[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
Such is the tagline I use every time I cross-post at Daily Kos, publishing an attempted tiny reminder that a democracy is not a country, it isn’t a republic that has elections, it’s not a place with a constitution that guarantees rights. These are merely some of the functional pieces of organized life that lead to an everyday experience that is the American democracy.
Democracy resides in the hearts and minds of all our people as life flows by in real time. We could have elections and borders, but if you’re discriminated against with a minimum wage job that has no health insurance—along with 40 million other human souls—it could be fairly said democracy doesn’t mean a damn thing in a country that exploits and harms so many. A few years ago millions of Iraqis held stained purple fingers aloft, did that deliver democracy to them?
I was initially fairly puzzled at my non-reaction to yesterday’s devastating news from the Supreme Court, the outrageous equation of corporations as individuals leading to even more vast corporate power. Why wasn’t I as upset as everyone else at the latest terrible blow to the democracy?
I expected it, of course, after Bush vs. Gore the utterly naked political thrust of the five creep conservative judges forever abolished any expectation of real judicial action from those thugs, the laughable idea the Court is impartial, beholden to Justice, will never hold sway in America again.
But still...why am I not unholy alarmed at the news, even if it was expected? The Democracy could be in real peril! Well, duh, the democracy was in fact imperiled with the selection and confirmation of so many quack thugs to the Supreme Court, many years ago. At the start of the century they went berserk and stole the election for George Bush, hell, never mind the elevated elements of society like equality and employment that deliver a real democracy, the creeps on the Supreme Court took one of the basic building block pieces—elections—and deliberately smashed it all to hell in their theft.
We’ve been dealing with the broken pieces and smashed-up country ever since. The democracy is in grave peril? No. The democracy was smashed nine years ago in Bush vs. Gore, hasn’t the utter fucking nightmare been so much fun ever since? If I’m wrong, ask yourself: when in all of our post-WWII times has the country been so messed up on so many fronts? That’s what happens when the will of the people is tossed, an underpinning pillar of the democracy obliterated with the broken pieces of the country lying around, you get the nightmare we’re living now.
How I loathe the denial and sore loser accusations about all the stark truth to this. Al Gore would have read the memos and acted, 9/11 and all the rest never had to happen, just imagine where we’d be without those felon lying thugs Bush and Cheney stealing and looting everything they could for eight years under a vicious boot heel of fear, war and terrorism.
If I’m wrong, how come any of your telephones conversations can be tapped? How can we spend $30 billion more next year to kill more in Afghanistan when our very own people are dying and suffering every year? How is it monstrous inequality like black employment is constantly ignored? Why is it that every industrialized democracy can care for their people with real health care while we cannot?
Well, because they’re democracies, of course, we are not. Our democracy isn’t in peril, it’s gone.
We deal with the pieces as best we can every day, live in denial about what the Supreme Court did in Bush vs. Gore and act like real elections that don’t get stolen can somehow make up for that so critical one where George Bush brought us down.
I suppose a very valid case can be made that with the election of Barack Obama the American Democracy came back. By my lights a man ran for president railing against corporate influence and secrecy, precisely identifying Billy Tauzin in a commercial as part of the issue. Then he took all the little people who believed and worked so hard for him and treated them like suckers and rubes, hey Billy, here’s a secret deal for your people, come on in the White House and shake it down!
Did the country come back after that little trick? Did the democracy? As we all so sadly know, of course not. I have no idea if we’ll ever get it back, but I’ll never sit here mutely until the end of my days without trying.