Written Rhetoric — musings of a writing traveler.

Yeah, those other two are off trying to write a book like two right hands with one pen between them. No word yet how long they’ll be.

And I wish them luck, of course. Writing a story is a daunting task if you want it to be even remotely readable, let alone good. For me, though, the great and all untouchable novel is an animal I’d rather not have to deal with no matter how much coffee I drink. I can’t imagine taking on that amount of work voluntarily.

So they’ll be gone a while. But that doesn’t stop the ugly and the weird from showing up in the world of government, politics and economics. And shit, that’s my turf. So let’s get started.

First of all, I’m not talking about Haiti. I’m certainly not talking about John Edward’s illigitimate child, and god-damn you if that’s what you wanted to read about. You know what’s happening in Haiti by now. You know what the problem is. Poverty. Destitution. Inequity. Unfair extortion from France, and a general disinterest from the rest of the world. A lack of roads from the airport is just a symptom, as are the riotous crowds that form whenever someone tries to distribute supplies or food to those dying from things much worse than crumbling buildings. You don’t need Anderson Cooper showing you these things over and over for ten days; what you need is to know what policies have been in place that supported these conditions, who enacted those policies, who might have benefitted from them and which of these people are still running for re-election? And if they’re appointed, who appointed them or might reappoint them or someone similar? You need to know how you can vote to avoid these kinds of conditions. That’s political free speech, and that’s what runs a Democracy.

In any case, I digress. Or do I? What I really meant to talk about here is how our leaders don’t really work for the left any more than they work for the right. If you don’t see this, you’re probably getting your news from exactly where they want you getting it from. You’re probably watching CNN, or reading without thinking, maybe even wondering where you could possibly find the time to learn about any of these big issues enough to take an intelligent stand on it, assuming you had time to do that.

But that’s exactly the problem.

Look: after what happened this last week in the Unite States Supreme Court I was all ready to vituperate the general voting public. I was nonplussed at first, struck dumb with disbelief at the blatant criminality of what I’d just heard. It can’t be true, I thought, this must be left-wing spin. My sense of irate disgust kicked in and I wanted to set the internet on fire. But I couldn’t get it all down before my reason got the best of me and the next thing I knew I was scouring left and right wing news sites looking for details, as well as noting which sites didn’t mention the damn thing at all.

To be fair, I suppose there are just too many indirect leads into the roots of the causes of this latest bit of very grim news for me to berate everyone but people like Howard Zinn for not seeing this outrage coming…especially given the standards to which I typically hold the general public. This is the Supreme Court we’re talking about, and all you do is vote for the guy who would appoint one or two of them. And they have to be confirmed by…oh, right — the other people you get to vote for. But, man, that’s a lot to consider when all I’m trying to decide is whether this person agrees with me on major issues.

Yes, being a citizen is hard work, eh? But maybe if people who’d voted for a pimp like Bush could’ve considered more than just what he was like to have a beer with, such as what dangerous things might he do in office, we wouldn’t have decisions that endanger the very foundation of what makes a democracy made along a corner of the government that gets almost no attention.

But this is, after all, the year of the Rat. Maybe not on the chinese calendar, but certainly in the US Congress where the scurvy bastards on both sides have been doing nothing but stalling for the better part of a year now, on pretty much everything they touch. No leadership, no leader, and no action. And down the hill at the courthouse, Kennedy, Scalia and Roberts, along with the other two — who I’m daring you to look up yourself right now — are carrying on the pro-business agenda almost in the dark.

I say almost because yes, it is in the papers that the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling overturned about a hundred years of legislation preventing corporations from deciding between them the results of the Amerikan “democracy”. It is in the papers that the court ruled that money is a form of free speech and that corporations too, have a right to it, amazingly. It is in the papers that purely legal entities, while still prohibited from giving directly to candidates to further their own agendas, can now spend unlimited amounts on television ads and radio time, or any other form of public influence. But aside from a couple of pundits here and there that are pointing out how much this limits any individual’s ability to make a voice heard over the billions that oil and insurance companies will certainly pour into campaigns now, there is very little noise made about what this ruling means. The urge of a few people to scream their fiery hearts out into the black empty abyss made wider by corporate money now amounts to a fart in a hurricane.

But this is and always has been the logical progression of things. When the voting public participates in the political process only enough to claim as much, people with actual interests will surely win out the disinterest of the masses, even if they are the majority. And when those few people aren’t people at all but legal entities with all but unlimited cash, the interests of the disinterested won’t go forgotten, or ignored…they’ll simply cease to exist.