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TechnoratiA reader recently advised me:
"Sleep-walking through the gray ocean of information fog cannot provide the shock needed to bring cultural revolution ... Rebel against this negativity and write something to rattle our democratic bones."
... as in "Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk around"?
I'd like to rattle "dem bones" - our democratic bones - and I'd like to think that rattling would connect them so they'd walk around and change the world. For too long Bush & Co have been rattling our bones, systematically disconnecting them and selling them off to the private sector to finance an unjust war, while we've been sitting on our ... er...assbones.
The song analogy fails, of course. We don't need to "hear the word of the Lord," as much as we need to hear one another and make democracy work for us.
Actually, dem bones here in Portage County walk around doing democracy pretty well, connecting our foot-bones, hand-bones, head-bones and jaw-bones to hold picnics, forums, voter-registration drives and candidate's nights; to write letters to newspapers and elected officials; to go door-to-door with leaflets, circulate petitions and help people get to the polls.
Portage County has a little over 150,000 people, 56,000 households and 40,000 families. Fifty-three percent of the voters are registered as Democrats.
As well as being Democrats politically, Portage County is democratic culturally, committed to making government work for people, and with a high rate of voter turnout (71% in 2004) People also work for the government in Portage County: the largest employer is Kent State University, next-largest the county government/county hospital, followed by several large school districts. Educationally, only 14% of the population over age 25 lacks a high school degree, and 46% have had at least some college. A big boost to making democracy function in our community is our daily newspaper, the Record-Courier, which reaches about 20,000 households and has local editing and reporting.
Grass-roots activists in Portage County have worked to create an outstanding county-wide recycling program, to restore the Cuyahoga River to its natural health and beauty while preserving a historic dam, and to assure a safe cleanup of the Ravenna Arsenal. "Freedom House" for homeless veterans was sparked by local volunteer and veterans' groups, and is now expanding with help from the federal government. And just this weekend nearly a hundred people including KSU students, canoeists, kayakers and senior citizens went right into the mucky roots of the Cuyahoga River to pull out tires and trash.
Portage voters are generally well informed about current events and fairly au courant with computers and the Information Revolution. Many Democrats are involved with MoveOn.org,, read sites like www.CommonDreams.org and www.dailykos.com, and write in progressive blogs; they watch Bill Moyers on PBS, look for the best TV news they can find, and criticize its shortcomings.
Labor Day weekend close to a hundred Democrats shared a pot-luck picnic of food and politics sponsored by the Portage Democratic Coalition. (www.pdcohio.com ) People spoke passionately against Bush's plan to attack Iran and about the non-responsiveness of Congress to calls for impeachment of Cheney and Bush; they talked anxiously about the desperate need of people for universal health care, about global warming, energy costs, and the destruction of mountaintops, about the manipulation of information and subversion of justice by the White House, and the challenges to infrastructure all over our nation.
At the picnic a straw poll of favored presidential candidates gave Edwards 25 votes, Clinton 17; Obama, 10, and Kucinich, 9. "Waiting for Gore" and "I'm Clueless" each got three votes. (n = 73)
Not everything is smoothly articulated among Portage County Dems. There are tensions among several Democratic organizations, the party is still recovering from a corruption scandal. This summer, the volunteer webmaster of the Portage Democratic Coalition suddenly turned on the group, removed all web page content and replaced it with his own "Progressive Defense Council."
Shortly after Labor Day, a few Portage Democratic Coalition members turned out in support of Kevin Egler at his arraignment on charges of littering - with an 'Impeach Bush' sign - along State Rte 59 in Kent. The charges were dismissed by Judge John Plough, to the satisfaction of Egler and his attorney, Bob Fitrakis. who both believe that the best place to start with the issue of protected political speech is at the local level. Egler plans to start with Kent City Council, asking them to draft a littering ordinance that reflects the will of the people of Kent with regard to political speech.
That's a wise move, and an important one. Democracy is nothing if it doesn't start and finish on the ground where people live.
Yet I'm deeply pessimistic. While we know how to do democracy pretty well at the local level, I don't see how we-the-people connecting with our neighbors on home ground or through Internet organizations and electronic media are going to reconfigure democracy to work in global imperial economy controlled by the madmen in the White House.
I don't know how our frail bones, however connected, can deal with the monstrously inhumane, unjust and unwise programs of war, terror, torture, fear, deprivation, deforestation, resource depletion, greenhouse gases ... the list is daunting.
The specters of expanding war in the Middle East, nuclear accidents or attacks, vast sums spent on weapons, climate disasters, infrastructure decay and political repression should have rattled our bones long before now. And even if we're not sleep-walking, the "grey ocean of information fog" is rapidly limiting our vision and our ability to walk confidently toward a better future.
This September our best hope is ourselves, and whatever ways we can invent, imagine or gin up to take matters into our own hand-bones and jaw-bones and say to Congress: "Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk around/Now hear the words of the people."
