American Politics – Pepsi or Coke?
Believe it or not, I once spent a bizarre twenty minutes or so in a diner listening to two teenage girls arguing the respective merits of Pepsi and Coke. Each perfect little consumer-chick swore allegiance to her chosen brand and sniffily dissed the other. They even got quite heated over it, as folks are wont to when grappling with the great intellectual questions that bedevil our age. Pepsi or Coke, Eh ? Who’d of thought it ? To one with a less discerning palate (or less susceptible to bullshit) such as your humble correspondent Joe Hack , they’re both just brown’ish fizzy drinks, similarly laden with the caffeine-drug and some good ‘ol tooth-rotting sugar . But then again, I thought, maybe it wasn’t so comical after all. I mean, these are the same weird people who grow up to argue with as much heat, and just as little justification, that theres a genuine difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. You couldn’t make stuff like this up.
To listen to the vicious war of words that always breaks out come election time you’d be forgiven for thinking some mighty big principles were at stake, some genuine divide between right and left, some real choice between capitalism and a socialist alternative, or between ’small’ government or ”big’ government, or whether the country is run for the benefit of the few or the many. But is that so ? Is it hell ! To people in America the dirty, bitch-slapping, slug-fest that passes for electioneering may seem to be about big differences but to any objective observer looking in from outside thats just plain, unadulterated rubbish ! By any normal political standards, you can’t pass a cigarette paper between the two big parties. The great American political debate is being fought out by pygmies dancing on the head of a pin, squabbling over the same tiny inch of right-of-center ground. Both parties, Republicans and Democrats, believe in almost exactly the same things. You think not ? Ok, well does either one offer a radical alernative to the status quo ? Of course not. Whichever party controls the country, you know that things always stay pretty much the same. The agenda of no-change is largely dictated by the big business interests that control the politicians. Did you really think it was any other way ? Oh come on ….
Perhaps you think I’m being too cynical ? Well ask yourself this. In this great democracy where is the poor but honest presidential candidate whose pockets are empty but whose heart is pure ? Answer.. he’s out scrabbling around for at least $30 million if he’s to have even a remote shot at ever becoming president, which means that unless the good fairy turns his pumpkins into gold bullion, he will have to put himself into hock to big business interests who will undoubtedly expect a payback in some form or other after he’s elected. Have we all observed this very thing happening recently folks ? The post-presidential election payback to big business, I mean ? Oh, I think we have. And whichever party a compromised, bought-and-paid-for president represents, will it really make any difference to you or yours ? Of course not. Will you be offered a genuinely more liberal or socially conscious alternative by either party ? Will you see any real change in the way society is structured so that the colossal wealth of the richest nation on earth begins to be used for the benefit of the majority of the people who live in it ? Free access to health care for all ? Better welfare and pension plans for old age ? Higher minimum wages ? Better schools ? A genuine commitment to fight climate change ? A promise to stop meddling in foreign countries and to start addressing the real problems at home ? A genuine undertaking to finally introduce sane gun laws ? The banishing of big business interests and its sleazy paid lobbyists from the corridors of power ? All of the other things that would make the USA stronger and happier and more at ease with itself ? All of the things that would make it more respected in the wider world ? Do you think you’ll be given the chance to vote for any of that ? Hell no, buddy .. dream on. It’ll never happen with the present system where self-interest perpetuates self-interest.
Sure there are sometimes temporary aberrations in this cosy little club, as when Bush and the loony-toon neo-cons got delusions of invincibility and started throwing their weight around in the world, trashing constitutional freedoms at home, and trying to turn the USA into a police state, but we all know that those neo-crazies are already dead-men walking and after the next election you can bet that shell-shocked politicians in all parties will be scrambling back to the safe right-of-center concensus so they can return to business as usual. However heated and bitter the next election gets, however many millions of dollars that could be spent on doing real good they waste on infantile, vicious TV campaign adverts, you have to remember that its all just candy-floss. Its theatre. An elaborate entertainment put on to con you, the voter, and fool you into thinking you enjoy something called democracy. No big conspiracy, though, just a lot of trusting folks and some sleazy politicians pulling together as if by instinct towards that same old trough.
