by Martin Macisso Jr
Just added to the endangered species list: The Republican.
The Republican: an evil, oil tycoon-looking, white, portly, balding man who enjoys in his spare time, over-throwing rogue states rich in natural resources in an effort to enrich his Ivy League cronnies, insider trading, organizing Pro-life rallies, mass genocide and long walks on the beach.
Yes, its easy to say that not many free minded people categorize themselves in the above group. The rise and fall of the Bush Empire has left the boat tipping, close to the point of capsizing, to the Left. If anyone in the Great State of Maine has any hopes to run for political office, you best consider yourself - time wasted - if you adopt the Republican party as your political home.
But what's in a word? Is the Republican, at a definitive level, the very ROOT of the word being - REPUBLIC, accurately portrayed by the Bush Administration? Let's put ideologies aside for a moment and agree on one fact: The political parties of 2009 are in no way any semblance of what the founding fathers designed over two hundred years ago. So what have the Democrat and Republican parties become? Or more importantly, what have they come to represent? (rhetorical question alert!)
Here's a very breif history lesson in a consolidated paragraph: The Democratic-Republicans were formed by the great Thomas Jefferson around 1792 as an opposition party to slimey British loyalist, Alexander Hamilton's new party - The Federalist Party. Quite simply, the Democratic-Republicans(The Republicans) did not like what they were seeing with Hamilton's new Federalist Party(The Democrat), you see, Jefferson just got done fighting a war of Indepandance against said British and he then authored the document outlining the American's Freedom from Tyranny that many call - The Constitution. The Federalist Alexander Hamilton wanted a very large and heavy handed government, and a Central Bank funded by the British, to lend money to the American people(basically), and Thomas Jefferson in his divine wisdom gathered patriotic Americans who cherish human liberty and dislike Kings and Queens, to form a dominant political party - the Democratic-Republican.
The United States of America is a "democratic republic" (for which is stands...), which in a nutshell means, it is a group of States, independant from Federal government control (sovereign) who come together only to defend against Tyranic Rule of Kings and Queens. So this blog begs to ask this question:
"Was George W. Bush really a Republican?" and maybe another question:
"Are the Republicans really Republicans?" Did George W. Bush truely represent the small government and maxium individual liberty ideology that the President Thomas Jefferson penned and possessed? Most humans agree - NOT.
....and maybe we'll ask another more important question: "What are you?"
....and perhaps you'll respond:
Who knows? Who really cares, because "words" are just that, and ideologies are not "words" and "we" are not as simple as a "word".
A great American engineer, Buckminster Fuller once said,"By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties." He was born in 1895 and died in 1983, but he was genius or just aware enough to predict the demise of the Free Society, to be replaced by the wheels of global commerce and capital merchants gambling away our middle-class freedoms.
And what has become of the American patriot? More importantly, what does it mean to be an American Patriot in 2009? In a global world, its not quite as clear as it was in 1776.
The true American patriot who wants justice and equality for ALL, cannot simply jump into a political group who claim a certain politcal ideology, in just name only. A truely "political" and "concerned" patriot does not jump into the hot topic of politics and government simply because its "that time of year again". (heated rant warning)
A REAL political person gets involved because they're PISSED OFF. A REAL political person runs for office because his/her government has become a TERRIBLE place to work. A REAL patriot does not become BLIND to reality and merely fights to support a political party. A REAL AMERICAN does not beat his/her chest and waive flags in victory over another. A REAL AMERICAN does not extend an empire of belief. A REAL AMERICAN just wants to be left alone, with his/her family, with his/her property, with his/her pursuit of happiness, the proverbial search for happiness, absolutely free from control, FREE to think, FREE to act , FREE to speak, FREE to choose, FREE will in general.
So come election season, perhaps its time to "write-in" your own affiliation. In the spirit of making up new words to really describe the nature of the party politics in 2009, here are some of mine:
Trustafarian = hippie Democrat with lots of money(I had to throw that in to assure you're still awake;)
Democa-lobby-acrat = Person who uses tax dollars to buy bills supporting liberal agenda.
Banking-apublican= Person on daddy's tab intent on using influence to keep Daddy's tab.
Anarcha-tarian= Person who wants to reduce government to rubble.
Green Party=Grow it, make it legal, but don't ask me where my car keys are.
Apatheitcrat=Absentee ballot voter who showed up 2 days early without reading up on a single candidate.
Hummer-apublican=Conservative A-hole who votes just to piss of a Trustafarian.
Thank you and sorry, I tend to get verby, but I am Undecided, so I'll just call myself an Independant. It has a nice ring to it. Or maybe I'm a verb?
One last quote from Bucky Fuller and its a doozy, in his 1970 book I Seem To Be a Verb, he wrote: "I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe."
Maybe I'm just a verb, but deffinitely not a word.
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Interesting thoughts. No doubt the Republican Party doesn't look much like it did at its founding. When the GOP was formed - around 1860 - it was primarily as a coalition of players who a) hated the legacy of Andrew Jackson and b) wanted to halt the spread of slavery. Within that coalition, there were more outspoken abolitionists and anti-protectionist industrialists/bankers from the north. But the big tent was designed to draw in pro-Union border state Democrats. It worked and Abraham Lincoln was elected.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, the biggest legacy of Lincoln's Republican Party is the adoption of the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution - most importantly, the 14th Amendment protections against state government intrusions upon Equal Protection and Due Process.
Yet, this didn't take form until Teddy Roosevelt took the presidency. That is to say, the early Republican legacy is the use of the Federal Government to protect against the incidental tyranny of incongruent state regulatory efforts.
The Republican Party did not become the party it is today on its own. Rather, it because what it is today in reaction to the New Deal - i.e. Franklin Roosevelt's move to co-opt the Lincoln legacy of using the Federal Government to protect the rights of the people against tyrannical or ineffective state government structures.
When the Democrats dropped the baton of states' rights and drank the New Deal kool-aid, the Republicans picked it up and ran with it. Thus started the "strange bedfellows" Republican relationship of southern/rural populists and big city industrialists.
I would suggest that the Religious Right's takeover of the Republican agenda was purely incidental. It occured as a result of having too many rural populists under the tent who happened to be religious. Big city industrialists then decided to make their faustian bargain and signed onto the moral majority campaign, ushered in the Reagan era, and there you have it.
Ever since, the libertarian roots of the Republican Party have been marginalized by the Religious Right.
Or something.