CommentsCORRUPTION WATCH--Years ago I took improv classes at MICE, run by Michael Chain who taught some valuable lessons which also apply outside of theater.
One morsel of wisdom was that people should not believe their own publicity. The Dems should heed this advice.
The Dems need to stop publicizing that the Nov 2018 election gave them a mandate and that the modest gain in the House of Representatives was a wave. Trump was correct about one thing. To an extent, this election was a referendum on him. A mild rejection of Trumpism and by extension of some of his echo chamber from Orange County was not an endorsement of Nancy Pelosi or any of the befuddled old guard promoting group rights. Nor, was it any triumph for Progressivism or Socialism.
How the Old GOP and the OLD Dem are Alike
The leadership of both parties value one thing – their own personal power and the public welfare be damned. The GOP do not even admit that the public welfare is any of the government’s concern, while the Dems mouth platitudes like Single Payer or Pre-existing Conditions, because those utterances rate high in the polls. We have degenerated into government by emotional memes, lies “told by idiots full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28
Where Is Pogo When We Need Him?
Pogo may have been our greatest political diagnostician. He told us that We The People are the enemy. That means it is not the evil GOP nor the vile Dems who threaten the nation, but it is all of us who follow these leaders. The leadership of neither party owes us an iota of loyalty; they sold their souls to the company store years ago. As for us, "You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt." Not much has changed since 1946 when Merle Travis wrote Sixteen Tons, which was most famously re-recorded in 1955 by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Americans not only have two of the greatest political documents in world history in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, but our popular culture recounts those truths. Americans who may not recall who Will Rogers was and who may not know that he was Cherokee, still identify with his sentiments. “This election was lost four and five and six years ago not this year. They didn’t start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour.” 1932 Tulsa Daily World.
How did we devolve to “The media is the enemy of the people”? How did we come to demonize all White people with the proclamation of White Entitlement? While the media shades and slants reality, and while many Whites benefit from entitlement, that does not mean the media per se is the enemy of the people or that all Whites cause racism by virtue of being born white or mostly white or white appearing.
It wasn’t long ago that MLK said to judge each individual by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin. Yet, both the GOP and the Dems want to divide us by skin color, by religion, by sexual orientation, by ethnicity, by anything that will cause people to fight against each other while the billionaires rob us blind. They not only misappropriate our productivity to make the 1% constantly wealthier, but they even monetize and sell our identities.
A Fool and His Money are Soon Parted
While ethicists ineffectually moralize against the wealthy taking advantage of the weak, the reality is that power corrupts and right now, corruption rules. The powerful will not stop looting everyone else of everything unless We The People stop them. In order to do that, We the People need to heed Pogo. These bad things are happening because we allow them to happen. If people did not cheer Trump as he tramples on basic American virtues of honesty and hard work, he could not stir up race fear and hatreds for his personal gain. If We The People did not endorse Identity Politics, the Dems would not be slicing and dicing Americans into a polyglot of separate groups who owe their souls to a new company store.
While California would be one of the world’s most productive countries if it were a nation, Angelenos are sinking to the level of the Third World with the worse homeless problem in the nation. We know the cause of LA homelessness. It has been the unrelenting destruction of the homes of LA’s poor in order to help billionaire developers built a glut of high-end apartments. As long as Angelenos pretend that all evil flows from the GOP, they will never address the real problem: corruption. On the other hand, the California GOP makes itself such an easy target by being anti-Gay, anti-Black, anti-Mexican, that one can see why even Orange County has turned Blue. Sure, the GOP would have looted L.A.’s treasury, except the Dems got to it first.
What We Need Now
No, it is not maudlin “love sweet love.” We need hard work, respect for each individual based on individual character, and we need to heed the Declaration of Independence’s third inalienable right, the Pursuit of Happiness, and we need to heed the US Constitution’s Preamble that the government’s purpose is to establish a more perfect Union for the general welfare. If the Soviet people could muster the resolve to make their corrupt regime dissolve into nothingness, We The People can likewise will away the yoke of the 1%. It is not a matter of whether we can do it, but whether we will do it.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams’ views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.)
-cw
