I just got back from lunch at The Odeon with James, Scott, and Andy -- too much wine so this won't be eloquent. Andy asked me why I started doing a blog apart from my current, more "public" web presence, and I think it's because of what David Drake referred to as "free floating rage". I started with shoulderchip rather than this page, because I had some things to say about the way the world is being run today.
A little bit of shoulderchip is about the Middle East, but a lot of it is about the theocracy that America has become. The current administration didn't even win a majority, and they're acting as if they got 90% of the vote. They don't care what people think. All they have to say is that this is a war to protect our civilization, and the sheep that pass for the media and the public say, "OK".
As Choire says -- what should we be doing? I don't post to shoulderchip that often these days, because I'm feeling pretty apathetic about changing anything. I was never a great activist, but I feel really impotent these days.
So what's the answer?
sam
get people to actually vote in elections? i know what you mean about apathy. and as a refugee from Texas, i think the way the administration is acting is not at all surprising, given the way the good-ol-boy network works down there. i could go on for days....
James
But the people on the ballot are selected by the system which is itself the problem; there really is no choice on the ballot, even in the most "liberal" parts of the country.
We have no true leftists or progressives representing us in Washington, even in the most progressive parts of my own country, New York city. I have despaired even of Nadler, especially since the last attempt at a presidential election.
No number of pilgrimages to the ballot box has ever, or likely ever will, change that, so long as we do not have proportional voting. Apathy is built into the system, by design, for the benefit of the monied, the politico and the demagogue.
barry
Remember that the last election ended in the Supreme Court "appointing" the person who did not win a majority of the votes.
Even if I ignore that point, what kind of choice was Gore vs. Bush for a country as diverse as the USA? Do we really only get to have 2 parties? We also got to listen to both of them talk about their relationship with God, and witnessed the Democratic candidate for VP tell us that only those people that believed in God were moral. In a real democracy, someone like Lieberman would be a candidate for a right-wing religious party, not the major party that's supposedly to the left of the other major party.