Dreaming

I saw a purple-crowned fairy in my dreams last night. Honestly.

When I woke up I read Beerstraw's post. I endorse it. Good stuff. But since I'm a young dude living in California, I blame it all on the System. Here's why.

Take a young idealistic up-and-coming politician [assuming that some start this way], call him Bob. Bob feels strongly about a few issues, and if he's smart and independent-minded, probobalistically speaking these issues will liekely not follow a particular party line. So he decides to run for election. He has two choices:

1. Sell out to a particular party [my bias in no way reflected in my choice of verbiage]
2. Lose the election

Bob takes option 1. He does this because option number two is stupid. So Bob decides to run as a Democrublican. Now Bob has two more options:

A. Sell out to the party line
B. Lose the primaries

So Bob chooses option A, of course. It's his only option. So he trims his list of genuine ideals in order to win the primaries. What's the point of running if you can't win? By now he's becoming a party hack, but he still feels like an independent spirit so it doesn't bother him too much. He hires handlers to tell him how to look and what to say in order to get votes from the Democrublican party. In order to finance his campaign, Bob aligns himself with several corporate interests. By the time he wins the primary, Bob has become a complete phony. He adheres to the party line so religiously that he believes that's what he started out believing just a few months earlier. Next comes the general election. His options:

I. Revert to more moderate positions
II. Lose the election

So Bob softens his stances. He no longer follows the party lines. His handlers talk to him in terms of gaining and winning votes. They plan on keeping all his old supporters and gaining a few new ones by essentially lying: retracting his harder positions from the primary race and becoming more moderate. Bob listens to his handlers and shakes hands the right way, he smiles at the cameras the right way, adds perhaps a homey twang or sophisticated curve to his speech, and he treats his opponents with the correct blend of disdain and respect that he has been coached into believing will win the sympathis of the general public.

Bob wins.

Now Bob has two options:

i. Sell whatever remains of his soul to the System and have a long political career.
ii. Revert to his original well-thought-out ideals, be labelled a liar and hypocrite, and lose all political clout. Lose the next election

So Bob finally is making policy decisions. He is a slave to his former campaign donors, his party, and his supporters. Someday he might remember that it was idealism that started him off on this track [remember, Bob didn't get into it for narcissism]. But by that time he is in way, way too deep to ever get out.

Bob's rise to public service required so much lying, bribery of the public, and selling out to corporate interests and his party that there is nothing of merit in what Bob has to offer in public service any more. He does whatever he is expected to do by those who he owes his election to.

Isn't that sad? Isn't it true? Is there another path to a high-profile public position?

Lest I lose track of the point of this post, here's it is: the political machine today is intolerant of objectivity and free-thinking. We have a choice: let others dictate to us what we are to believe or live impotent political lives on the outside of the circles of populist power.

Wow. Sounds cynical. It's not, I promise.

And by the way, lest you think that Bob represents a particular politician, that's not true. And even if he did, it's not the one you're thinking it is.

[for those of you unaware, a purple-crowned fairy is a species of hummingbird]