{"id":51749,"date":"2012-01-11T20:40:30","date_gmt":"2012-01-12T01:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=51749"},"modified":"2012-01-12T00:24:32","modified_gmt":"2012-01-12T05:24:32","slug":"exit-signs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/exit-signs\/","title":{"rendered":"Exit Signs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like that existentialists’ room with no doors or windows, we are now in what Jean-Paul Sartre called in his play No Exit<\/em>, “the hell that is other people.” \u00a0The month of January has begun, and the silly season that is the interminably long road of time stretching before us between now and the Republican National Convention in late summer is upon us.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"<\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

I look forward to this year’s general election campaign like I do an invitation to a goat slaughter.\u00a0Needless to say, like many of us here, I haven’t been able to get too worked up about this season’s Republican primaries, their candidates, last night’s primary in New Hampshire, or the 2012 election in general. It’s not like we were finally getting rid of George Bush and Dick Cheney in 2008. It’s not because I’m a Democrat and the President has pissed me off on more than a few occasions these last two years, or that it’s the Republicans’ turn to nominate a candidate.\u00a0It’s not about whether or not I am for or against any one party or any one person — because all members of the elected parties have proverbial ‘stains on their dresses’. This is just what Washington has become.<\/p>\n

It’s clear on the part of Republicans that\u00a0the election of 2012, like most general elections in the last twenty years, is not about issues.\u00a0In fact, its very hard to find that the issues we actually face — like poverty, joblessness, access to affordable health care, an increasingly diminishing environment — have any connection at all to the platforms of the Republicans campaigning for the presidential nomination. Unless of course, you live off a trust fund or you’re a fetus. A bizarre costume contest at masquerade ball in Versailles could be the more accurate summation of the Republicans’ race for the White House so far, coupled with mud-slinging, race-baiting and other egregious forms of pandering to the base.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s also quite clear that members of Congress have done their best to try to ‘plow the road’ to advantage their party, attempting to sabotage the country for political gain by their corporate masters, even slowing the recovery of the economy by last year’s late summer debt ceiling crisis — an attempted national fiscal suicide — during a Mercury retrograde no less. That event alone nearly turned the world’s economy to shit. But that did not matter, as long as it could be used as mud to sling at President Obama.\u00a0Same with their refusal to approve key agency heads like the ones for Transportation Safety or the Federal Consumer Protection Agency, a watchdog department designed to protect ordinary citizens from the loan and credit fraud that tanked the economy in 2008. Stepping around an inert Congress, the President finally had to appoint Richard Cordray to head this agency through recess appointment. The nation’s capitol, it seems, is stuck.<\/p>\n

Yet, as the world turns, Congress continues to dig in its heels. As long as it tarnishes the chances for President Obama’s re-election, this Congress will do what it must even if it means fucking the country up further in the process. They really don’t care if you yell.\u00a0Embracing their corporate cohorts protected by the SCOTUS’ Citizen’s United\u00a0ruling, the relationship of the Republican Party and their presidential nominees to the reality of everyday citizens does not exist.\u00a0Why do they do it? The answer is: Why not?\u00a0They have the time, the money and cameras squarely pointed at them, and their ability to hypnotize others into voting against their own self-interests is legend.\u00a0The Republican political road show of 2012 is feeling, at least for this audience, more and more like a teleplay by Sartre.<\/p>\n

2012 is America’s first official “Citizen’s United” election. By that I mean, according to the Supreme Court ruling, that corporations are persons with a ‘voice’ in our republic. Money, otherwise known as campaign contributions, is the ‘voice’ of corporations.\u00a0Not that this hasn’t been the case already for several years, but now it’s official.\u00a0In short, the general elections could be called “Campaign 2012, Inc.” — kind of like the Olympics, with billions in ‘sponsorships’. Should we expect\u00a0Mitt Romney breakfast bars, official light bulbs of the Rick Perry campaign, and maybe even a pharmaceutical named after Rick Santorum? Perhaps I will leave the symptoms that the Santorum pill relieves entirely up to you. Let’s just say the silly season is made even sillier by the newly encoded corporatization of American politics.\u00a0The actual passion, also known as rage, is coming from and for us<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We are starting to see the closed off room that is the general election campaign that we have been forced into accepting every four years. We have withstood the psychic assault of character assassination, subtle appeals to intolerance, bigotry, violence and every other base instinct we should have rid ourselves of the day Jack Kennedy died.\u00a0Just maybe our lack of interest in the 2012 election year is not a signal of social demise, but an initial sign of the returning health of our republic, and that we’re sick to death of this shit.\u00a0This ennui with the current Republican crop is our impatience with the side show. The political infantilization of the American public has to stop or the world could indeed end.<\/p>\n

The Occupy Movement’s standing up to the machinations occurring in corridors of power is our actual social and political evolution — albeit quiet — and it’s taking place right under the television screen.\u00a0We need to continue being the real ones. Consciously or not, after a season of the Occupy Movement (and more to come), we are\u00a0standing further and further back from entering that closed off room ever again. We are starting to recognize the circus called Campaign 2012 is just a movie set. The living room we’ve been sitting in, watching the clown show of the Republican primary debates, is just a Neptunian illusion after all. In February, once that illusory planet leaves Aquarius — the sign of the people and groups — maybe the fog will lift and some hard questions will be asked of all candidates running, including the President. Maybe then we can begin to question ourselves and the dazed myopia that has brought us perilously close to taking down a whole lot more than our portion of the continent.<\/p>\n

This year, there is support to get out of the room by, twisting Sartre for a bit, recognizing the hell it has been for us — all of us. There’s been a good long thirteen years of it, probably even more, and we don’t have to take it anymore. This year, with this crop of clowns, it’s going to be a long road from now until August. Maybe it’s time to back up out of the illusion of politics — that windowless room. Maybe it’s time to help others breathe in the reality of it — the people who need help, the schools that are getting de-funded, the health care needed by those who can’t afford it, the poisons that threaten not just our grandchildren but their children in coming generations. We need the proof provided by anecdotal evidence that the policies of benign neglect that have plagued the voiceless and vulnerable among us for the last 40 years\u00a0aren’t working. We don’t have to accept the movie set or a hell we make of ourselves and each other. We don’t have time anymore for ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’. It’s now about all<\/em> of ‘Us’. Maybe this time, we could get it right. Maybe this time, we could all get up, step back and get out of that sunless room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like that existentialists’ room with no doors or windows, we are now in what Jean-Paul Sartre called in his play No Exit, “the hell that is other people.” \u00a0The month of January has begun, and the silly season that is the interminably long road of time stretching before us between now and the Republican National … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51749"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}