#112 The Lesser of Two Evils (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Since 1968, every election in which I've voted, for every significant office, state or federal, the choices have been the selection of the lesser of two evils; Demolican or Republicrat, conservative or less conservative, Tweedly Dee or Tweedly Dumb.  Since I began my voting career writing-in my Presidential candidate, Eugene McCarthy, I pretty much did the same for every other office on the ballot.  Except for the rare exception of a local candidate who I know and believe might be uncorrupted enough to do some good in political office, I have written-in a candidate for almost every office for which I've voted in the last 36 years.  If I didn't write-in someone I thought could do the job, I voted for one of the alternative party candidates.  Maybe that's a wasted vote, but I don't think so. 

The only vote I feel I ever wasted was in 1996, here in Minnesota, for the office of state governor.  The race was tight, too close to call between the Demolicans or Republicrats.  An alternative party was fronting a complete political unknown, Independence Party candidate Jesse Ventura, for the office and while I thought Ventura would make a terrific governor I thought the Republicrat, Norm Coleman, would be a disaster for the state.  Coleman was a corporate welfare promoter for sports teams and crooked construction companies as the mayor of St. Paul and I thought bringing that attitude to the state government would be a disaster.  I voted for Hubert Humphrey II, the Demolican, a candidate I despised from his pitiful performance as the state auditor. 

I was disgusted with myself as I cast my vote.  I wasn't voting for someone I respected, for the first time in my life, I was voting against someone I despised.  Even more disgusting, I had a choice on the ballot.  I had a choice that I thought was better than anyone I could have written-in for the office.  Out of cowardice, fear of the more obvious evil, I voted for someone who I thought had no chance of doing the job well, but who had a chance of winning. 

As if fate was trying to teach me a lesson in civic responsibility, Jesse Ventura won.  For the first time in my life, I had a chance to vote for both someone I respected and someone who had a chance of winning and I missed it.  For a brief moment in my life, I was a conservative, a political coward, and I was rewarded for that failure when I watched Jesse's election celebration and knew that I'd had nothing to do with that success.  I never felt less of an American than the evening of Ventura's inaugural celebration.  I will never again vote for the lesser of two evils.  A recent bumper sticker reads, "Kerry sucks less."  I'm not convinced that is a terrific endorsement.  Bush, on the other hand, sucks more.  That doesn't make the choice much easier. 

I'm an American.  I don't give a damn about the "rights" of international corporations, dictators, kings and queens, the idle rich, or any other piece of worthless human crap.  The positive history of this country is all about the battle between the middle class and the inherited power class.  I'm back in the war and I don't care if we win it this year or any other election.  If I do my part, the rest is up to you.

#71 A Democratic Experiment (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

Minnesota's experiment in participatory democracy ended in early January. Once again, the rats are winning the rat race. The lesson the state and the nation should have learned from our experience was distorted, or simply ignored. Mostly ignored. A lot of vested interests went well out of their way to pretend the last four years were either insignificant or a terrible mistake. I guess you could call that active ignore-ance?

As of January, our citizen governor’s, Jesse "The Body/Mind" Ventura, four years was up. He chose not to run again, most likely because he needs some time to wash the bitter taste of public service from his palate. The Independence Party fielded a strong candidate against a pitiful Democratic candidate and a downright repulsive Republican corporate mouthpiece. Minnesotans stood up on their hind feet and split the overwhelming majority of votes between Tweedly Dee and Tweedly Dumb. Dumb won.
Like most of the country, Minnesota's voting public was bought for a song (the rarely credible "no new taxes" refrain) and we're off on another four years of pointless politics, underhanded spending, and smoky room decision making. The politicians and the media call this "politics have returned to normal." This month, we learn that part of returning politics to "normal" includes the information that an insurance company that had agreed to a $3.5 million settlement decided to back out of that agreement because they discovered that a $10,000 "contribution" to the state Republican Party would reduce that penalty to $200,000 and a promise to stay out of the state for 5 years. Personally, I think missing out on a few decades of "normal politics" would be a relief.