Does it have to be this way ? Well no. In France they recently had a national election where there was a genuine choice for the voters between a right-of-centre conservative moderniser and a traditional left-of-center socialist. The voters knew the result would fundamentally change the way the country was run, one way or the other, so they turned out to vote in record numbers. In some other european countries too (with the exception of the UK which has sadly followed the US model of two indistinguishable right-of-center parties) there is still a real battle of ideas comes election time between different political philosophies. I’m not saying any system is perfect. Far from it, but at least in some places you still get a genuine choice. Its up to you which way you go, right or left, and thats what democracy is all about. For democracy to flourish there must be a real contest of ideas and a genuine choice for the voters. Not just an illusion of choice. Of course it is perfectly possible to reclaim democracy in the USA. You just take the money and big-business interests out of politics, deny undue influence to the special interest groups and media moguls, regulate the electioneering process to ensure equality of exposure and spending for all candidates, and insist on a genuine, honourable contest between different political visions for the betterment of the country. You demand a system where ideas talk louder than money. Its not rocket science, is it ? But its not in the interests of self-serving politicians to make that happen, so I guess it won’t.
Sure you *could* have the democracy that the founding fathers dreamed of all those years ago, but you won’t. Not here in the good old US of A. Here, my friends, you’ll only get a choice between Pepsi and Coke .. so enjoy ..
Bookmarking is the bomb 
It’s the Guns, Stupid!!
by guest blogger, Joe Hack
Some things happen with an inexorable inevitability, like the changing seasons or the tides of the sea or Britney doing something else weird, but perhaps the most predictable of all is otherwise normal Americans shooting holes in each other. Every year in excess of 30,000 Americans die because of guns and many thousands more are horribly injured. Every single day eight children lose their lives because of guns. Every year, sometimes several times a year, some deranged loony will take his gun down to the local mall or high-school and kill indiscriminately. Since President J F Kennedy was assassinated (with a gun) more Americans have died from guns in the USA than in all of Americas wars in the 20th century put together. Think about it. Osama Bin Laden would need to launch nine successful ‘twin-towers’ terrorist attacks just to equal what Americans do to themselves every single year with guns. Crazy or what ?
If you were a man from mars who’d suddenly landed your little spaceship in the USA and you heard people agonizing over the causes of the recent Virginia Tech shootings you might be forgiven for thinking .. ” Its the Guns Stupid !!” I mean, lets face if, if you don’t have a gun you can’t shoot anyone. Right ? But this is the big elephant squatting in the American living room. The blindingly obvious concept that no American politician dare acknowledge. Get rid of the guns. Why daren’t they touch this ? Because it would be political suicide, that’s why. There is a hugely rich and powerful gun-manufacturing industry ready and willing to pour millions of dollars into countering any tentative moves towards gun control. They see the problem not as being that there’s too many guns. Oh no, if there were *more* guns in private hands then that would be the necessary deterrent. Am I missing something ? The United States has the largest number of guns in private hands of any country in the world, with 60 million people owning a combined arsenal of over 200 million firearms. Read that again slowly. 200 million guns . More than enough for every man, woman, child and baby in the USA to be armed to the teeth. Fer chrissakes , how many more guns do the gun manufacturers think are needed (answer: as many as they can sell)
The arguments put forward, often by those interested in profiting from death and misery, seem facile and self serving, but lets examine them briefly:
- They plug into a fuzzy feeling of patriotism by asserting that the second amendment of the constitution enshrines a citizens right to ‘bear arms’. Well kind of, but even that 200 year-old document, written in a totally different world, said only that .. “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”. Got that ? A ‘well regulated militia’, like .. oh .. lets say the modern day local police forces ? Hmmm ? Certainly not every sad-sack psycho or inadequate who feels like a big man just because he’s got a bunch of killer automatic weapons stashed in his bedroom closet.
