THE END OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

joan mitchell

Last night I wrote my response to the recent news of the Republicans tripping up Congress again, continuing the promise made by Ronald McDonald Reagan during his first run for president to destroy our government. Thirty years later his followers keep the momentum going on this promise. It has been the nature of the Reagan Revolution to take from the working people and give to the rich. The working people pay taxes the corporate rich use for wars to make themselves richer and the people paying for the wars poorer. I have seen steady progression along this line since 1980. One thing that is not going to happen, that seems to me sensible and needs doing, is tax the corporations like individuals since the Supremes declared corporations individuals. Of course, the purpose of the Supreme Court decision was to give the Republicans political advantage, not to increase revenues in the nation they are systematically working to destroy.



One of the more curious phenomena I've seen in my lifetime is the brain-drain from Europe during WW2 when the intellectuals and artists went to America where many of them stayed after the war. They were hired into our universities, raising our standard of education way up during the 50s and 60s. Then the European intellectuals started dying out. As they went away, or standards went downward, until by now we're back in the American groove after an artificial rush of intelligence. Looking at our politicians as people with American college educations, it doesn't say much for our educational system. That added to the Republicans shutting down every funding there is for education, until by now after half a century of only Education majors getting teaching jobs. Where I went to school, the Phys Ed majors said thank God for the Education majors, like South Carolina said thank God for Mississippi.



Last night I wrote out another harangue and deleted it when it was finished. I didn't want to subject you to some more of my political inaccuracies. I hear people on NPR talk shows calling in, like Diane Rehm show, Talk of the Nation and another one or two, telling their opinions and conclusions they've drawn about government this and that. They all sound so ridiculously uninformed, even the seemingly better informed ones. I've taken to hearing people at Selma's talking politics in the same way. I hear myself talk, read what I've written, and it's so incredibly uninformed I don't know why I have to feel compelled to express it. The answer I give myself is everybody has their own way of seeing according to their own experience and their own selective hearing. What I write is my own conclusions drawn from my own interpretations based in nothing but listening to the news all my life. These expressions of how I see the unreality of our political world are mine and mine alone. I don't mean for you to take them for your own, nor do I care for you to attempt to convince me of yours. I offer it for your amusement or even consideration to add to your own thinking, or turn your thinking away from my way of seeing. It's all ok by me. It's not even air to breathe. It's just brain cells sparking and triggering each other, however that works. I'll say it's thin as thought. That's not even one atom thick.



Deleting what I wrote, I felt it pointless to say anything. This morning I drove into town to have Kenyan coffee at Selma's and enjoy some good company with whoever showed up. The old feller Moxley, whose first name I don't know, was there. Then Dudley came in with Cynthia and Andrea, the two women who attended to his wife, Caroline, who died yesterday after a long decline from MS. Beth and Charlie came in. Then Joe came in. By the time Joe arrived we had all been talking our thoughts on the recent news, and it sounded like what I wrote last night. That set me to thinking there might have been something worthwhile in it, simply because it was how one person saw it. We at the coffee bar all saw it from different aspects, some informing others, some not. Conversation was lively. Beth turned out to be the conversation leader simply from being so well informed. She really pays attention. She's good at expressing her thoughts in words. I love it when Beth gets going on one of her topics of interest. She studies and she pays attention. She has a good mind and it seems to me a balanced way of putting it all together for whatever conclusion it leads to. It was a lively 2.5 hours.



Then Roy came in and took the stool to my right. He started coming down on the ACLU for all the Limbaugh reasons. I was having a good time inside, because from my way of seeing, the ACLU is the barbed wire fence between democracy and fascism. Since the Reagan Junta and the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice seizure of power, ACLU, like the truth, has been ridiculed to powerlessness. How do we know the truth when we see/hear it? We have to keep ourselves informed to be able to decipher the truth from a structure made of lies. Also, we all have what I call our "truth center" within that rings something true or false. I don't mean like test questions, but like interpersonal relations. It's subtle, to be sure. We know other people better than we know reading or study. Roy telling me his way of seeing it I found a great deal of fun. I didn't agree with anything he said, but saw no need to tell him. I was interested in what an American could find reprehensible about the ACLU. I didn't learn anything, because he never gave a reason, only that he blames them for what's wrong with our country.



We have a truly dysfunctional government now, thanks to the Reagan Junta's strategy of divide and conquer that has wreaked havoc on the American people ever since. It has conservatives hating liberals so much the liberals hate conservatives in turn. The language charged up by Limbaugh and the Fox network is heading us toward a civil war of some sort that won't be pretty. Like cancer is eating up the American people, cancer is eating up our government, the Southern California / Texas billionaire right wing cancer. I cannot help but see that the American experiment with democracy didn't work. Communism didn't work either.



Maybe in this time of the end of communism and democracy / capitalism something new is brewing. Maybe this is what the 2012 prophecies are about, the end of these belief systems we've collectively adhered to and lived by that worked relentlessly against human interest, the interest of the planet and all its life forms. Historically, as one belief system goes out, another comes in. This could turn out to be a very dynamic time, but the American working people, including the management class, may suffer mightily before a halt comes to the momentum of the corporate rich taking everything from us to themselves, putting it in off-shore accounts, Cayman Islands and others, so they don't have to pay taxes. Dollars among the working poor are like fishes in the sea, diminishing toward extinction in very near future, unless this momentum comes to its end. Ralph Nader saw this coming. He told us about it years ago. Television laughed out loud. A liberal that reads books.

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