In the aftermath of the last couple of elections, one of my favorite events is getting a call from one of the local news rags asking if I'd like to subscribe. I know this is sort of like picking on a fat kid, but if you're lazy enough to work for a newspaper you ought to expect a little abuse. We have two anti-newspapers in the Twin Cities and they regularly offer free bird cage protection in the hopes that I might decide to actually pay for my media drivel.

"No, not interested." I say. I always give them a chance to exit gracefully.

"How else are you going to keep up on what's happening in your neighborhood, your state, and your country or the world?" The solicitor always replies. It must be on their script.

Since the solicitor passed on a graceful exit, I can degenerate into attack mode without feeling unfairly malicious. "I talk to my neighbors, I read the free news websites (including AP) on Yahoo!, and that's about all the interest I have in what's going on in 'the world.' But newspapers are at the bottom of the list of information sources. You guys are the folks who couldn't uncover, then wouldn't report, the fact that a Presidential candidate had a long DWI record. Something, that any high school journalist student would know how to find. You guys spent eight years harping about Clinton's "I didn't inhale" comment but completely avoided Gee Wiz's spoon draining coke habits. You guys still insist on characterizing Gee Wiz as a 'jock' when the closest he ever got to being athletic was when he was a Yale cheerleader.

So where's the news?

"You folks have as much vested interest in dragging the country down into a two party system, because those two parties have all the advertising money. Anyone who's not pre-owned doesn't have enough cash to interest the media, so where's the news going to come from? It's not news if everyone already knows what you're going to say. I trust my local free radical rag and random internet news sites far more than the major media and that isn't saying much." I'm usually just getting started when the phone solicitor loses interest and asks to be excused.

My local Public Radio/TV contributor-hunters used to get polite conversation and moderate contributions. I've even volunteered to do time taking contributions on the phone for them, but no more.
In the last days of our state's congressional election the incumbent candidate, Paul Wellstone, died in a plane crash. The Demoplicans dredged the Mississippi until something, Walter Mondale, got caught in the nets. They propped him against a lectern and offered him as a memorial substitute for Wellstone. In a last minute attempt to focus the congressional campaign, someone decided that there ought to be a debate so that under-100 year old voters would know who Mondale was. Mondale threw an old fart's tantrum and refused to debate unless he only had one opponent on the stage. His attention span had, apparently, shrunk even further than it had been when he was Carter's vice-pres. So, even though the Green Party and the Independence Party candidates met the threshold for public financing, they didn't meet Mondale's standards for debate participation.

Remember, this is all taking place in a state where the "experts" claimed that, in 1998, Ventura wouldn't get 5% of the vote until the polls started to close and Jesse ended up being governor. Sometimes, the public actually gets to vote before the media proclaims the new king. But not this year.

Minnesota Public TV broadcast the two-party debates. Mondale proved himself to be a crabby old used-to-be-a-liberal, currently-a-corporate-shill fool. Coleman managed to keep his feet spread far enough that he didn't trip over them. And the two best candidates spent the evening watching the election being thrown by "public broadcasting."

That piece of history will save me a good bit of time and money in the future. Having controlled an election and actively worked to exclude substantial third-party options, Public Broadcasting threw its hat in with the rest of paid media. I think this is a sad moment for Americans, who have put time and contributions into trying to hang on to a small spot of media control, but the past is the past and we have to move on. Something Ventura's moment in politics provided for Minnesotans. A moment in the sun for Democracy. The last Presidential election, also an embarrassment for democracy and our electoral system, trashed the credibility of national elections. Our local election finished off hope for the Minnesota Fifth Estate. Good thing we have the Internet.

However, Minnesotans learned quite a few things about government during The Body's reign. We learned that anyone with reasonable intelligence can manage a state at least as well as professional politicians (a world class oxymoron). That should have been obvious, but testing the theory with a professional wrestler was a pretty dramatic example. Jesse made up for his own lack of experience and training by packing his administration with a diverse and skilled group of people that even the media and Republicrats were impressed. I think this demonstrated that the best people for the job of managing the country try very hard to avoid politicians, not politics.

