nothing to be done

That was a headline yesterday or the day before on politico.com.

The full headline was:

Politicians:  Nothing to be done

The editor was summing up what elected officials were saying about the Colorado massacre.

"What can we do about these regularly occurring mass murders in our country, Senator, Congresswoman,  Governor, your Honor?"


"Well...it's a tragedy, naturally, a lunatic just went out there and...you know...what can we do about lunatics, a madman, really, just a madman and...uh...nothing to be done.  My heart goes out to the families and...yeah."

You know what you call a lunatic without access to military-grade weaponry?

You call him Skippy, if that's his name.  Or Jim or Tyler or whatever and you wave at him and walk on by.

I live in Rat City, so I've got some experience with lunatics.  And sometimes you can tell they're fighting some serious invisible shit and might confuse you with a part of it and so you walk a little quicker and keep a distance.  But usually you can just walk on by.

Friends, left and right, libertarian, Tea Party, apathetic, surely we can agree that the Founders didn't have some kid buying a handgun because it was cool and he could in mind when they were talking about a well-regulated militia.

Right?

And who's the madman, actually? 

The dude who finally snaps or the guy who shakes his head sadly at the death count and doesn't try to stop the next one or the next one or the next one.

A friend of mine said on Saturday

"Man, awful.  But it was about time, wasn't it?  Hadn't happened in awhile."

And  I knew what he meant.

So, we're cool with this?

Part of the risk in this country when you go to a movie or a mall or to school in the morning is that somebody might stroll in and kill you and ten other strangers in a matter of  seconds?

Yeah?

We're cool with this?

here's a bit of heresy

Willard Mitt Romney being sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America on Monday, January 21st, 2013 will not be a terrible, cataclysmic event.

It will be a drag, oh yes, but no toads will rain from the sky; no rivers will run red.

When Bush the Lesser won the second time (the first time he actually won, of course,  but that's at least eighteen other posts) I moaned to my father,

"My god, what is going to happen to this country?"

And Dad said,

"Hey.  We survived Nixon.  We survived Reagan.  It's going to be all right."

Wise words.

I worry about the Supreme Court picks, of course.  That's really the most lasting and potentially damaging thing a President can leave us.  The fact of the national security state (read Police State, read Galactic Empire a la Star Wars, read Orwellian Dystopia in the making) has been growing for decades and my man President Obama has done nothing to check it and everything to grow it and that's one thing I strongly disagree with when it comes to his administration.

So, Mitt's not going to make that any worse.  How much worse can it get?

That's probably not a question I should lightly toss out there; probably not a rhetorical question at all.

Mitt vows to repeal the Affordable Care Act, first day in office.

Yeah.  Guess what, Willard?  Not in your job description.  That's the legislative branch's bailiwick.

The Mittbot is programmed not to tell us what he's going to do when he gets behind the Big Desk, so it's all kind of a national guessing game right now, but seriously, look hard at that hard-working cyborg.  He's the most sane, boring, low-key guy out there.  Yes, he's an unthinking tool of Late (Disaster) Capitalism.  That's not a good thing.  Yes, he assaulted and humiliated a weaker, probably gay classmate in high school.  I'm in no way dismissing that or diminishing it.  Yes, he seems incapable of a genuine, honest, simple, human reaction.  To anything.  If a reporter lit his hair on fire and asked him to react, he'd probably bark out that weird laugh and say,

"Well, where's there smoke, there's combustion!  Ha ha!  More goose sauce?"

Many, many bad things if we elect this particular cyborg.  (I'm pretty sure that's unconstitutional, by the way.   It does say "person" in Section 1 of Article 2, but if corporations are people...  I don't know, I'll leave it to the scholars.)

And I'll be doing all I can to work to keep it from happening.

But let's all stay calm and be honest about it.

It won't be the end of the world.

 

Benjamin Harrison, one of my favorite Presidents, mostly because of the beard.

I'll be honest, I'm fascinated by the inside baseball stuff, the pure politics.

But what's missing, at least as far as I'm aware, is a place to have a serious, respectful conversation about conservativism, the old and the new, and liberalism, (now called progressivism, I guess) the old and the new.  I'd lay it out like this:

In the old days, conservatives were cautious, sober, serious guys who were good with money and didn't see the value in getting too involved with other country's problems or affairs.  They believed in the basic goodness and decency of people and figured the less the government was involved in anything, the better things would work out in the end.

The old-school liberals, on the other hand, had a much more pessimistic view of people.  They believed that left alone, most humans would look out for their own self-interest more than they would take care of others; especially others who didn't look, sound or act like them, their family and all of their friends.  Old-time liberals held xenophobia as a basic fact of the world and believed that the government could help to blunt its more brutal results.

So, in the old days, you had Roosevelt (a patrician guy who was called a class traitor by many of the people he grew up with) shuffling the deck and dealing out the New Deal.  And making us the World's Policeman.  Liberalism run amok.  And you had Eisenhower (a guy who had spent his life on the front lines Roosevelt convinced us to advance and defend) settling things down, building the interstate highway system and generally growing things steady and slow like a retired gentleman farmer in a true conservative fashion.

But how those  two philosophies or styles or realities relate to the parties today is beyond my meager grasp, friends.

I've written elsewhere about the deep deficiencies of the modern Democratic party.  I became an independent in Clinton's second term, although I vote exclusively Democrat in national elections.  The simplest way of saying it is that the Democratic party has been co-opted by old, self-interested, rich, cautious  white men and the Republican party has been taken hostage by fundamentalist racists.  These two highly funded camps have little genuine interest in governing and no meaningful interest whatsoever in improving the basic living conditions of you, me and the poor people of our country.

