[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
Got a dart to the heart of yesterday when I was idly clicking on various blogrolls, trying to update my primary blog reads, and for the hell of it clicked on Anonymous Liberal. Suddenly after months of silence here were two excellent entries, somehow, in some very good way for us all, Al had accepted to the truth that he always had something worthy to say. Always, no matter the confusing media roar of American life, the sensitive hurt that can motivate so erratically, the seemingly utter futility of launching blog text into the American hurricane of daily distraction.
So very few citizens do, using some very generous extrapolation from the gross number of unique visits at Daily Kos there are perhaps 4 million Americans—out of approximately 375 million total—that actually read political blogs, let alone a further tiny percentage that actually writes to put the mind and soul of American little people into the daily discussion of politics in the United States. Let alone brave brilliant voices that aren’t afraid to call themselves liberal. It isn’t any surprise that here in the 2010th year of our Lord the American little people have been left in the ditch in our Great Recession with representation in the daily political discourse like that, and every voice raised from ordinary citizens radically amps up the hope meter that someday we can get out of this.
I’m truly sorry to be briefly absent myself lately, unfortunately I became ill last Wednesday and it takes few days for things to adequately settle down. If you want to catch a case of nausea I wrote so unheedingly and then whaddaya know, your world is stopped. Naturally the writing was terribly negative, if I’d been myself or had an editor the work would have been instantly launched into the fucking trash can, no worries at all it happens, but all the risks of few constraints in my frame of reference easily flipped and I published poorly, which I now get to live with. Lovely.
I will be voting for Jerry Brown, of course, the Republicans have gone completely berserk and there is no hope at all they have any answers to what California needs. Which is why I spend half my political time yelling at the Democratic Party, at least there’s a chance truth and justice for the little people can make into daily political machinations, the Republicans are completely gone in some vapid fantasyland where they can’t even accept the truth of daily life. Trying to reason with blockheads who truly are convinced Obama is a Socialist is completely hopeless.
Which was the point of Al’s first entry, with vapid talk radio, Fox News and Republican internet sources it’s totally possible for Republican citizens to construct a complete fantasy world where facts and the truth mean absolutely nothing, where fanaticism and total adherence to cause are the only rewards. It’s easy to be smug at the childish absurdity of our pathetic political opponents, but the fact remains that environment produced a total Sarah Palin clone that stole an election (get over it!) with a vicious, obdurate stupidity that crashed our country into its present hellish mess. We ignore it or sneer at it our greatest peril.
What to do? Completely nothing comes back from any liberal or Democratic cranium, there is no idea out there to bring our cher Republican cousins back from their inviolate hatred of liberals and the truth. If there aren’t any affirmative answers on how to inject truth and reality into both stances of American politics at the very least one truth is always crystal clear: silence in the face of it can only make it worse.
Which is why I’m here, again, despite my many limitations I have truth, reality and justice in my pocket and occasionally they pay off in our politics—sometimes very obliquely, many times delayed by weeks after writing, always in very tiny ripples, but still there, watching and waiting patiently delivers plainly seen results. Not often, true, and sometimes maddening in their hazy incompleteness, but yet right there.
If you have mind and voice concerned for American politics, use it. America so needs it, all of our minds and their worries, concerns and hopes have to be in our political discourse or too many will give shoved out. Thank you so much for writing, Al, the country’s missed you.