Stop Me Before I Vote Again

A little kerfuffle among fellow scourge-ascetics is always a fun time, but back to Parson Weems:
"We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia Mckinney and aoplogy..." Sez who? Do we owe the bum on the street who says the same things as those two? Both Nader and McKinney are front-row Bullshititarians, as is the pious former war-chaser and NYT employee Hedges, as is Lerner, as is Derrick Jensen, as is Obama, as is

anyone with a megaphone for a mouth and an inordinately strong capacity to produce no commensurate action within the supersystem, and a full, DNA-strong inability to refrain from preaching Godzilla-like righteousness.

strong brew
mjoe
let's give ralph a play yard at least and cindy
surely deserves better treatment then
such lady fingered self lacerators
as hy lerner

as to liberal sauls now seeing the smbiva mission
if ever so waverly
welcome them to our log cabin ..like a good host mjoe

"It is time to walk out on the Democrats."

Uh, walk out to where exactly? The right? Self-exiled victim status? Run it by me again why either of those is an improvement. It's true that with the self-exile you get to be "right," for whatever that's worth, but you do not do anything, not one single damn thing, to move the world closer to what you say you want.

you do not do anything, not one single damn thing, to move the world closer to what you say you want.

But even in the worst case you're now harmless, instead of being actively harmful by supporting an energetically evil institution.

Pete needs to remember the analogy to abused spouses, battered wives.

"Okay, you've left the man who beat the shit out of you physically and crushed your spirit emotionally. But now you're ON YOUR OWN! That's SCARY! We should avoid being SCARED!"

Come on Pete. Man up. Hike up your bloomers and walk through the feces and urine to a place where you're not being abused and you have autonomy.

Try it, Pete.

Pete,

Is it possible that you cannot see that political engagement does not need to stop beyond the door of your local polling place?

If you can, then why ask us for an "exit plan"?

As MJS notes, all you have to do is find something in your community that occupies the time you'd spend shilling for Democrats. While voting is a brief act, many partisans actually end up giving money, doing phone banking, canvassing, and also spending their free time on the internet recycling DNC talking points. Their middlebrow fantasy football that they call "politics" is a giant swirling vortex that eats up money, time, and energy that could be better spent almost anywhere else. Even if they were spending it watching American Idol, at least that's relatively harmless.

In my personal life, I focus on issues that affect the community: copwatches, community gardens, from which we harvest and distribute free food, tackling the "minutemen" movement that has grown up in our fair border city, supporting local unions, and I still help out with some bigger issues like anti-war organizing (practically dead since Obama put an acceptable face on U.S. empire), prisons, and promoting left politics by founding a group devoted to renting out movie theatres and screening documentaries which are usually well-attended. I got that idea, as well as a notion of how to effectively promote a documentary, from a group that did the same thing in the Kansas town where I used to live.

And I don't give a dime of money to Democrats nor do I do phone banking for them, and yet I'd say my actions are more effective within my community than sucking up to the Democrats for years in the hopes that our lords and masters will finally grant us an audience. It might not be the stuff of revolution, but at least I'm frustrating the aims of the corporatocracy to create a wholly pliant and somnolent population while turning every interaction into a for-profit venture.

Oh, Null! You filthy hippie you!

Thanks for answering my question. It sounds as if you'd rather be angry and "right." Me? I'd rather be happy, but it took me a very long time to get there.

The question about an "exit plan" had to do with my curiosity about what you hope to accomplish by removing yourself from any say in who the candidates are.

When you drop out, no matter how you spin fuming on the sidelines, that's all it is. You fall face down into your own excrement metaphors and don't appear even to realize it.

For what it's worth I don't give money to any political party either. My most recent active political role, as a straight white male married for more than 40 years, was last fall as a volunteer for gay rights--which rights will come so long as people don't just get mad and go home.

I've spent many years helping the poor, the abused and the abandoned. I'm a veteran. I've raised a child and a foster child. I've cared for ailing parents at the end of life and helped my wife survive horrendous chemotherapy. I'm a hotline volunteer. In short, I've been "manned up" for a long, long time.

Pete -- Kudos on all the good things you've done. Nothng wrong with any of it except participating in conventional electoral politics, which is a waste of time and energy that could be put to better use.

By voting in primaries and so on, you may have some say in "who" the candidates are, but you won't have any say at all in what they are. Back in '08, for example, you could help decide whether you'd have a black male President who was a bloodthirsty globalist corporate warmonger, or a white female President who was a bloodthirsty globalist corporate warmonger.

Really, who gives a shit?

