Politically We're Frogs Not Noticing the Boiling Water

[marmar]

from HuffPost:




Chris Durang
Politically We're Frogs Not Noticing the Boiling Water
Posted November 13, 2007 | 08:54 AM (EST)



This is a free associative rant, triggered by a friend who wrote me asking me why I'd been so silent for a while (both in email and on the Huffington Post). I hope it's of interest. If it isn't, please cut me some slack (and/or stop reading).

My friend offered me several choices to explain why he hadn't heard from me, and they included "worried, really worried" and "uninspired" and I checked those two. (I did not check his options of Giddy, Pregnant, New Puppy, or Becoming a Lutheran.)

But "worried, really worried" (about the world, and the country) is the main thing I've been feeling, and it permeates my daily wanderings about. And "uninspired" because I haven't been working on a play I've started (alert the media!), and because I haven't written anything on the Huffington Post.

I mean, my writing a post isn't significant, except I feel that the more voices that get out there with "worry pay-attention-damn-it" the better. But I have felt paralyzed about adding my voice lately.

I feel like a person who is in a community where first one house is on fire, then another one, then there's an earthquake, then there's a mud slide, then there's a witch burning ... politically there are so many issues that tumble into each other, I am tongue-tied.

I think of writing something, and I become overwhelmed, both with anger and then with a sort of despair that I can't get my mind around how to communicate. (Plus there are so many articulate people posting on the blog who are indeed writing about the very issues I would write about, much of the time I don't seem to know how or why to add my voice.)

And sometimes I think about trying to write about the above -- the feeling of OVERWHELM of there being so many issues.

Among them, waterboarding and the new attorney general. (And Schumer and Dianne Feinstein's disturbing/distressing votes of yes for him.) The Democrats have held some good hearings, but their follow through has been dispiriting. I know they don't have the votes to overcome vetoes, so I sometimes cut them slack. But they need to fight much harder, to fight tenaciously, and they're too laid back, and it makes me despair of them.

They have to explain why their positions are important on FISA and on the President breaking laws. The American people need to have things like this explained with clarity and passion. Instead, the Dems let the Republicans "win" by sound-byte or yelling "you're weak on defense," and lie down and play dead. And recently they ducked a real debate on Cheney and impeachment. It's a discussion worth having. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-durang/politically-were-frogs-n_b_72368.html

[blm]

1. It's no longer even GOP v Dems. It's Fascists v Open Government

and too many Dems are siding against the Open Government wing of our party and betraying us for the power of the Fascists.

[nancyr]

2. Sadly true.

If this article doesn't depress you enough, read Dark Ages America by Morris Berman. If there is still any doubt as to what has happened in and to this country, then I suspect brain death. This is not "politics as usual". and an election isn't going to change much except for the names of the current players in the farce. I'm afraid the frog is already boling.

[DemoTex]

3. Incremental fascist dictatorship ...

Fools think we are safe from fascism because they assume it will happen overnight and someone (indeed, someone else) will stop it.

Yes. I have tricks in my pocket. I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them. Or they had failed their eyes. And so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery brail alphabet of a dissolving economy. In Spain there was revolution. Here there was only shouting and confusion. In Spain there was Guernica...

- Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

[marmar]

4. Exactly.

n/t