Part One
'Tis the season for conservative mouthpieces, candidates and incumbents to utter jaw-droppingly stupid statements. Or at least utter more of them, more often. They cast these pearls of putrefaction before their highly-indoctrinated, low-information, fear-filled minions.
Now it's true that in the conservative circus, that social and cultural caricature where no sane person can, or would try, to live (look what happens to clowns like Palin when they try), that alternate reality, that opium den of indulgence where conservatives drift in and out of coherence, mostly out, anytime is a good time to repeat demonstrably false absurdities that, somehow, pass for universal truth. Repeat ad nauseum...and voila! A voting bloc is conceived, blissfully ignorant of the nation's real problems and ready to cheer wildly at the coronation of a fascist oligarchy.
Of late, the timbre of those babblings has drifted farther and farther from any recognition of the sorry state of our economy, farther from any recognition of Republican and one-percent complicity in economic downturns and economic injustice, and farther from any recognition of the advances in social equity now becoming the norm. No, the Right's demagogues and their knee-jerk nonsense seek to enshrine a conservative culture where fear of change, and more especially fear of demographic changes, are considered a normal, healthy outlook. Call it a willful advance to the rear, a surrender to fear.
More below the orange croissant
The unaccountable moneyed elite, who use the Republican party to indulge their manic appetite for money and power, do so by deceiving their minions into worshiping homicidal, unsustainable economic policies. They put lipstick on trickle-down economic pigs and promise eternal bacon to the faithful. They divide and conquer those who would prosper, were the latter to merely pause, recognize what they hold dear, and in common, and then ally themselves against the one-percenters.
The affluence-addicts now find and fund puppet-candidates, grinning idiots all too eager to trade their integrity for the illusory reward of public attention and the more tangible reward of wealth.
They make for a sorry spectacle, these heavily coached candidates, these aide-dependent dolts who dodge questions, freeze up during even modestly challenging interviews, or stalk out of them, and whose “public appearances” entail speaking almost exclusively to exclusive audiences in exclusive venues where guests are vetted for ideological conformity. The press-dodging, vacuous pinhead Joni Ernst is a perfect example of late. Think too, of Romney and the venue for his clandestinely recorded “47%” declaration, a moment that captures pandering, pathology and idiocy of the first order. There is nothing public about this kind of candidate coddling.
The coddled candidate, or the corrupted incumbent, is the product of a narrow and/or limited education, limited exposure to cosmopolitan culture, limited foreign travel, yet speaks from his or her limited experience with unlimited certainty that he or she touches universal truth. Again and again we endure the earnest idiot, blithely unaware of the lunacy of his pronouncements (Think: Ron Johnson, Steve King, and Sarah Palin, for starters). They are commanded to utter some fringe-element notion, brainlessly embrace it, ever assured that it will be applauded as self-evident, even Jeffersonian, in its insight. In the echo chamber, it is.
Even worse, we endure the infantile bleatings of attention-whores like Cruz and Paul, who compete to make brainless statements guaranteed to get them press attention, and who then reveal, once again, that they have mis-described a problem, or invented one altogether. But neither case matters, because these morons have no solution to offer anyway! Infantile.
Expose any cardboard candidate to the marketplace of ideas, that blasted heath where public opinion is wrought, and lo! Pushback! Their prophecies and pronouncements are parsed, dissected and thrown back at them with no small measure of much-deserved scorn. Sadly, the fourth estate used to be much more responsible and active about exposing (and dismissing) ideological lunatics and lunacies than it is today. Witness the systematic corruption of said estate by corporate influence peddlers and meddlers.
The brittle, transparent, osteoporotic nature of these radical Right candidates and their platforms somehow, bafflingly, escapes the notice of conservative and/or Republican voters. That this is so, that the GOP has cult-like qualities and demands slavish, soul-selling allegiance, that it actually cultivates ignorant, intellectually shallow supporters, and also shelters sociopaths, has been noted by several authors of late. The GOP hierarchy, with blessings from the unaccountable elite mentioned earlier, vet a pool of cardboard candidates profoundly short on substance, intellect and ethics.
