My Vote is Worth Something
Tough-guy writer James Ellroy’s 1995 novel, American Tabloid, starts off…
“America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.
Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight.
The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He talked a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab.”
Our current well-spoken president has a list of people he wants to kill with those fabulous drones of his. Hitler set off 9,521 V1 rockets towards England and killed 22,892 people. George Bush and Barack Obama between them authorized 326 drone attacks and killed 2,832 people. Sure the Nazis had volume, but let’s talk civilian kill ratios. American technology is four times better when it comes to bringing down hellfire.
Someday this fall I’ll receive my absentee ballot in the mail. If I vote for Democrats I’ll be supporting the President, Senators, and Congressmen who passed on holding the Bush/Cheney regime accountable — who passed on holding Wall Street accountable — but passed and signed laws like the National Defense Authorization Act.
If I vote for Republicans I’ll get an administration very similar to the one we’ve endured since the advent of Hope and Change. The Elite’s war on poor people, the middle class, and especially women, will get uglier … more overt if that’s possible. Maybe that’s what’s needed to make people finally shove back and say “ENOUGH.”
The most positive thing I can do with my vote is to … recycle it. It’s worth the paper it’s printed on. Our Democratic Republic isn’t just broken … it’s smashed into a fine powder. If the handle of your favorite coffee mug snaps off, you can crazy glue it back on and use it tomorrow. But you can’t crazy glue powder together and end up with anything that looked and functioned like your old coffee mug. Best sweep it up and throw it away. Besides … the political game is a diversion anyway. It’s just one part of the Dominant Culture’s noise machine.
Kurt Vonnegut’s 2005 collection of essays, Man Without a Country sums it up…
“We are killing this planet as a life-support system with the poisons from all the thermodynamic whoopee we’re making with atomic energy and fossil fuels, and everybody knows it, and practically nobody cares. This is how crazy we are. … We’re really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbra Streisand song, ‘People who need people are the luckiest people in the world,’ she’s talking about cannibals. Lots to eat. Yes, the planet is trying to get rid of us, but I think it’s too late. …The good Earth we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”
June 20, 2012
