11 September 2011

Little By Little, A Diatribe Brewing

      After writing this morning's little spiel "Federalize It Or Let It Go... Ten Years On" it occurs to me that I've been succumbing bit-by-bit to partisanism over the last year or so.  Granted, since my teenage years I've borne political opinions of one sort or another.  Hell, I'm human!  But I've generally been able to keep my opinions to myself, and even those fairly moderate and obligingly vague.  Politics held an interest for me as an operating system, and I felt rather liberated from its more emotional wiles.
      And then came the 2010 midterms, and the national rumblings of a sweeping new movement.  Not that it's much of a new thing, this latter-day populism.  Proponents of Ross Perot, Southern Democrats, the Know-Nothings and Bull Moosers; America has a long, colorful history of political sub-groups that raise furious hub-bubbery and don stupid names.  The Tea Party is no exception in this regard.  Neither new nor in fact widely popular in the grand scheme of American politics, Populism is inherently energetic and thus the fairly unstable, poorly-organized yang to the dual party system's more sedate yin.  It takes issue, it rages, and it wanes; perhaps leaving behind some small legacy, but always survived by the the powers that be.
      Given the charged nature of the rhetoric employed and at times melodramatic (and occasionally ludicrous) aims of such movements, it is little wonder the nation's founding fathers sought to marginalize the impact of popular politicking on such crucial entities as the Senate and Presidency, and keep people altogether removed from choosing our highest judges.  In touting the merits of the creators of American democracy, many people forget the Adamses and Madisons and even Jeffersons were wary of the unbred masses.  Utilizing them from time time, surely, but after the elections try and keep them as far away from decision-making as humanly possible.  It is a system that even to this day largely operates on the notion that most people don't care about politics, and that those who really do are too far-out to matter.
      So why be bothered?  If it's merely another political El Niño, why get so up in a huff?  I suppose I can't really say why, but I feel irritated by this somewhat badly-timed uproar coming so soon on the heels of what I'd supposed had been a national triumph.  America had elected its first black president, and a charismatic and outspokenly progressive one at that.  It was a change I thought people had finally come to recognize was needed, still coming down from the cataclysmic crest of our questionably low-regulated bank and trade policies, from a drawn out and again questionable war against something as marginally frightening as 'terror'.  From dinosaur technologies that keep Americans tethered to the gas pump and living beyond the sustainably feasible.  
      We'd won, I thought at the time, and it was our turn to begin setting things right (better late than never, eh?).  Right for the environment, right for our infrastructure and our tax base.  Right for our spending priorities and domestic initiatives.  Restoring our image in the world's eye, vital in this global era of ours.  We were apparently moving onwards and ever upwards.  It would be a slow thing, perhaps spanning over ten or twenty years, but it was a work set in motion and I was excited by it.
      Sour grapes, maybe.  And while I can't quite divine where the nation is headed now I can safely say I disagree wholeheartedly with the direction people are trying to finagle it into.  Less a direction even, and more like an anchoring in place.  A stopping of the cart and slaughtering of the ox, if only to believe we are protecting the American quality of life.  But I dunno... at the end of the day I want to have an opinion, but not at the risk of sounding like any number of angry folk who take the art of argument and turn it into a name-calling match.  To wit...  I don't want to be that guy (or gal).  We have enough of those about already.

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