The anti-government idiocies spouted by these grinning goons also signal they are anti-candidates, obstructionist puppets installed to gum-up government operations until Republican majorities, purchased by the one-percenters, can redirect government to the task of further enriching the rich.
Such cardboard candidates either arrive pre-corrupted, or possess moral pliability and quickly sell-out to corrupt, well-heeled extremists. We are thus treated to a procession of GOP puppet-politicians. This parade separates into two lines, two possible arcs of incompetence, two modes of public disservice from supposed public servants. One line features the incoherent idiot, the other the sociopath. A few candidates and incumbents manage to combine the best of the worst of these qualities.
“Arc-One”, or “the Idiot line” examples include Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Steve King, Joni Ernst, Scott Brown, Glenn Grothman, Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Joe Barton, Rick Perry, Terri Lynn Land, Herman Cain, and Louie Gohmert. Another was Todd Akin, he of “legitimate rape” fame. And this list is far from complete. Far...
“Arc-Two” candidates and incumbents, who fail miserably at hiding their greed and anti-social pathologies, include Rick Scott, John Boehner, Darrel Issa, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Jan Brewer...and don't forget recent stars on the walk of shame such as Eric Cantor, Mark Sanford, Tom Tillis, and David Perdue. Again, a short list excerpted from a much longer one...
One of the notable category-spanners is Mitch McConnell, who combines incompetence, incoherence and greed in a truly winning combination of losing traits (Some would also dump Boehner into this bag of rabid wolves.). This man would be utterly useless outside of the beltway cocoon. His one-time constituents (by this I mean the people he is supposed to serve, as opposed to the ones he trips over himself to please) say that he has long been utterly useless inside the beltway...
These clowns are in no way common people, ordinary Americans rising to the call of public service, however sanitized their resumes, whatever boilerplate personal mythology was bolted together from the tinfoil of conservative stereotypes and archetypes. No, they are uncommonly vile, greedy, ignorant, megalomaniacal and/or pathologically anti-social, to a degree that makes them public menaces.
The opinion makers and thought-police of the political and social Right would keep political dialogue operating at this base level, to prevent Americans from engaging in the kinds of substantive discussions and discoveries found in community, in Civil Society. Such thoughtful discussions, disagreements even, are the foundation of intelligent compromise. And that term itself, Civil Society, sounds almost quaint to the modern ear. It is a structure, a binding agent, that the political Right is trying to strangle. Civil Society thwarts the pathological, infantile plans of the one-percenters by demanding the individual suspend automatic and exclusive consideration of self-interest.
The Right would keep Americans too busy consuming, or too busy avoiding starvation and homelessness, to engage in the kinds of conversations and political action that would prevent a one-percent takeover. They are largely succeeding. Expected voter turnout in the coming election suggests we are, in fact, too distracted to stop, notice and strangle a creeping, neo-fascist revolution.
And there is nothing in the bald-faced power grabs and money grubbing, nothing in the one-percenters' re-engineering of our government so that it caters to their whims, that passes for Alexis de Tocqueville's “enlightened self interest.” No, the one-percenters merely exhibit monumental greed and megalomania...
Even more amazing is Republican ignorance of, and willful blindness to, the consequences.
This nation was born out of a then-radical notion that a people could reject the rule of an unaccountable monarch and an unrepresentative parliament, and become self-governing. The colonies were a feed trough, and the English king and parliament merely over-dressed swine. These “gentlemen” taxed the colonies to pay for wars driven by the demands of imperialist expansion, and to enrich themselves, and felt little compulsion to offer colonists any substantive means by which their interests could be represented in parliament.
Much of that should sound alarmingly familiar..timely even.
Today we see our representative democracy in real, immediate danger of being overthrown by a moneyed elite. And the result, a nation ruled by oligarchs, would be every bit as unrepresentative and unaccountable as the rule by unaccountable monarchy and unrepresentative parliament once was. And Republicans are too stupid, too willfully blind, or too enthralled by vacuous talking points to see the end result of their idiocy.
Why are the strident Democrat and Progressive voices, candidates, and incumbents so rare, such a minority? And why are Republican candidates so far below any lowest common denominator?
Much of it may be due to the death of commonwealth. The best citizens, and thus the best candidates, once arose from a culture more infused with it.
Commonwealth is a notion little recognized, discussed or debated these days. Yet it once suffused the American ethos, uniting a diverse and even contentious citizenry. (And yes, it existed alongside many other less admirable traits, a pernicious undercurrent of Calvinism one of them.) It has, still, a visible, physical, muscular presence in the form of grand nineteenth century state capitol buildings, county seats, and those plots of land at the centers of small towns once referred to as “the commons.” Imagine it as a diaphanous yet tensile ribbon, binding neighbors into communities, states into a nation. In the centuries since the Revolutionary War this nation has stumbled and stalled, often, as it pursues and defines, even expands, constitutional protections, but the categories of citizens who have gained access to the commonwealth has slowly, albeit fitfully, expanded.
Commonwealth remains an imperfectly executed belief, a work in progress. Consider it a vital infrastructure project, one in need of a fresh infusion of investment. Witness the condition of aboriginal Americans before allowing the nation a pat on the back for efforts and accomplishments to date.
Republican aims, never explicitly stated, but pushed by the unaccountable, moneyed elite, would now privatize and sell off the commonwealth, commodify the public realm, wring profit from all that was once held in common. The common good, its places and privileges formerly understood and agreed to be reserved in perpetuity, would become profit centers. These havens and reminders of greater good, of that richer life lived beyond the mindless, tireless tentacles of commerce and avarice, were once held to be near-sacred. The commons, and commonwealth, served also as reminders that some things, ideals among them, can never, should never, become commodities.
There was once a sense that the most important, most fundamental decisions were made for the common good (This also often meant wresting those decisions from the clutches of the affluent, and the clutches of that minority who pull the levers of power.). The shift away from this norm, to one where the most important decisions are made to enrich the already rich, portends the abandonment of the American experiment in representative democracy. The one-percenters are dangerously close to purchasing this nation that they falsely, stupidly claim is “obstructing” their “rights.” Witness the madness of the Citizens' United ruling, a gift to those same one-percenters from the corrupt conservative fringe-thinkers and sociopaths sitting on the Supreme Court.
Any hope of ending this race into social and political anarchy, and into neo-feudal fascism, lies in changing Congress. To change Congress, we must change who gains office there. To change who gains office there, we must ourselves change. We must pause from thoughtless, addictive consumption and self-indulgence to remember the best of what and who we are. We must step out of our comfort zones and into the public sphere, and speak up, with all the risk of ridicule and condemnation that act entails.
And the caliber of our candidates must climb astronomically higher. Consider now the electable and ideal candidate. Who will put public good, civil society and rule of law before self-interest, self-enrichment, golden parachutes and material abundance of an obscene, gluttonous and absurd degree?
Who, in short, is the incorruptible candidate? Who is the quintessential American? How do you find that higher caliber, substantive, moral citizen?
The incorruptible candidate rises from the particulars of her place, the region in which she was born. She is inseparable from the particulars, and the quirks and oddities, possibly even the dysfunctions, of her family, her education, her friendships, her achievements. She is from a particular place, and inseparable from it, by her conscious choice.
Yet she chooses to be more than the sum of her experiences. That sentence is worth a re-read. These merely point out to her the universal human experience. She chooses, consciously, to consider, recognize and define the debt she owes to the place and people she arose from, and by extension, the debt every individual owes to some community in this nation. And if she has been ill-treated or ignored in her place of origin, she is far beyond claiming any virtue through victimhood. That, she knows, is a prison. Whatever harm has befallen her, it has not made her a social predator, a soul eager for vengeance. Guided by a slow-burning fire in her belly, one that yearns for justice and equality of opportunity, the incorruptible candidate is a long-term thinker. She is a leader, not a manager. This already sets her apart from the majority now serving in congress and in state legislatures across the nation.
