absolutely. Not with the weight they actually carry.
We'll say "All politicians are corrupt, crooked liars." and "I really think Howard Dean could change things for the better" in one breath, not even acknowledging the dissonance of those two statements.
Liberals talk about how anti-war they are, how much they want peace in our time, and say that we need to get those warmongering Republicans out of office so we can have one big happy Democratic jamboree in America where everyone is treated fairly and no one's feelings are hurt, and the love, abortions, and healthcare are all free. Then they'll talk about how the last "justified" war was under Roosevelt, a Democrat, and inevitably go on to discuss how much the Iraq War (which was started with plenty of Democratic Party support) is starting to resemble Vietnam. But they never mention that 'Nam was started by Kennedy (-D) and escalated by Lyndon B. Johnson (-D).
Nixon (who I am by no means defending) tends to take the rap for it because he resisted pulling out (note the lack of partisan spite when it comes to keeping us at war) and because he was a Republican, who most tend to think of as the war party because they've been in power for most of the last 35+ years, and we have never really been at peace. Kennedy's involvement is glossed over because Vietnam wasn't a "bad" war until later on, kind of like "Operation Iraqi Freedom", where even anti-war types said, "Well, I don't like it, and I know he's not a threat, but I can't stop it, and Sadaam IS a bad guy, after all." Plus, JFK was shot down before the press had a chance to find out all the shit he did and turn on him. LBJ is only known as the Vietnam chant guy to most of us born after 1970, and since he's not known for much besides the war, I think a lot of folks assume he was a Republican. I think I did at one point.
And that's the thing: it doesn't matter what party I think he was in because
he pulled the same exact BULLSHIT. It doesn't matter if the man in charge says Social Security is a Socialist fraud, or if he says lack of national healthcare is the greatest problem facing America today
if he still sends our kids off to die for reasons that never become entirely clear.But if we maintain that our guy is different or better somehow, no matter what he's done in the past or what he isn't doing today, the only people we are helping with our stubborn denial and selective blindness are
those who recognize and seek to exploit that blindness for their own gain.Here's another cliche: "Life's not fair." We've all said it. But behind that general complaint lies the essential assumption that it
should be, when the only impulse behind that self deceit is that we
want it to be. We are terrified at how futile and foolish any moral behavior we exercise would be if life was truly unfair, and as a result, we raise each generation to strive for fairness, and this common striving and wanting leads us to believe that is how everyone feels. And God knows I want life to be fair, I strive to be fair, and I expect people to treat me fairly. I don't know how realistic such an ideal is, but in moderation, I think it can benefit mankind in many ways, and I believe that, to some degree, a great majority of us have this noble vision.
But there are areas where our vision of the world can blind us to
aspects that don't fit comfortably within it.
There's a point where trust turns into gullibility, where optimism turns into denial, and where idealism turns into naivete. A point where our best eyes and most rational minds will not allow us to see and understand things that are simple and obvious because they are too devastatingly painful to accept.
All these points form a neat paradigm, a box of possibility, if you will, that contains our personal understanding of the way things are, and the limits to what can be. And we each have a unique "box". Huh huh huh, I said, "unique box" huh huh huh. Er, anyway, this box is constantly changing size and shape, as we learn new things, discover new possibilities, and have previous beliefs discredited. Anyone who has worked for a corporationg has heard the cliched command to "Think outside the box." It is often difficult to grasp that your carefully crafted box is flawed, so it can be a difficult and even painful to change it, which is why people who can "think outside the box" are considered to be exceptional. The majority of us hold beliefs of some type or another that are so cherished, or so integral to the construction of our box that we will stubbornly deny any question to these beliefs, limits, or boundaries, even extending other boundaries to accept previously unbelievable ideas to defend those in question.
This is not necessarily closed-mindedness so much as a protection mechanism. If you believed that literally anything was possible, someone might take all your money by selling you a bridge, or get their kicks by telling you that you'll float if you walk off a bridge, or convert you to
Scientology, or do any number of other harmful things. And beyond that, sometimes, the beliefs are so fundamental to worldview that without even considering it, we understand that if they were struck down, they'd take many others with them, like a shaped C4 charge on the main support of a large building. We see that, regardless of how valid the questioning of these beliefs, these boundaries, these foundations, and regardless of how foolish we may be if we don't examine them, that the resultant damage and resultant need for reconstruction would, as a friend of mine put it, "just be too painful to even consider." There's even a psychological term for this feeling: "cognitive dissonance". This is what happens when doubt is raised over the veracity of something that you just
know is true, and that must be true in order for a lot of other beliefs to be so.
As a nation, we need to recognize just where these keystones are, and eye them with grave suspicion.
We need to understand that there are dangerous people out there who know exactly where these support columns are, who know that they are not as solid and binding as they appear, and they have no qualms about hurting us for their own benefit and hiding from our wrath beyond the point of our protective blindness.
We need to stop giving "our team" a pass for abusing us the same way the "other side" does, just because we don't want to "give the other team an edge", because I'm not talking about Democrats or Republicans here, I mean our whole system of governance, and by us, I mean Americans in general.
We need to stop standing there with our team memorabilia and confused tears in our eyes, whimpering, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" and start grabbing bats and muttering "Why you lying piece of shit..."
We need to stand up in our bleachers, take off our hats, look at each other and say, "Hey, this is a damn ripoff! I paid a chunk of my paycheck for these tickets only to sit out in the nosebleeds and watch the action on a giant TV! Both teams run in the same direction, around the same circle, that guy was on our team last year, they rarely ever hit the guys on the other team, and when it's over, they shake hands and take our money! Then they do the same thing next year, only they charge more for it! Hell, I helped pay for this stadium, and they'd never let me play out there. Fuck this, let's rush the field!"
Because if we don't show our team that they're going to be working at McDonald's if they don't start playing like we want them to, logically speaking, why should they do anything different? Why should they rock the boat when it looks like smooth sailing to them? Hell, just look at the Red Sox and then look at how well-known they were and how
Boston fans were always just as puppy dog-loyal as any Yankees fan. But given the contrast between the "special kind of fan" behind the Sox, and George Steinbrenner, it shouldn't come as any surprise who has done better over the years, no matter how much money New York has. Obviously, we should not stop cheering when our leaders do something right, but we should not get reminiscent for past moments of excellence when we should be demanding a pennant
every year.
Because everybody in the skybox is forgetting that if enough of us rush the field, security won't be able to stop us from playing.
