{"id":2274,"date":"2008-05-07T21:00:29","date_gmt":"2008-05-07T21:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2008\/05\/07\/the-futility-and-frustration-o\/"},"modified":"2008-05-07T21:00:29","modified_gmt":"2008-05-07T21:00:29","slug":"the-futility-and-frustration-o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/07\/the-futility-and-frustration-o\/","title":{"rendered":"The Futility and Frustration of Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is obvious in the United States that we need to replace the executive with a Democrat and add a few senators in the mix, in order to undo 8 years of Republican policy and replace it with four to 8 years of Democratic policy. This is because Democratic policy is better. Not great, just better. Also, Republican policy has a few elements that are truly evil, far more nefarious than anything the democrats have to offer. For instance, we really don’t want to have a supreme court staffed entirely by yahoos. We are almost there now. Let’s please not go all the way.But in the mean time, it is easy to get frustrated with the system. I’m not anti-party, or even anti-two-party. I kinda like the system, and I participate in it. I am annoyed at people who are too ready to complain about the system but really, all they do is complain. They don’t do anything useful or helpful. Just whining. The only whine I want around here is something red, French, and at least four years old. Otherwise, please, no whining.But I do want to express a few frustrations about the system.Recently we saw the Reverend Jeremiah Wright affair unfold. This was a tragi-comedic circle jerk of willful misunderstanding if I ever saw one, with all parties being guilty but no party more guilty than the Fourth Estate. For days we heard nothing but “Has Obama put the Jeremiah Wright Affair behind him or not?” coming out of the tube and the intertubes. Now, we are hearing about how successful Obama must have been at putting the Wright affair behind him, because it seemed to not affect Tuesday’s results in the Indiana or North Carolina primaries.Members of the Fourth Estate, you need a reality check here: Barack Obama did not “put the Wright affair behind him.” The voters did not transcend it either. It simply wasn’t that big of an issue to anyone but a few percent of the voters and to Tim Russert and the other Spewing Heads of network and cable TV. There was no blip because there was no thing<\/em> to make a blip.Sunday, Russert interviewed Obama on Meet the Press. I watched. The total interview was about 50 minutes. The first 16 minutes were about Wright. The War in Iraq was not brought up until 40 minutes into the interview. Tim Russert, bite my ass please. You have no sense whatsoever of your responsibility, do you? None. You are such a joke.I’m now beginning to think that Clinton (whom I started out supporting, by the way) is a psychopath. It is obvious that she cannot win, and it is now up to her to “do the right thing.” But she can’t.I am reminded of a story.<\/em>One day in the Congo I went to the deep forest with a group of Efe Pygmy men and a colleague (who turned out to be a pretty poor excuse for a human being, but that’s another story). As we hiked deeper and deeper into the forest, my colleague and I kept chiding Endimo, the man who was in charge of carrying the fire, to not let the fire go out. You see, Pygmies do not use any fire starting technology. They just keep the fire going, and they carry it around with them when they need to. We knew, however, that these guys were likely to let the fire go out because they knew that I’d have a lighter or some matches with me. But we kept telling them to not let it go out.So we got many many hours into the forest to the top of a hill sticking up above the trees. We were to camp here, in a cave. One of the guys, Ambrosi, put together a bunch of dead wood to get a fire going, and we turned to Endimo …”So, is the fire you are carrying alive? Or is it dead?” I said.”Oh, it’s dead. It died a long time ago, way back on the trail…”We explained to Endimo, Ambrosi and the others that this was an experiment. We did not carry a lighter with us, or matches, because we wanted to live as they live, relying on the fire that Endimo carried. But now the fire was dead. What would we do? We would now probably die in the forest.Ambrosi continued to arrange the dead sticks and logs that he had gathered, uselessly. I went over to him and said …. “So, Ambrosi, are you expecting this pile of dead sticks to get hit by lightning?”He looked up at me and said….”Well … It’s possible!”Now, whenever I see Hilary Clinton or one of her staff talking about this election, I think of Ambrosi. Yes, it is possible that Barack Obama will be struck by lightning, or that something similar will happen, and we will all go “Hey, Hillary, we are so glad you are still in this race. Would you please be our president? Please? Pleeeease?????”I did have matches with me, by the way, and after a sufficient amount of joking around I gave them to Ambrosi. Ambrosi never had a doubt in his mind that I had the matches. He just waited for us to finish our stupid little joke.We got the fire lit and survived the night. We were attacked by no fewer than 7 different species of swarming biting ants that night in the cave. The fire was truly important to us! I can still hear the constant tap tap tap tap …. constantly replacing the tiny burning embers in the ring formed around us to keep most of the ants out…….But that is another story.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is obvious in the United States that we need to replace the executive with a Democrat and add a few senators in the mix, in order to undo 8 years of Republican policy and replace it with four to 8 years of Democratic policy. This is because Democratic policy is better. Not great, just … Continue reading The Futility and Frustration of Democracy<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[49,33],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-AG","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2274"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}