November 13, 2005
Elephants and Rats
A thousand DOCK parties----
Well, it's probably not quite a thousand. Howard Dean is going to be interviewed on Meet the Press today, along with his Republican counterpart. He'll be asked to interpret the election results from last Tuesday, but he'll probably not be given time to get into any specifics, so I thought I'd lay out a couple of things that happened and are planned.
The latter category first because that's real simple. This coming Tuesday, there are going to be almost a thousand Democratic Organizing Campaign Kickoff parties all around the country to inaugurate the 2006 election season. If you haven't planned one yourself, you can find one near you at
http://www.democrats.org/event
Even if you can't attend in person, you can sign in as a virtual guest. Unlike the annual NPR Membership Drive, which is mainly designed to collect money, these house parties are designed to increase the membership--warm bodies who will be available to sign up as candidates or campaign workers for the next round of elections. Oh, and go to
http://tools.democracyforamerica.com/petition/iraqpledge/ and take the pledge to support only candidates who:
1. Acknowledge that the U.S. was misled into the war in Iraq
2. Advocate for a responsible exit plan with a timeline
3. Support our troops at home and abroad
The most recent elections had some Democratic successes which were widely covered by the corporate press. Less attention has been paid to such things as that 50% of the candidates supported by DFA were elected all around the country, many as first time candidates and many challenging long-neglected Republicans. Here in New Hampshire, DFNH did even better in that 9 of 11 Democrats were chosen by the electorate for a range of local positions. We're building a farm-team.
That the Republicans are dropping like lead balloons in the popularity polls isn't really surprising to anyone who's been aware of the lies and misinformation the party leadership has been spewing. It may be surprising that it's taken so long for the American public to catch on, but that's mainly because we assume, falsely, that in the electronic age information should be broadcast and received more quickly. The reason that doesn't happen is mainly a consequence of the fact that our brains still run at their usual speed and more information arriving more quickly just overwhelms the capacity to absorb it--sort of like trying to take a drink from a pressure hose.
I was really shocked to come across a quote from Thomas Jefferson that's totally applicable to what we are witnessing today. Gary Lindberg used it to introduce a chapter: "Diddling on a large scale" in one of my favorite books, THE CONFIDENCE MAN IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
"We are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth."
And that's really what we've been seeing the evidence of--tricks and diddling of various segments of the public by the likes of Abramoff (Native Americans), Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed (evangelical Christians), and Tom Delay (gullible Texans). Tom Delay's diddle is, of course, the most destructive because in engineering the composition of Congress to pack all the committees with Republican Chairmen who won't investigate or check on any mis-administration, he's made it possible for the U.S. Treasury to be looted just as surely as if he'd left the door to the bank vault open.
Finally, I've also come to another surprising realization--sort of. The fact that American corporations seem unable to compete in the vaunted "free market" without a lot of special interest legislation giving them monopolies and without the backing of our military might, wherever other nations prove disinclined to be diddled. Gun-boat diplomacy is alive and well in the twenty-first Century. So,it's not surprising "Swiftboat Veterans," who managed to throw John Kerry off his stride, are now targeting Bernie Sanders, the Congressman from Vermont, who's offered to serve in the Senate. The Swifties will no doubt attack Sanders' "liberal" positions. But what they're really fronting for are the corporations angling to make a killing in the electronic information age. Which is also why we need to be alert to any efforts to restrict or limit what we're creating here--a civic media, controlled by the people, rather than corporate interests.