There's an old adage about management and politics that says "anyone who wants the job shouldn't be allowed to do it." Jesse's candidacy was founded on testing that theory. When he started his campaign, he was trying to make a political point. He had next-to-no expectations of winning the election. His campaign was half entertainment, half protest movement, and zero political ambition. Of the three candidates for governor, Jesse was obviously the best choice. For once, that mattered. Four years later, the least capable candidate of that same trio, Norm Coleman, has been elected to the U.S. Senate, Jesse is retiring from politics, and our new governor is a conservative corporate hack. It's comforting to see that humans are still predictable and gullible.

Jesse got a lot of heat from characterizing the media as "jackals." The heat all came from the media. Anyone who's watched a press conference would have a hard time disputing the jackal label. On average, the media is lazy, elitist, vicious, disinterested in the truth or issue complexity, and observes pack mentality etiquette more closely than traffic on the San Diego Freeway. I think calling the media hacks jackals is slandering a perfectly reliable animal.

I didn't vote for Jesse. I was so worried that the Republican idiot, Coleman, would win that I flushed my vote on the Demolican candidate, who I disliked slightly less. It's the first time in thirty-some years of voting that I chickened out and the first time that a candidate I really wanted to see elected ended up in office. Go figure.

Jesse was thin-skinned, tended to whine when he felt abused, he could be a bully, he was often overly-dramatic and a little paranoid, and he would rather settle serious issues in the parking lot. He was also quick to admit when he needed to study a subject before commenting on it. He took advice and could tell good advice from vested interest advice. He cared more about taxpaying citizens than he did the tax-avoiding rich. He's not a coward. He has principles and tried to live by them, even when they were politically incorrect. He came into the office with the same standards he took when he returned to life as a civilian.

My only serious disagreement with Jesse came when he was hanging out with a New York talk show. He said that St. Paul was much more poorly designed than Minneapolis. He joked that the place had been laid out by "drunken Irishmen." Having just experienced far too much of Minneapolis' organization, I couldn't agree less. I think Minneapolis was designed by a pack of drunken professional wrestlers. The city, obviously, couldn't decide if it wanted to use the compass, the winding and merging rivers, or the random escape route of a scared rabbit as a street planning device. So, a little of each was applied. Getting from point A to point B involves passing through Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Russian alphabet.

So, Jesse, you were a good governor. Some of us learned a lot about politics and the state's activities while you were in office. I'm proud to have been a Minnesotan during your term. I'll miss you and your honesty and, maybe more than you, the members of your administration. You "shocked the world" and this brain-dead place is better for it. I hope, someday, we Americans find the courage and creativity to test the American Experiment again.

March, 2003

#59 We da People (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

I had the interesting pleasure of seeing Minnesota's rapping, wrassling, acting, and  Governor, Jesse Ventura, live and in person and doing his morning radio show this past Friday morning.  I'm not a big believer in the charisma thing and I wouldn't have given a lot of credibility to anyone who tried to tell me that Jesse had a piece of that action, but he does.  In fact, he's down- right nearly- likeable in person.  Who'da thunk?

But that's not the point of this Rant.  Before Governor Ventura started his radio show, Jesse took some questions from his audience of Musictech College and Minnesota Academy of Recording Arts students.  One of the more strident questioners was a young woman who was upset that she couldn't afford to pay her private college tuition and her apartment rent on the income she made from her two part-time jobs.  She was convinced that Jesse owed her an explanation of why "the government" didn't provide her with low income housing assistance.  Jesse tried to make the best of the question by explaining how she would appreciate her education that much more because she'd earned it.  He explained how he'd tried to redirect higher education funding to direct student loans and grants, but was shot down by the Minnesota legislature who left the education system in charge of that money.  He did his usual bit on how citizens shouldn't expect the government to make every personal decision as painless as possible.  It was obvious that she wasn't happy with his answers.