- They say that putting guns in the hands of private citizens allows them to defend themselves against the bad-guys. Bullshit! The number of times a gun-toting citizen shoots and kills a criminal who is threatening his life with a gun is *tiny*. Its the exception, rather than the rule. The vast majority of deaths by shooting are accidents or suicides or domestic arguments or drunken Saturday night brawls. The exact situations where people would have probably lived if there’d been no guns.
- They say that its not guns that kill, but people. Well duh ! The blindingly obvious fact is that if those people didn’t have guns their ability to kill would be seriously curtailed. Sure you can beat someone to death with your fists, but how much easier is it to just pull a trigger ? Sure people behave badly all the time. They yell and get drunk and have fist fights. They get cuts and lumps and bruises. But where guns are available, they kill each other.
- They say that gun control would be an ‘infringement of civil liberties’. Hmmm .. yeah right. An infringement on the right to make money from selling guns, more like. Lets be serious. We all live in a society in which we accept certain constraints in exchange for certain benefits. Some people, for example, might think the free trafficking of Heroin is desirable, but society as a whole disagrees. Society says that its so dangerous to us all that its sale must be illegal. Quite right too. The point is that we do, as a society, make decisions like that all the time. So there’s nothing to stop us deciding that guns do more harm than good and make them as illegal as heroin. Right ? And remember, guns kill far more citizens every year than heroin does.
- They say that gun control would leave only the bad guys with guns. Oh Boy. Well firstly, if it did, it wouldn’t be very successful gun control, would it ? Secondly, that’s what we pay the police for isn’t it ?. They’re the ‘well-ordered-militia’ that carries guns on our behalf and protects society. Thirdly, slap a mandatory life sentence on *anyone* (other than an authorized officer of the law) found with a gun, no exceptions, and that would pretty quickly take the gun-owners off the streets. And fourthly, Oh but this is just too dumb .. you really know the arguments for guns are tripe …don’t you ?
Frankly I don’t care much one way or the other. If a bunch of gullible people have been brainwashed by the propaganda of those who want to make money out of gun sales then I guess I’m not going to be able to dissuade them. If someone has been brought up on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and shoot-outs and cowboy myths then any injection of reality into their over-heated vigilante fantasies isn’t going to be welcome. As long as they stay well away from me and mine, then they can pick up their 200 million guns and blow holes in each other all day long. At least that’s what I feel like saying when faced with such destructive and irrational behavior. But the humanitarian in me (and he’s down in there somewhere, the irritating little bugger) says don’t give up on them just yet..
So hey folks, let me ask you this before I go. When will it be enough, do you think ? When will there be enough guns ? When everyone has two, three, five, a hundred ? When will there be enough gun-deaths ? When it rises to 40,000 a year, 50,000 ? More ? When will the price in human misery become too high to stomach ? When someone you love, your child or father of brother or sister gets killed senselessly by a gun ? When will you demand that your spineless, self-serving political representative finally *do* something to eradicate this modern day plague ? Its going to happen, you know. Its inevitable. A situation as crazy as this one is can’t go on forever. Someday, and lets all hope its soon, our collective disgust is going to blow the cowardly politicians who allow this carnage right out of their cosy feathered nests. And you can tell them Joe Hack said that …
Lord Save Me From Certainty and Jerry Falwell
by guest blogger Joe Hack
I was thinking as I sucked down my jolt of caffeine this morning, and flicked idly through the fairy stories that make up most of the mainstream ‘news’, that there are two kinds of people in the world; those who say with certainty things like ‘there are two kinds of people in the world’ and everyone else. I believe I must fall into the latter category because I’m finding it increasingly difficult to be deal with certainty. I can handle moral ambiguity all day long but Lord preserve us all from people who are certain. Those flushed with certainty and its close-companion, self importance, are just plain trouble. They can’t stop themselves from meddling and trying to control the lives of others and, in doing so, they make everyone else miserable. The harsh truth is that zealots of all pursuasions, in their childlike moral certainty, have caused more suffering and death through history than any number of evil dictators or nuclear bombs or serial killers. Lives are still being blighted on a daily basis by sometimes well-intentioned people who are absolutely sure that their way of living is the best and only way. Just as dangerous, and infinitely more disgusting, are the sleazy politicians and tv evangelists and newspaper columnists who cynically wrap fake moral certainty around themselves like a flag to excuse the inexcusable. The fact is, life is very rarely black and white. Don’t believe anyone who pretends otherwise and always look for the shades of grey.
