6th of July

And now that the Fourth is past and everyone's had a day to recover, a post from dday at Hullabaloo that paints a depressing picture of what it has come to mean:

But from where I'm sitting, it certainly seems different, not among the elites but the public. Every four years, particularly when there's a transition in the White House from one party to the next, we hear some encomium to the strength and vitality of the American system, that it can allow the peaceful transition of power, that election-year fights end on the day of voting and the country comes together in harmony to salute its new democratically elected leader. This comfort, this blissful faith in our democracy, is exactly what has made us so fat and happy that we practically cannot recognize a Constitution in crisis. We are so benighted that when a lonely voice, as if freed from the shackles of Plato's cave to see reality as it truly is, yells "what has gone wrong with us," he gets shouted down by those authoritarians who confuse patriotism with an blind loyalty for literally whatever declaration their leaders make (this all turns around when there's a Democrat in the White House, of course, and such conventions like the Presidency are given precisely no respect).

As one of those who has been asking "Why is there even a debate on this?" (meaning torture, detention without recourse, unlimited surveillance, the sale of the American government to major corporations), I'm obviously sympathetic to dday's point.

Maybe it's just that each of us has so much shit happening right in front of us that we can't back off far enough to see what's happening elsewhere: and so when we hear about the closed-door deals to turn pristine forest into high-end housing developments (and these are not primary residences, these are vacation homes); a Supreme Court decision that lets one of the biggest, sloppiest oil companies around off the hook for being sloppy and unsafe, and lets another off the hook for discriminatory compensation practices (the Supreme Court, at this point, being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the RNC); and a Congress that insists on giving the White House immunity for breaking the law (and even though the FISA bill says immunity for the telecoms, we all know it's about the White House) and all the other crap that's been coming down for the last seen years, all we can do is sigh and turn back to our own latest disaster.

You hit overload; you go numb. That's why I've been blogging so lightly lately, and not about the news. It's the same damned crap over and over again, and the MSM just sit there and say whatever the government tells them to, like butter wouldn't melt in their mouths, and Congress just keeps going through the motions like there's no country outside of the Beltway. And the rest of us? Crying in the wilderness, I guess.