I've been feeling kind of strange lately, like everybody just go away and leave me alone. But that's not very realistic of me is it? So anyway I find myself becoming violently ill when I think about the whole presidential race. First off, I don't really hold true to the vote down party lines thing. I think I would be a Republican, if they weren't festering with evangelical bullshit, also they haven't exactly been conservative with spending. Which might lead me to the Democrats, except I just think they're full of shit too. Exactly how is one man going to affect so much change? And would it really be any better? It seems like it will certainly cost me more.
Maybe that's the whole problem with politics. It costs somebody. The right puts it on everybody, and the left on the richest amongst us. I'm in that percentage of wealthiest. Though I can't believe it. We, my wife and I, make just over $100,000 annually. I can't even imagine how people making less do it... at least around here.
But I'm trying to stay neutral in this diatribe... seriously. I just don't know how inspiration is going to fix our problems. I can't even bring myself to check any websites, fact checking anybody right now because I believe, as hard as this might be to imagine, that the government only muddies the water. I can't say I was better off when so and so was in office, because there's just too many variables to try to pin down. Your job, your cost of living, your personal choices, and the litany of choices for everyone else. Is one man in charge of all of this?
So we come to this, the democratic convention. I see Ted Kennedy made a speech, they were saying and showing how it was like his speech in 1980. Does anyone else find that amusing? Almost 30 years in-between speeches, and nothing has changed? hmmmmmmm... It sounds and smells like pipe dreams to me.
So again I ask, instead of all this crap, this pomp, you know this one came from a single parent home, or that one was a POW in Vietnam, can we get to the task at hand? Or is there nothing left to talk about? Can we not talk of how things can be or should be, and start talking about real difference that we can make now? And just what has been done in year or so that either candidate can hang his hat on? Nothing.
If that's all we're about, the speeches, then why register to vote? It's pretty ridiculous when you think about it.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
My Politicalness
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2 comments:
Along those lines, a movie suggestion: "My Fellow Americans" (1996), maybe two stars, but on topic.
From the NYT: Is it just coincidence that Jack Lemmon and James Garner, as bickering ex-Presidents in ''My Fellow Americans,'' look a lot like George Bush and Richard Nixon? Probably not. In this funny, farcical spoof of Presidential mediocrity, greed and arrogance, any resemblance to an American statesman living or dead is pure gravy. If the moviegoing public guffawingly laps up the film's bone-deep cynicism, it will be a sign of just how tarnished the nation's highest office has become since Watergate.
''My Fellow Americans'' (''Grumpy Ex-Presidents'' would have been a more descriptive title) finds the former chief executive Russell P. Kramer (Mr. Lemmon), a Republican, and his longtime Democratic foe, ex-President Matthew Douglas (Mr. Garner), fleeing for their lives. Because of an unwinding political scandal involving their corrupt White House successor, William Haney (Dan Aykroyd), certain parties have decided that they should die together in a helicopter crash and be assigned posthumous blame for the new President's glaring ethical lapses.
Yup, PB, that's a good one, that pretty much describes politics as usual, from the smallest board to the most important office in the land.
I think that cynicism is a natural response to most candidates today. The UNnatural response is the hysterical, wild-eyed belief that one man (or woman) or one Party can save us from ourselves; our bad investments, our bad decisions, our bad habits, even our vices. Left to our own devices, we can save - or lose - ourselves, and if politicians were honest they would tell people that they had to start paying their own way and making their own lives, not endlessly depend on others to do it for them. But there it is - you don't get voted into office if you practice and demand reason and common sense. "We have met the enemy and he is US!"
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