Marble Composition

She's Old, But She'll Hunt

If I had one wish that I could make come true, it would be that Americans of every stripe would, well, first of all, vote, and then keep track of their votes and just how effectively their elected representatives look after their interests. I wish this would be applied especially to members of the House of Representatives, because they need to be re-elected every two years. (Sorry for the civics lesson).

It pains me to see most ordianry Americans dismissing politics as just that: politics. The media does a really nice job of mucking all that up, and people live very busy lives, but politicians wield enormous power over issues of the day, and more importantly, given that laws take some time to take effect, shape the way policies are carried out for years to come. If you hired a lawyer to represent you, be it civil or criminal, and they lied, witheld evidence, and misrepresented statements that you made, you'd hold them to account, would you not?

All this is a roundabout way of saying that I wish Americans would wake up just a little bit and take a look at what the people that you send to Congress are doing to this country. It's not pretty. (Here I sit, blubbering like a stupid baby...sorry)

I guess that's just me. I'm a political junkie. There are few of us out there.

I've come to learn that it's only the catostrophic changes that effect normal life in America that get any attention, and that most folks know, somehow, that they can sail along through some bumps in the road knowing that, in the end, all will be settled and care will be taken. The sense that after all this time, the American Way will be saved and honored. That there really is some kind of national safety net, not necessarily an actual one, but one that exists in our minds that will cushion our fall. That's my only guess as to why Americans keep sending a massive gang of absolute frauds to D.C. to tend to our national business.

Our American Democracy is a nine year old dog with bad legs, but she's eager and willing, and she knows the way. We need to make sure she stays healthy and that we mind her pups, because the wrong track, followed long enough, will foist cascading failures onto people who really don't know what's going on (was that really a dog-democracy analogy? Pathetic, really). And, as Murpy's Law would have it, they are the least prepared to accept those changes.

America has lost it's sense of self. As I was contemplating this drivel, I came across this literary reference from Eric Alterman:

To become sophisticated citizens, Americans would need high-quality, independent journalism; but news organizations, to stay in business while producing such journalism, would need an audience of sophisticated citizens.... Because most members of the public know and care relatively little about government, they neither seek nor understand high-quality political reporting and analysis. With limited demand for first-rate journalism, most news organizations cannot afford to supply it, and because they do not supply it, most Americans have no practical source of the information necessary to become politically sophisticated. Yet it would take an informed and interested citizenry to create enough demand to support top-flight journalism. The nature of both demand and supply cements interdependence and diminishes the press's autonomy. On the demand side, news organizations have to respond to public tastes. They cannot stay in business if they produce a diverse assortment of richly textured ideas and information that nobody sees. To become informed and hold government accountable, the general public needs to obtain news that is comprehensive yet interesting and understandable, that conveys facts and outcomes, not cosmetic images and airy promises. But that is not what the public demands.”

Source: Democracy Without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics
(New York: Oxford University Press) 1989 by Robert M. Entman

When Supply and Demand determine what the news media chooses to tell us about our representative government, we're in trouble folks. That's not how our Founding Fathers enviosned it. Life really is like a box of chocolates.

Two more items:

Up From Conservatism: Why The Right is Wrong for America

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

(Whew, those two smarty-pants links sure saved this lame post...)

posted by FuzzFinger @ 7/27/2005 05:54:00 PM