So.

Where to start?

Here, I suppose.  You got to try, anyway.

My first, tentative steps forward will be these:

Citizens  United (o, the irony of that name) is the most dangerous, short-sighted, destructive judgement in the history of the Supreme Court since the Dred Scott decision.

President Obama's stimulus package isn't working and won't work because it wasn't big enough.  They couldn't sell a billion dollar bailout (which was what was needed) so they sold what they could, knowing it was bogus.

Mitt Romney is the most ill-equipped candidate I've ever seen run for national office and that includes George McGovern and Michael Dukakis.  And he's got a real shot at winning.

Thoughts?

let's get started

An American patriot?

Me?

You bet your bippy, Bucko.

I love this county.  Love it like a rock. 

I've been lucky enough to see some other places: England, Mexico, Australia, France, Morocco, Ireland, Scotland, Argentina, Italy, places like that.


And if you're an American and you haven't traveled abroad then the first thing I can tell you is that you need to pack a bag and get out to the airport and fly away, son. 

There's a whole world out there and it's worth seeing.

And the second thing I'll tell you is that the best thing about going away is coming back home.

Because This is the Place.

And it's not just because of the chance of Big Money, it's not just Vegas Fever.  

It's part that, sure.  It's a lot that, O.K.  
But that's not all of it.
And that's not the important part, really.

It's mostly because this place is the best idea backed up by the best good luck and fortune (no way Washington should have beat the British, simply no way except that he did) resulting 236 years later in simply the best place to live on the globe.  Rich or poor, this is the best shot going. 

And we're not taking care of it and we're taking it for granted and if we keep behaving like we're behaving it's going to keep getting worse and worse.

And we're only about four months away from the election and no one seems to be paying attention, so I've decided to act.

So, in true Tom Paine fashion, I've started this blog.

If blogs had been around in the 18th century, you know Tom would have been one annoying, blogging bastard. He would have been tweeting you ten times a day and had seven thousand Facebook friends.   

I've invited three of my friends to co-anchor this thing.  Three other voices to howl in dismay or quietly counsel us all back to reason, we'll see.

I'll introduce the players.

Bill Hennessy, from St. Louis, MO, is an old high-school drinking buddy of mine.  He's a hard-core, card-carrying Tea Party true-believer and he describes himself like this:

Bill Hennessy lives a varied life. (Maybe it’s his attention span.) He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He gave up a theatre scholarship in 1984 to join the U.S. Navy where he spent nine years on active duty in the submarine force. He’s been an activist, a writer, a small business owner, a software architect, and a new media marketing director. But his activism and writing are what most people want to know about.

Tim Vahle married one of my closest friends from Dallas, TX, the luminescent Sally Nystuen, so that's how I met Tim.

Sally is the Meryl Streep of Dallas. 

No joke. 

They regularly publish articles in the Dallas papers with headlines like "The Best Actress in Dallas?" and then answer their posed question with a big-ass puff piece about and picture of Sally. 

Tim, by all accounts, was a pretty serious thespian his own damned self.  But a few years back Tim and Sally had two of the most beautiful daughters you can imagine and as Tim told me one hot Dallas night when we were down visiting (and I'm paraphrasing as drink had been taken):

 "You can drag yourself through ashes and be fine with it.  But when you've got kids, you can't drag them through the ashes.  You just can't do it, John."

So Tim exited stage left, left the impoverished, unpredictable lot of the actor, stopped performing for a while and this is how he currently describes himself:

Occupation: Vascular Access Nurse

Hometown: Texarkana, Texas

Political affiliation: registered Dem (but am going to be changing that to "independent.")

I look forward to the civil banter!

(I asked him those questions, so it's not like he's a rules and regs type person.)

And  rounding out our quartet is Dr. Robert Clough of Bangor, ME.

The good doctor didn't supply me with a bio, so I get to write it for him. Here goes, and this is all  true:

"Robert Clough" was found foraging in the Maine woods by a prominent surgeon from Bar Harbor, Dr. Hiram Cercophalus Clough, inventor of the trachea.  Robert was naked, covered from head to foot in thick, spiky hair and had no faculty of language, barking only the syllables "Sing-Gull-Malt" and "Si-Gar" at the top of his primitive lungs.  The good doctor Clough took the creature in, shaved him daily, taught him the English language and raised him as his own.  He christened him Robert after his favorite apostle.

No.  

Funny but not entirely true.

Robert is one of the great humanists I've ever met, a cardiac surgeon and a patron of the arts up in Bangor.

I spent a hilarious half-year or so with him and his incredible partner Jo Ann (I pray I'm spelling that right because she will kick my ass if it's wrong and I mean that literally, the woman is a world-ranked weight-lifter in her division, no joke) and their children, Andrew and Becca.  He's an old-school Republican, a serious man and I'm honored he's taking part in this foolishness.

So.

Tim and me on the left, arguing the philosophy of liberalism or progressivism or whatever we're supposed to call it nowadays and Bill and Robert on the right side of your screen, arguing the conservative point of view. 

Here we go.

The idea is a civil, spirited conversation about our country and what's next.

The only guidelines are no lying and no canned talking points. 

Assume intelligence and honesty all around. 

Assume we are all patriots in the real sense of the word: people who are fellow countrymen and want the best for the country.

I've got something I'll use to start the conversation tomorrow.

But know that I hope you'll join in and we'll have a broader conversation with many more voices chiming in.

Hey.  Exercise the first amendment.