It’s not going to be a fun two years coming up.
To be fair, Jon Stewart’s rally was great, but even as he pointed out, “it’s not how many people attend, it’s how many people the media says attended.” And, as if on cue, the NYTimes et al barred mention of the rally from the front page, relegating it to two op-ed pieces and a short article that failed to mention any of the pointed criticism Jon Stewart held the rally for in the first place.
But that’s not nearly as insane as the insinuation that, what with Obama declaring himself “humbled” by the political winds changing (and here I was two years ago predicting the end of the Republican party – I may yet not be far off) pundits are claiming that – finally – there may be bipartisanship in Washington. Because, as we all know, Republicans were all simply waiting for the right opportunity to collaborate with their comrades across the aisle.
It’s not a terrible stretch of the imagination to point out that, to a great swath of the political system, all politics is merely campaigning and reality is subservient to the goals, however amorphous as they may be, dictated by the Republican party. In that stead, this election isn’t a mandate for Republican policies – for there are none – but instead a grossly misdirected referendum on Democratic inability.
And while Jon Stewart has attempted to take the moral high ground by having us and them (mostly them) tone down the hyperbole and acidic rhetoric, we may not see the fruits of that for at least another generation to come. Simply put, too many of the American people are too ill-educated, too easily distracted, and too cynically apathetic to allow proper function of this here republic, and education takes at least a generation to fix itself… and we’ve yet to begin to overhaul it.
In a sense, the corrupting of the executive and upper congressional branches – invented largely to temper the hoy polloy through the closest system a representative government can get to an oligarchy – has finally spread to the only direct representation the people have through the House, such that direct representation of a people who have no idea what it is they want is largely useless.
And until they figure that out, our economy will contract, our influence on the world will diminish, and we will become yet another failed empire.