But vitally, the incorruptible candidate chooses to remember where she came from. She deliberately places reminders of her origin in any surroundings where she may temporarily reside, places other than her native soil. These touchstones keep her focused. Access to power and influence are temporal responsibilities, not rewards. And they make no one immortal.
Even more, she nourishes that connection to the place that sheltered her and taught her, returns to it often, in pilgrimage, recognizing that it lives still within her, and has more lessons to impart. From the specific, the real, the tangible, spring conceptions of the universal, the ideal.
The current crop of legislators is, with precious few exceptions, a people without any place. By and large they have forgotten where they came from. While they have memories of that place, those are mere abstractions. They have also forgotten who they are, if they ever knew...
That these representatives should lose track of themselves in Washington DC is odd, pathetic even. Here is a city of monuments, a living tomb. Everywhere are reminders in bronze and stone that the price of our liberties was paid, dearly, by ordinary Americans, people from particular places, people defined by those places, people who lived and acted on the truth of their places, but were not limited by their origins. Those monuments recall service to ideals we have always imperfectly served. Such ideals often called us away from comfortable lives.
This is all largely lost on the current crowd of congressmen, those place-less, ungrounded dwellers in abstraction who haunt the DC environs.
The incorruptible candidate, by contrast, returns often to renew the bonds of place, that region primal, the land and skies that sing in her bones. She can no more ignore that sound than she can hold her breath. She loves her home, her place. It is part of her.
Any politician of character and substance who would choose to become incorruptible begins by returning to the place that made her. Have in hand a shovel, spade or trowel. Dig up a clod of earth and squeeze it in your fist. Feel again the ultimate source of your breath. Pause, too, and acknowledge the wind that bathes your face, the sun that warms it.
Place is not an abstraction. It is tangible. It is dirty, in the best sense, but also at moments harsh, mysterious. And irreducible. It is the wisdom of the real, the concrete. It is a source of knowing and knowledge that precedes language. It speaks through the fingers, penetrates the skin. It smells like home. It is inseparable from the incorruptible candidate. The skies above her and the landscapes before her belong here and nowhere else. The place she calls home will not deceive the incorruptible candidate. It will speak the truth, no matter how much vanity and temporal distraction may have clouded her thinking and her actions during her absence. Some call that connection to place, that kind of knowing, that knowledge that has no words, the voices of the ancestors.
This is a far cry from the modus operandi of the Republican Party of late. It is filled with fools who deceive themselves with words, even as they mislead and misdirect others with words. They erect a clumsy artifice, a false-fronted flimsy edifice, by trying to live inside these lies, and among them, as if these lies had substance.
It is said of a native, an aboriginal, that, if you suspend your dualistic delusions, the bias of your Western-hemisphere education and your Puritan-Calvinist strictures, that if you stop the self-limiting, self-centered thoughts that crimp your perception, and see the native as she is, you discover it is difficult to perceive where she ends and her environment begins. She so belongs to that place, and it to her.
Here is the model for the incorruptible candidate. Become what you once were, a being inseparable, indistinguishable, from the place that raised you. The words you utter will be the truth of your place. Those who listen will suspend their self-limiting thought. The truth you speak will be far more than pretty platitudes, far more than intellectual grist or cleverness, far more than political melodrama. Your speech will possess a power beyond that of clarity and concision. It reaches beyond these to ensnare the souls of listeners. Your words will induce, as happens among musical instruments, a sympathetic vibration. You connect with your listeners' knowledge of irrefutable truth, incorruptible truth.
The clowns, clods and clots who corrupt and impair Congress must be retired to well-earned ignominy, replaced by the incorruptible, the people who remember who they are, people who nourish, and are nourished by, that place they call home. These, the incorruptibles, cannot be purchased. They can never become commodities.