I guess what prompted these ruminations was the news about the ‘Reverend’ Jerry Falwell’s death. What a guy ! I’ve read some of his Christian fundamentalist rantings and, frankly, he reminded me of nobody so much as the Taliban. I guess that fundamentalists of all persuasions, Christian and Islamic, must share the same basic DNA. They’re programmed to destroy. That was never really a problem as long as the Islamic fundamentalists just limited themselves to blowing each other up and the Christian fundamentalists simmered away angrily, largely unseen and unloved, somewhere south of the bible belt. What changed was when George Bush’s brain, Karl Rove, came up with the unholy idea of forging an alliance between the extreme-right neo-con wing of the republican party and the even extremer-right Christian fundamentalists. It was a marriage made in hell but, for a short tawdry time, it served its purpose. Bush and the neo-cons got into the Whitehouse on the back of the fundamentalist vote and the likes of Jerry Falwell got exposure and influence at a level unwarranted by their loony-tune beliefs. As a great man once said though, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cant fool all of the people all of the time. So gradually the unholy alliance of the Bush neo-cons and the Christian fundamentalists has dissolved into internecine bickering as the sleaze of the former and bigotry of the latter have collided like two nasty old tom-cats fighting in a sack. Someone asked Jimmy Carter in an interview the other day how he dealt with his very strong Christian faith while he was President of the USA. You know what he said ? He said that he built a wall between the two because the constitution of the United States was very carefully and wisely set up to ensure a separation between church and state. Good for you Jimmy ! If only some other politicians had been as honorable. So lets make a deal, shall we ? A deal to be more patriotic in future. To really honor the constitution and treat with distrust and contempt any politician who tries to use his ‘Christian certainty’ as a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card in the game of politics ? Because you just know anyone who does that is likely to be a scoundrel, don’t you ?.
Want to hear my thought for the day ? It’s ‘ Don’t Follow Leaders’. Seems to me like the very act of putting yourself forward as a political or spiritual leader is deeply suspicious and should automatically debar anyone from being taken seriously. Remember, moral uncertainty is unlikely to kill you. Dogmatic belief has a fine track record of doing just that. And you can tell anyone who says different that Joe Hack told you so..
Lying Politicians, Corrupt Media, and Weasel Words
The mighty organ of free speech that is ‘Absolutely True’ has invited me to do an occassional column for them and I couldn’t resist because Lord do we ever need some balance in the news. Huge swathes of the media are owned by a very few private individuals who each has a personal agenda that, believe me, isn’t about truth or justice or your welfare folks. The so-called ‘news’ on some mainstream TV channels and in some newspapers is nothing more than thinly-disguised propaganda. Its a bland mixture of celebrity slop and a few ‘facts’ served up with whatever distorting spin best serves the interests of the media moguls and their political puppets. If all you ever watch is Fox news, for example, you can’t avoid having a very skewed view of the world and we can all see the trouble that’s caused recently, can’t we ? So on the one hand you have the lying politicians and multi-billionaire media moguls manipulating public opinion for their own ends and on the other hand, well there’s just you and me buddy. Ordinary folks who won’t buy into the bullshit. But you never know, maybe in time there’ll be a few more of us. It’d be nice to think so. Read more
