Short Stories, Long Odds

Uninvited
We’ll stay if we want
Searching through your closets
For your grandfathers gun
-Cake

Over the last several days, I have made several attempts at writing a piece for this site, or for the Dig, called “Minimum Wage Nation.” The basic thrust of the whole thing was going to be that, like most families in America, our beloved country lives far beyond its means.

This was recently proven to the American people by, of all things, hurricanes.

Oh sure, YOU knew it, and I knew it, but the American electorate did not. They did not realize how far in the hole we’ve been getting, or that we’ve been borrowing money hand over fist to finance the war in Iraq. They did not realize that Homeland Security funds have been ill-allocated, and that locales and programs that could truly benefit Americans and shore up their safety have had a hard time getting dollars, while, as previously mentioned here, Alabama and Kansas have gotten plenty of dough to combat terrorists on their native soil. They did not recognize rampant cronyism leading to appointments to positions of importance in national security: to be fair, cronyism is always rampant in federal appointments, but usually people get cush jobs at Interior dealing with things like ethanol, not jobs which require actually saving people or implementing shit that actually has to work.

Instead, Americans were treated to the third giant clusterfuck of this century. (You get two guesses as to what the first two were, and if you get it wrong, I’m not sure how you got here in the first place.) They watched on TV as New Orleans flooded and everyone in the federal, state, and local governments stood around with the collective thumb up the collective ass. They watched as everyone tried to blame each other and were unable to make much sense of who was actually responsible. The answer to that, of course, comes back to the federal government, no mater how sad you are for Generalissimo Jorge: when FEMA became part of Homeland Security, they got the power to override and commandeer state and local government decision-making and resources, which they failed to use during Katrina and are now Camaro-ing in the face of Rita.

So I kept trying to write - the gospel, righteous truth about how America is like a double-income, low-wage family struggling to make ends meet. A family, like most, that can’t afford health insurance and are unprepared for any sort of emergency. A family that, when little Timmy ends up with a busted leg for whatever reason, well, they end up losing the house. And I hate to say this, but I couldn’t do it.

After a summer of working for the Democratic Party and being met on some very important fronts with nothing but frustration, I began to wonder if maybe our party leadership is determined to fail. That maybe they like losing. That they are so wrapped up in a vision of the Democratic Party that never actually existed - the spineless, all-inclusive vision that is afraid to engage in real politics, the vision where Bill Clinton was elected because he was a really nice guy and was ready to fight on the front lines of our nation’s hearts and minds for gay marriage and abortion and being really “progressive,” a term which everyone seems to throw around (similar to ‘‘populist’) without anyone having any idea what they’re talking about. The vision where you can show up for politics without a bandana and a switchblade and still have a shot at winning.

Let me give you an example of what I mean: there’s this Denton County Constable - a Republican elected official - named Larry Floyd. Larry got in a spot of trouble because he drove to Colorado to solicit sex from a young girl via her mother, using the interweb. I urged the party to release something to the press, saying “We in the Denton County Democratic Party believe that our elected officials should hold themselves to the highest standards, and an elected official that administers the law even more so. We call for Larry Floyd’s immediate resignation at the behest of the Denton County Republican Party.”

Seems fine, right? Why wouldn’t we feel that way? “Oh no”, I was told.” We can’t touch that. We can’t play their game!” So then it comes out that the DENTON COUNTY REPUBLICAN PARTY KNEW HE WAS FILTHY. They knew he’d been accused o going after the kiddies before he ran for office, and they ran his ass anyways.

Guess what the party leadership dictated be done about it? Yeah, I bet you can guess.

So either I’m all out of outrage or I am so disappointed in the people leading my own local party that I can’t muster up the juice to throw down.

Wait, I totally just wrote about it! OH SHI