Anderson vs. the United States

When I started this blog four years ago, nobody could have ever convinced me that I would be eventually be giving the lion’s share of the air time to my thoughts about politics. But here we are, and even though I’m a little ashamed about it, I’m not going to stop today. Sorry. But part of my point, like you’ll find out if you keep reading, is that YOU are partly to blame for the reason why I’m so mad about what’s going on in the world right now. So you owe it to me to keep reading while I rant and rave about things how stupid we are as a country.

Another characteristic disclaimer of mine before I start: I honestly don’t think the p-word, Patriotism, has anything to do with this recent fixation on wanting to straighten things out with how we in this country conduct our business. My problem is that there is a country full of people who are somehow, on average, of average intelligence yet still don’t know their right hand from their left and are in need of some educatin’.

Ignorance in our society is pervasive. This is a major problem in a democracy, rule by the populace. People should either (1) know about the cost and benefits of collective action, and together determine the best course, OR, (2) they should be entirely removed from caring about what kind of appropriations of their time, money and effort are going on above their heads, while enjoying not having to do any research or math or real thinking. Of course, the original design of the nation as a republic was meant to protect against the monster of a government that is created by mixing and matching the components of (1) and (2)- through the mechanism of having each local population elect a local smart guy, that would then get together with the smart guys from elsewhere and make informed decisions as to how to cut the national pie. It used to be that saying you were a republican meant that you believed that this convening of smart guys from o’er the land was a good system of government. This is kind of like option (2).

On the other hand, it used to mean that saying you were a democrat expressed a belief that everyone with a vote should be able to help divide the national revenue and put a hand on the national steering wheel, because nobody could better represent a man than himself. This is option (1).

Clearly, both parties have gone astray from their original ideals. Nowadays, it seems that all it means to have a party allegiance is to have a preference as to which two people should be our co-tyrants. How sad! I submit that people from both parties would not get so worked up every fourth November if we had just stuck with the plan of keeping the president assigned to his role has a simple enforcer of congresses’ decisions. But alas, you and me have let things get out of hand, and nowadays a President is just given the keys and people are told to climb in the back seat and shut up. And we do. We go along with it by not only listening to the debates about the non-issues between “left” and “right” that the media feeds us, but we commonly recreate less intelligent versions of these debates among ourselves and call it talking politics. We vote people into office because of their accomplished personal lives, or because the other party’s candidate has something about their past that we find distasteful. We consistently vote for the lesser of two evils (and in doing so, we vote for the evil of two lessers). We have a feeling that the people we keep electing could do a better job, but we sigh and say “that’s politics”. And this is exactly what serves the status quo best, when we don’t believe that going to the poll and voting for a change will actually do anything. Do you think all the negative ads you’re about to see are really meant to change your mind about the opposition candidate? I think they mostly exist to make any independent want to separate themselves from such a perverted system by putting everything to the back of their mind, until they have to flip a coin on election day to cast their bit. This theory of mine is based largely upon past experience.

Yet the issue bigger than our ignorance or our apathy is our hypocrisy. As you can tell, we have wounds that run oh-so-deep here, but we’ve given up on treating them for now and have instead been focusing on screwing up the rest of the world (and liberating their oil, shhhhhh!) There is poverty all around us, and we insist upon not only being armed to the teeth with absolutely ridiculous military might, but holding it up in front of everybody else and, every now and then, actually using it to punish some government that isn’t as well run as ours or something. And to add insult to injury, we then tell foreign investors that they’re stupid by piling up debt and thinking that they actually believe us when we say the check is in the mail.

I am discontent, and let me tell you why. I’ve put the cash and hours in over 13 semesters of higher education for two science degrees to reach the unemployed status that I now have, which I can’t help feel is partly due to our “economy”, or lack thereof. Before that, I’ve worked since I was 15 and paid my taxes, and watched as 20% of them are used to enforce the "wheel of carpet bombing" foreign policy that we’ve had that whole time (including the Bill Clinton era). Now I can’t help feel like I have some blood on my hands for my part in funding the destruction. I’ve never taken out a risky mortgage or rolled the dice with any stocks, but I am, apparently going to give ex-Goldman-Sachs CEO Henry Paulson a break by helping fund the risks that he and his cronies took.

Most of my friends that I talk to about this are either too cynical to try and restore the republic by sweeping the corrupt off the top, or are woefully uninformed about how they are being used and convinced that McCain or Obama will turn things around. Like I said, I am discontent.