I've seen that reaction a lot, when people want "the government" to pay for something they want to do; or something they did that turned out to have unexpected personal costs.  This afternoon, while I was cutting next winter's firewood and thinking about my own work/education history, it struck me why that expectation is especially irritating to, what's becoming, a minority of citizens. 

Because the government (especially the federal government) is so out of control and so deep into our personal lives, too many Americans are beginning to think of that institution as a free-standing entity.  It's not.  Even in places where the government is a vicious monster that exists solely for the purpose of mangling the lives of its citizens, that government only exists at the will of the public.  It might take an incredible act of will to end government's existence, but that government still stands because its citizens allow it to stand.  In our case, we Americans are the government without any great effort on our part.  We may be too lazy to exercise our responsibilities in that capacity, but the enemy we've met is still us. 

When someone insists on getting something from "the government," they're really insisting on getting it from each of us.  Individually.  Me, in particular. 

When Enron's execs ask their boy, Gee Wiz Bush, to hand them a few billion dollars worth of federally protected oil fields, they're asking for that handout from you and me.  Especially me.  I have a particular resentment for any money taken from me to give to the rich.  At the other end of the spectrum, the pico-economic level, when a single mother expects the government to subsidize her decision to become a parent, she's asking for that help from you and me.  Just like the rich folks. 

We approaching the tip of the pendulum where the people insisting on being helped outnumber the people being asked to provide that help.  We've passed the point where the people providing assistance out-vote the people getting assistance.  Today, the majority of folks in ballot booths are performing the act of voting themselves rich.

I had a strange and personal experience with this mindset, about twenty-five years ago.  A high school friend, who I hadn't heard from in nearly a decade, had spent his first out-of-Dodge years playing professional baseball.  He'd done a couple of years playing college ball, a couple of years in the minors, three years in "the Big Show," and a couple more years in the minor leagues before deciding he'd thrown enough baseballs for a lifetime.  Then, he picked a nice ivy league college and spent the next few years getting a Masters in Psychology.  Once he finished with college, he discovered he'd spent his baseball wad and a bunch more.  He was in debt and was beginning an career that might not pay much more than the interest on that debt until he was established; or discovered he wasn't a good listener and chose another occupation.  So, he did what any logical modern American would do; he wrote to every person he'd ever known and asked us to help pay off his debts and finance his new practice.  Since he was trying to get rid of his debt, he wasn't asking for loans, he was asking for no-strings-attached handouts.

At the time, I was supporting a wife and two kids on $2.88 an hour.  My empathy for a guy who had a college degree and had earned the American League's minimum wage was very limited.  I found that everyone I knew, who this guy had contacted, was at least as offended by the ex-pitcher's pitch.  Nobody found the time to mail him the spare change they'd stored in their couch pillows.

This past Friday, I found myself regurgitating the same old resentment for being told that I had an obligation to pay for someone else's personal choices.  In 2002, Americans are so lame that we expect to be subsidized for private school expenses?   What's next?  Even with my ability to wildly exaggerate every idiotic situation, I can't think of anything more extravagant (or wimpy) than that.

About 100 years ago, my grandparents bagged their belongings on a cargo ship, signed in at Ellis Island, transferred their stuff to a Santa Fe train, and were dumped in eastern Kansas where they were given the freedom to build a subsistence farm and a community; or starve.  Today, immigrants sue for welfare benefits, regardless of their legal status and kids believe they have an inalienable right to the comforts of middle-class while indulging themselves in whatever strange pursuit that might attract their momentary interest or fantasy.  Wow!  You've come a long way, babies. 

The next time some fantasy-player, nouveau-conservative babbles about how Reagan overwhelmed the evil-empire of Communism by burying the country in military-industrial debt, I promise to lose my lunch.  We didn't beat our socialist enemies, we became them.  Thanks for nothing, Ronnie.