Pete's funny. Without knowing someone personally, he accuses that someone of being "angry." That's fuggin' hilarious! What company's Internet Post Interpretive Device are you using, Pete? The fabled Acme of Road Runner cartoon fame?

Oh Pete's a regular pile of laughs, with his cocksure declamations that we're all so "angry" and his un-ironical assertion that he's "happy" while he's busy seeing anger where it doesn't exist. The only reason to see anger in someone else's depersonalized posts is to have anger as one's primary outlook -- or, alternatively, to be completely inept at discerning the motives and emotions behind an internet post.

Comic gold from Pete. He's a rock, and he's on a roll.

CF, you're ridiculous. If your sarcasm doesn't indicate anger, it'll certainly work as a placeholder until anger shows up.

Perhaps you need to get out more.

Thanks for answering my question. It sounds as if you'd rather be angry and "right."

Actually, I'd rather be happy and right, if it's all the same to you.

There's nobody angrier than the deep-dyed, thoroughly assimilated pwog. Nobody more scared either. Scared of the possibility that they'll lose an election here or a chairmanship there. Angry at all the rest of us who see the farce for what it is and refuse to participate "constructively" in our own political emasculation. You want to see anger, go to a pwoggie board and tell them that you voted for Nader in 2000. Even better, tell them that you'd do it again. You don't even have to be a Floridian to open the floodgates of pwoggie wrath (which is, admittedly, a little like being savaged to death by a pack of toy poodles). I voted for Nader in California, a state Gore won handily, and yet my vote always gives rise to an endless stream of thanksralphing when I mention it.

The question about an "exit plan" had to do with my curiosity about what you hope to accomplish by removing yourself from any say in who the candidates are.

That's easy: I save time. I save money. I save effort that I can devote to other projects that have a reasonable chance of success. I'm not against voting in principle. It's the weakest tool in the toolkit, but it's still there. I refuse, however, to go through the dog and pony show of picking one agent of globalization and U.S. imperialism over another agent of globalization and U.S. imperialism. In short, I demand what democracy is supposed to supply: candidates who reflect my views and whom I can affirmatively support (not negatively support as the "lesser of two evils"). If the electoral system doesn't deliver such people up, then I simply do not vote.

When I lived in Kansas, I got to experience a state that limited direct democracy compared to California. Here in California, there are ballot initiatives and propositions aplenty. In Kansas, there were no such issues to lure me to the polls in the mid-term elections. Living in East Lawrence, I did have a chance to vote for Dennis Moore, who has run unopposed in every Democrat primary in living memory. The problem? I've protested Moore every time he decided to put in an appearance in his constituency. The only person I wanted to see turfed out of office aside from Moore, which wasn't happening, was the egregious Phill Kline, and even then I didn't want it enough to vote for Paul Morrison, another law-and-order, lock-em-up jackass just like Kline (although Morrison's public sanctimony was entertainingly punctured by a sex scandal, unlike Kline's).

When you drop out, no matter how you spin fuming on the sidelines, that's all it is. You fall face down into your own excrement metaphors and don't appear even to realize it.

So how much have you accomplished with all your voting? NAFTA? The Bosnian War? The Clinton-era assault on the poor? Iraq sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Iraqis? Bank bailouts? Cash-for-Clunkers, a program that raided funds set aside from alternative energy in order to funnel money to the automotive industry? Drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen? Unprecedented assaults on civil liberties? A blind eye turned to the systematic starvation of Palestinians?

That's quite a range of achievements. Truly you can stand up and say proudly, "Mission Accomplished!"

Many of the specific failures highlighted by the article I sent out yesterday by Chris Hedges criticizing the performance of the Obama Administration are legitimate points.

So as far as fact goes Chris is right...

But the way Hedges's positions are stated, and the conclusions drawn from them are not the path of spiritual progressives, in my view."

...but he needs to STFU on transcendent spiritual grounds. Truly amazing!

Pete, your crystal ball is cracked and cloudy. Good luck with the anger issues that you need to work on but project toward others, old sport.

This whole "anger" trope is interesting.

There are lots of good reasons to be angry at Obie, say. Anger seems like a rather reasonable response to mass murder, for example.

But of course one can't stay angry all the time, and anger isn't the feeling I experience as I sit here in my easy chair day after day pecking out these posts.

I cast around for a few minutes, just now, trying to figure out how to characterize my emotional tone during the throes of composition, and the closest I could get was "quiet glee." Then of course there's a certain craftsmanly pleasure in trying to find the right words -- like rummaging through your toolbox for just the right vee-pointed chisel.

Actually, writing this stuff makes me happy, now that I think of it.