POLITICAL GARBAGE

I can’t believe that the local paper chose to publish my fluff blog about the great drug bust after ignoring most of what I consider the meaningful stuff. Of course the edited out my comment about how spending so many resources on tracking down marijuana growers is such a total waste from the git-go.
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But, that’s water under the bridge. Let’s talk about the garbage in the water!

The big story in Missouri yesterday was the expose on Rod Jetton’s involvement with the secretive passage of the “village” law. The more I see and hear about Jetton, the more I think that he epitomizes the garbage in the water of Amerikan politics. The guy’s arrogance is brazen and abrasive.

A highly prized friend of mine recently lent me a wonderful book titled, “The Earth is Enough” in which the narrator describes the political divisions within his family – Republicans on his father’s side and Democrats his father called ‘those people’ on his mother’s side – summing the whole thing up in three paragraphs:

“Socialists,” my father said in describing my mother’s family, “It’s people like them, people who have no desire to get ahead, people with a work ethic rather than a profit margin, that give people like us, people who are working their asses off to get it over on the other guy before he gets it over on us, a bad name.”

My father’s people were for God, America, and progress at any price, just as long as it didn’t cost them anything. They believed that America was the greatest nation on the face of the earth and they were willing to take on any other nation that didn’t feel the same way. They were honorable, courageous, decent folk who believed passionately that there ought to be a law given them and their kind more happiness, more prestige, and more power than those who weren’t their kind.

“Republicans,” said my mother, the word vibrating deep in her throat like a death rattle.

It seems to me that the division he described so succinctly is at the heart of the mess our country is in right now. The notion that money and power are the keys to success and that anyone who believes otherwise is a fool has become endemic.

The most sickening aspect of it is the ability of both sides to project their worst characteristics onto the other side and blast them for it.

“If you’re their buddy,” Jetton spouts, “You get your project. If you’re not their buddy, you don’t.”

Who is he talking about? – planning and zoning commissions. Planning and zoning commissions operate according to rules and regulations passed by county boards to control inappropriate building and usage practices. They have nothing to do with the kind of good ol’ boy system Jetton used to slip his buddy Robert Plaster’s village law under the table. The result of which was that his buddy, Bob, got his project.
In true FU style, Jetton also said, “It’s still America and if you want to put a junkyard in and you buy the property, it’s your right. And if a guy doesn’t want you, he could have bought the property.”

If that’s not a clear statement that the little guy doesn’t matter, I never saw one. Couple that with the description the article provided on the way the “village” law was slipped through the Congress and the slime just gets slipperier and stinkier. Why does Missouri vote this kind of scum into office?
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The big story in today’s paper was printed as a little one. In three short paragraphs stuck in the last page of the Nation/World section it is headlined, “Spokesman: Iraq will protect sovereignty” the story told in sparse detail how the Iraqis are fighting against the BushCo proposal for the US to take over the UN’s security role in Iraq.

That proposal, of course, is the long term pact Bush has been trying to slip through binding the US to long term troop presence in Iraq. It’s the central reason his administration tricked the country into this war in the first place, and but it is facing significant in-country opposition.

It isn’t just al Sadr’s group that’s against it, either. There are significant groups of both Sunnis and Shiites who are standing their ground against giving the US permanent footing in their country. This issue is becoming another wedge between the people of Iraq and the government emplaced by the coalition (read BushCo).

The fight over this issue in Iraq is much, much bigger than the three paragraphs the paper has allotted to it, and if the American press winds up taking precedence over the Amerikan press, we will be hearing more and more about it as time goes on.


Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle