The Fantasy Years
Jan 28 at 5:05pm by Jagwire X
The Fantasy Years
Everyone should read The Fantasy Years. It’s a novel by Charles Baker about how America was lead astray by an assault on reality by right-wing (read neo-con) pundits. I’ve know about it for a while now but I haven’t gotten that far into as yet.
From the site:
The Fantasy Years is a novel about the magical effect a particular strain of popular politics has had on Americans throughout the 1990s. The blook is just as much about the forces that helped seed and shape extremist political views among the public as the end result of such views. Rush Limbaugh and right wing think tanks form the chorus, a handful of Americans muddling through the 1990s make up the cast.
Once again I recommend it to everyone interested in how we got from the Greatest Generation to where we are today.
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Election Year
Jan 28 at 3:03pm by Jagwire X
Ballot Box
Well it’s that time again folks. That’s right I speak of election year - two thousand eight. And once again we are presented with such a limited bunch of self-serving ego maniacs that I continue to wonder how this country keeps together at all. Really, my biggest complaint is the party system. We have a two party system, Democrats and Republicans. We allegedly have a multi-party system, with Greens, Socialist, Libertarians and other, but they are never in contention. It sort reduces the choice from an array of candidates to, well, two. The National Football League has a better selection process for how teams get to the Super Bowl. I don’t buy all the crap about uncommon and unconventional ideas remain non-influential and so a two party system flourishes. It’s a strategy to keep any other parties from gaining traction. It’s not like various Socialist ideals don’t overlap with Democrat ideals, or Libertarian ideals don’t have companion ideals that find traction in with Republicans.
Actually are some interesting candidates, Barack Obama (D, IL), Ron Paul (R TX), Mike Gravel (D AK) and Dennis Kucinich (D OH) for example, less self serving that most I’d say, but still full of sound and fury and a bit of demagoguery, you don’t run for president without a formidable ego at very least, even if you aren’t maniacal. You’d go home in tears every night.
Of course we’ve been dropped into an economic, social, political, and diplomatic mire, for which mitigation will be difficult at best, by the current Republican administration, so I shouldn’t hold too high hopes for the next CEO of the USA. Which is the problem, this is a government of the people, for the people and by the people - not a corporation to be run as so. We, citizens all, are stockholders in this nation and it is up to us to decide what we want. Or are we to lazy to make decisions for ourselves?
But I do hold out hope that things will get better. In any event this being an election year should provided plenty of fodder for blogging. We don’t intend to be another DailyKOS or Crooks and Liars (you should read them too) but we do hope to provide a skeptical (or perhaps cynical) view of the political landscape.
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