In 1710 Jonathan Swift wrote: “We are told the devil is the father of lies, and was a liar from the beginning…But…he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation, by the continual improvements that have been made upon him. Who first reduced lying into an art, and adapted it to politics, is not so clear from history…there is one essential point wherein a political liar differs from others of the faculty, that he ought to have but a short memory, which is necessary, according to the various occasions he meets with every hour of differing from himself, and swearing to both sides of a contradiction, as he finds the persons disposed with whom he has to deal…”
Some things never change. Mitt Romney, for example, can’t help himself. When he was Republican Governor of Massachusetts he presented himself as a moderate, passing some new laws and putting forth policy that could easily be described today as liberal. I guess he knew what state he was in. Now, he peddles as fast as he can to the right to please the current extreme Republican Party. Is nothing really meaningful? Do values just change with the wind or depend on who your audience is? Apparently so because he certainly isn’t in Massachusetts any more.
What does running for office mean, then, these days? Having principles and the courage to lead? Or is it just about pleasing enough people to get enough votes no matter how much it costs? Is it about who’s the best liar or who’s the most competent to listen to all voices and assume a leadership role? Or is it simply about the agenda of the rich and the rest of the voting public be first fooled and then damned?
One of the things Thomas Jefferson believed was that a democratic republic must have an informed populace so that they could make knowledgeable decisions when it came to electing who would represent them. Yes, there was a time when issues were the deciding factor and the point was for the people to understand those issues. The press, and before that, pamphlets, helped to spread the word about candidates’ beliefs in what was right for the country and people could rely on the information in their decision-making process. Now, more than ever, it’s hard to find a candidate’s real beliefs behind the deafening roar of the current popular and exhaustingly repeated sound bite.
An even more creepy development since Sarah Palin claimed that a journalist who asked her what newspapers she read was a trick question aimed to trip her up or somehow embarrass her as she ran for the second highest office in the land, many candidates, particularly right wing Republicans, have simply refused to speak to the press at all. So much for keeping the public informed. Well, they will speak to the so-called news of Fox, but these candidates who populate the right wing of the Republican Party prefer to rely on those knee-jerk propagandistic sound bites made up by their handlers to convince people of, well, just about anything.
It is getting tiresome to hear from the right about how much of Obama’s agenda is socialist and to never hear how fascist the Republican Party has become. It is as if Mussolini is standing by with his finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. After all, the original Fascist Manifesto called for universal suffrage and many democratic principles. Mussolini, the ex-socialist, just went along to get into power and then abandoned everything democratic to make fascism what we know it as today – dictatorial, totalitarian, unequal and fear-based.
While the Republican Party turns further and further to the right, the Democratic Party continues to simply abandon its most progressive and people-oriented values. Nevertheless, since there are so many fingers in the air checking which way the wind is blowing, we, the people, must clearly present the America we want. We can only have a stake in the future if we fight the unfair and fascist tendencies of the wealthy and bullying minority.
We must all remind everybody running for office that fear, the inability to comprehend the seriousness and depth of so many issues facing the people in our country, and representing only the wealthy are not electable values. We need something solid. We need something fair. The extreme right bandwagon is full. Time to take another path.
Question Authority.
How can people become informed without reading newspapers, and only listening to sound bites? Those who are informed must relay knowledgeable and constructive facts to as many people as possible. Those who do not participate in the election process have no right to complain about how things turn out or how things are run by the government – in my opinion.