A cannon blast through the heart of all that is dead and decaying.

Friday, June 01, 2012

Wisconsin Recall Battle Royale

This time of year, I always have great difficulty waking up due to my king-hell allergies.  As I groggily ate my bagels and gulped down coffee at the dinning room table this morning, my blood pressure steadily rose as the constant stream of Scott Walker's bile filled my television screen.  No man should be asked to endure so many lies and so much transparent manipulation before he even rises from his first bagel and coffee of the day. 

It filled me with a strange sort of rage--the kind that would send most men running for a large calibre pistol to silence the utter gibberish emanating from the television set once and for all--but I am not Elvis; I do not live in Graceland, and new television sets cost too damn much for me to go around blowing them to bits every time some delusional moron enters my awareness through the boob tube. 

I chose the much more sensible (and economic) route of racing for the mute button on my remote every time Walker's weaselly visage suddenly appeared on the screen.  But it caused me to wonder who could be buying all this criminal rubbish that Walker and his billionaire surrogates (Koch bros., et all.) are cramming down our throats with the obscene amounts of money that the Citizens United ruling has now freed up to flow through our state like opened floodgates emptying out a sewage reservoir? 

How could any person not see through this manufactured fog of lies?  And yet, roughly half of our state seems to be held in bondage to the mantras flowing from the desks of the Masters of Talking Heads.  Despite the fact that Scott Walker has been outed time and time again by his own thoughtless arrogance (the now infamous faux phone call from one of the Koch Bros., as well as his "divide and conquer" comments to Diane Hendricks, to name but two instances), it would seem that 49% of the voting electorate is lapping it up and begging for more.  I cannot help but ask myself again and again--why?  When all reputable figures have put Wisconsin six feet below the basement in the loss of jobs, ranking dead last, not even close to No. 49, when Walker himself was forced to admit to Congress that his union-busting legislation had not improved the state budget one iota, when he was caught on camera admitting he wanted to make Wisconsin a "right to work" state while raising the taxes of all working Wisconsinites and slashing the taxes of the ultra-rich (it was divulged just yesterday that Diane Hendricks payed no taxes on her business in 2010 at all), one has to wonder how he is able to generate the support he has.

I think what it comes down to is who is able to wield the weapon of propaganda most effectively.  And now that we live in the post-Citizens United world, where we have even managed to put a dollar sign on freedom of speech, I think the forces of Right Think have gone into overdrive.  When the rich can sway enough of the electorate just by pumping our television, our radios, and our computers full of their lies, democracy itself is reduced to the shepherd who can move enough sheep between his own goal-posts, thereby winning the game that is politics. 

But in the final analysis, if we are to assign blame for this grotesque situation, all we have to do is look into the mirror.  After all, the Founding Fathers were no starry-eyed dreamers, and were very much in doubt as to whether the American people could properly tend the garden of democracy that they had so lovingly created with their own hands.  No democracy worthy of the name can survive without a well informed electorate.  And when the need to stay well informed degenerates into being manipulated by thirty second sound bits, you can bet the republic is in peril.
    
Those that naively believe that the battle being currently fought here in Wisconsin is only a regional dispute delude themselves.  Scott Walker is but one foot soldier in the army led by international corporations, whose tentacles run through such organizations as ALEC, and reach into every state legislator up to the federal level.  Their goal is to make America a cheap labor paradise, a shining sweat shop on the hill, to which end they want to destroy all organized labor, public and private, making every state "right to work."  Make no mistake: once they have their way and all the politicians that matter have been bought off or threatened into duplicity, America as we know it will have vanished. 

That is what is at stake here, in Wisconsin, and in every state in this union.  A battle is raging for what this country is to become.  Are we to turn back the clocks of progress to sixty hour plus work weeks with no benefits to speak of, as corporations rape this once great land of all its resources and turn it into one vast dumping ground until it resembles a moonscape?  Are we to sit passively by while the rights our fathers and mothers fought for are legislated out of existence?  Or are we going to live up to the responsibilities our forefathers vested in us--to make this land a true democracy, where all are able to prosper and none go hungry or homeless?  A land truly of the free and home of the brave.  Which side are you on, Wisconsin?  Which side are you on, America?  Time will tell . . .

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