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Sunday, May 01, 2005

Fair To Middlin' (or is it Meddlin'?)

Politics — I tend to avoid talking about the subject (other than the occasional cheap shot at the Holey Empire to the South and its puppet president-pope non-elect). However, today the Gazetteer links to some bloggers who are embracing partisanship and polarization.

I don't agree with that approach. Yes, in our country there are and have been elected officials who I wouldn't be seen on the same street with unless I was spitting at them. Paul Martin? Frank McKenna? Ralph Klein? Jean Chretien? Brian "I don't know how I got this chin up America's ass, but ain't it a nice brown now?" Mulroney? But I suspect that in the end who we elect to govern us says more about us as electors than it does about them as electees.

Seems to me that with all the crimes perpetrated on the world by the US government* in recent years in the name of De-Mockracy for oil and money there might be more of a need now than ever before for people who'll stand firm in the middle and attempt to be objective. No matter how many other people are drawing lines which they claim define everything as left or right.

Funny, you know, I look around at politicians, media, and people I know and their stating of their positions in what they seem to see as a two banded political spectrum seems to drown out anything else they might have to say; making that "anything else" and whether it's positive or negative seem like an afterthought.

Truly, what I seem to be hearing all around me is "Left, right, left-right-left ... Left, right, left-right-left!" Everyone is marching to their own little wars (where they just end up shooting themselves in the feet, at best).

But nothing is just "left" or just "right." Politics is more like a colour wheel than a spectrum: there are socialists, conservatives, liberals, communists, libertarians, anarchists, papists, freethinkers, quakers, and monarchists, just to name a few (and yes, religion is only politics by another name). I, myself, lean in at least four of the above directions depending upon the issue.

Portraying politics as an "either-or" thing ensures only two things, two things which reinforce each other, those being:
  1. that turmoil, disagreement and dissatisfaction continue over most of the world
  2. that power over humanity's present and future continues to reside not in the hands of humanity, but in the golemical economic structures and processes to which we've abdicated responsibility, reason, and justice.


*"US government" these days is no more than a pseudonym shared by various multinational corporations which have reached a point of self-perpetuation — the people in the CEO chairs and on the boards of directors, etc., no longer matter. They are as completely replaceable as the greeters at wal-mart, and have barely any more effect on the momentum and direction of such corporations than said greeters do.

2 comments:

RossK said...

Point taken MJ.

Not sure I agree with your analysis though, because it is the ability of the craptacular corporatocracies to foist assymetric equivalencies on us (ie. 2+2=5) that really have folks in trouble down south....and out here on the left coast at least it is fast being perfected to a 'T'.

Regardless, now that you have me hooked on Batgirl, none of this may matter anymore anyway.....

John said...

Yeah, Ross, that I like Batgirl's approach to baseball writing is about the only thing I'm real sure of these days.