April 2002

A Wise Move

In a country where stupid is the new intellectual, it probably pays to be flexible. In Minnesota, we learned that one price of giving credibility to the right wing press is that ordinary people of good will are driven from government. Their replacements will be the usual suspects of "professional politicians" who masquerade as actual human beings; Pawlenty, for example. The chances that other actual human beings will follow Ventura into politics becomes vanishingly lower every year. The corporate media protects its own, ruthlessly.

The multiple standards the wingnut press applies to abusing government is amusing, at best, and treasonous on average. For example, in our last state election both of our corporate paper media outlets decided that picking on Tommy Emmer's history of drinking and driving and his perverted family's even worse character is out-of-line and irrelevant to the election of a governor. The fact that this candidate has a terrible personal record and that he is, apparently, not much of a parent or role model for his son was pretty obviously important information for those who expect their government's leaders to be honest, responsible, reasonably moral, and accountable. Emmer clearly had none of those qualities.

If the local media had not gone after Ventura at every opportunity for considerably fewer and less serious activities, there might be some credibility in their behavior. Since they pulled out every gun they owned to discredit our first citizen governor in decades, their bias has been easily identified. Pawlenty, who had the Minnesota version of Reagan's "Teflon coating," was a blatant corporate shill from the moment he entered politics. Hell, he lived off the income he made "on the board" for a crooked cell phone company for his two years of "unemployment" between 2003 and 2005, when he took office as the state's governor. NewTel Holdings and their subsidiary, New Access, paid Pawlenty $4,500-a-month to pretend to be a "consultant and legal adviser," although even Pawlenty couldn't remember doing anything specific for New Access and "didn't view that as my job" during the period. How many real humans can knock down $54k/year doing so little that the effort was less than inconsequential?

You can work for any number of crooked corporations, above and below the surface, and our corporate media stays in love with you, The more you know about Pawlenty, the less a working class voter should like him, so the media made sure we knew as little as possible. So, Emmer's kid gets drunk and decorates a drunken coed with penis pictures and he's off limits. A disgruntled state employee invents a tale of Ventura's son having parties in a building that Ventura closed during his term of office, and the media is all over it. Pawlenty gets a paycheck for doing nothing, by his own admission, from a corporation that was convicted of conning citizens out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges and that fact literally vanishes from his public biography. Ventura used some of his spare time to be an XFL broadcaster and the media goes nuts. In his spare time, a resource a governor apparently has plenty of, Pawlenty vanished from the state after he began campaigning for President a year before he left his Minnesota office and it wasn't a blip in our media's outlook, although Pawlenty left the state massively in debt with the worst employment statistics since the last Great Depression.

Our local governments are becoming just as infested by "professional corporate politicians." The media leaves out the middle term of the proper description, because "professional politician" doesn't excite the "wrong kind of reaction" the way the full name might. In a democracy, there is no such thing as a professional politician because elected officials serve the will of the public. In our corporatocracy, there are politicians who are professional in the worst sense of the word: "participating for gain or livelihood in an activity or field of endeavor often engaged in by amateurs." These paid and captured employees of corporate America are as disinterested in the future of the country and their communities as are the big box stores that Pawlenty and his ilk believe the country should imitate; "look toward a Sam's Club approach to government by providing value at a low cost." Democracy and Wal-Mart have nothing in common, just as the corporate model and democracy have always been at odds.

In the end, it appears that real humans will disappear from politics and we'll be left with the professionals. You'd think that even someone as committed to the ideals of politics as Obama would have second thoughts after a single term. Ventura probably left us with the perfect model for citizen-politicians: win, accidentally; fight like hell with everyone inbred in the system; leave while you still have a soul; finally, any time you have an audience, remind the public of how fuckin' stupid they were to let you go. Characters like Pawlenty, who have done nothing but suck the public tit their whole lives, don't have that option. Without political life, they aren't live at all. Citizen politicians can always go back to their real life, but if they don't do it quickly they'll lose that option and become "professional politicians" or, as they should be known, full-time deadbeats.