Majority Report

Originally posted 3 January, 2007, I thought I adequately expressed my lack of enthusiasm about the Democratic Party's recapture of a slim Congressional majority, but I guess since I didn't call to have them poisoned or compare them to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Darth Vader, I was considered "too tame"...

Well, the holidays are over, and it's time to get back to the business at hand. The Dawn of the Dems has arrived, friends and neighbors, and a new chapter in American politics begins. Of course, it will sound a lot like the last chapter...good luck keeping straight who's who.

The new majority may be slimmer than Nicole Ritchie, but it will still behave as though it has a universal mandate from the mythical People (you know, the People they are all supposed to be looking out for). The new minority, despite 12 years of nearly unimpeded corruption and a full death grip on all three branches of government will blame their ascendant opponents for all of the country's ills. Careers will rise and fall like Roman candles on the 4th of July, characters will be assassinated in the run-up to the next big brouhaha, and nothing much will be accomplished except the small accidental triumphs that come from the rest of us ignoring them all and struggling on as best as we can.

But rather than waste the next year or so listening to the Leaders of Conventional Wisdom blat away at each other with overwrought and under-thought rhetoric, how's about we try something new. Let's start a list of "things that really matter that we can fix", and maybe another one of "people who really ARE looking out for us". Don't put labels on them, just note when they do things right. You may have to go looking for them, because people doing good things doesn't make the news; but they are out there. Let's start now so that when the Coke and Pepsi candidates ask which tastes better, we can tell them... I'll take a beer, thanks.

I know it's sad to think of putting them out of work... but I can think of a very nice parting gift: Has Been, by William Shatner