No more war. Impeach those responsible for crimes against humanity. Restore our Constitutional government and our Constitutional rights. Work with us to provide health care for all. Help us sustain one another and our planet."
Before joining Senator Glenn's Washington staff in 1985, Caroline Arnold (csarnold@neo.rr.com) founded a successful small business and served three terms on the Kent (OH) Board of Education. In retirement she is active with the Portage Democratic Coalition, the Kent Environmental Council, Family & Community Services of Portage County and the Akron Council on World Affairs.
11 Comments so far
Show AllThe only way to rattle dem bones is to make them scared that come the 08 elections, that their inactivity since 06 will carry over in the disatisfaction of the voters. Maybe 08 is the year where a defacto third party or for want of a better redefininition ... a third wave or new wave begins to take shape spontaneously in Congress.
If voters elect as many new people as possible to congress in 08 (and do the same in 2010) all those new members will form a new 'element' in an old guard status quo enabling and disabling Congress. This fossilized semi-permanent multi decade term serving self appointing lobbyist owned Congress have enabled Bush and continually disable efforts to impeach him and stop the war and halt Bush's assault on our constitution. Why? Because they rigged the game so that only they keep running and thus only they get elected. Each party controls who gets their nomination etc.!
I think this overly entrenched old guard system (seniority rules the dictatorial rules of committee chairmanships etc) which holds sway in our dear Congress and provides most the excuse they need to have continued doing nothing. They know what we the people want and how mad we are at them already. Yeah...they do know. They are at the moment afraid to break ranks and holding but if a dam broke most would trot out their meticulously planned new positions and represent us once again.
Till then, they get low polls (bush and congress both) but congress attempts flying low under the radar and takes a holding pattern position, not breaking ranks. You can see they are already prepared to flip on the war issue amongst many others but until other Congressmen begin breaking ranks, the status quo center holds.
The dems wait and let the repubs stall ... standing in blood weighted by plunder ... and tell the wearied and abused men and the devastated and long suffering Iraqis to stand in place and let this corrupt occupation go on.
There is nothing to be accomplished in Iraq by us stalling any longer. Bush avoids the totality of his failure since it is so complete and so massive that it is at present simply unbearable by a sitting president and congress to acknowledge responsibility for. The spin they spin is mostly for themselves now. The alternative is having to acknowledge the biggest and most expensive failure in US history.
Why don't the dems do anything? Or Republicans for sanity break with a failed policy? This is the government and this has been what their decision making process has produced. Whether we know know it or not... they KNOW that it all happened when THEY were the government. Dems and repubs enabled Bush and Co.
They were the government at the beginning of this misadventure and are it right now... do we expect them to admit they have been failures? They would rather try slipping into position by default. Incompetence and corruption not being a bar to reelection in their view. As long as they don't break ranks till 08. So the stall to avoid admitting failure goes on because it is the people responsible for that failure who decide whether they will have to admit it. So they stall.
A bloody stall for an election. The alternative is themselves having to explain why they failed while still in office.
We need new people ...other americans outside this semi-permanent group that has fossilized and stymied our democracy.
The Down apparently have long entertained the notion that of the two (or is it just one?) corporate parties, the Democrats are the easier in. But it may well be the Republicans that offer the easier access at this point?
* The theocrats demonstrated that they have chinks in their party armor, it's possible to get in and make huge in-roads.
* The Republican party is in perhaps even greater disarray.
Mr. COMarc writes:
"Since then, the Democratic party has changed its rules to reverse the 72 reforms. And the obvious intention and effect is to make sure that you never again see the anti-war movement win as in 72, or even to never again see an obscure governor be able to upset the party machine candidates as Carter did in 76."
What are these mysterious rules, dude? How exactly do they prevent "anti-war" candidates from winning, or apply any other ideological litmus test?
I challenge you to substantiate this empty claim. I assert that there are, in fact, no rules that prevent persons of any ideological stripe from running in Democratic primaries and, if they get the most votes from the voters, becoming the Democratic nominees for offices from County Clerk to POTUS. And that it is far, far easier for progressives to do this than to overturn the lock that the by now purely formal two-party system has on electoral politics in this country (it's winner-take-all, stupid).
Sure, some rules may favor better-financed, anointed candidates (early and bunched primaries, for example, but that makes the biggest difference only in the one national race - for president). But there is no particular reason the progressive left can't beat the DLC at their own game, and it would be much, much easier to do so in the Democratic primary races than through a third party - the latter a strategy that has failed consistently for the past century and a half.
I'm mad at Pelosi, too, but I expect she thinks she is doing the best she can given the cards she's holding at the moment. And Kucinich has no chance of capturing the Presidential nomination for the same reason that his candidacy is useful - he is a standard-bearer for left positions that only a small percentage of the voters consistently share.
One note about Jimmy Carter.
In 1972, the anti-Vietnam war movement propelled George McGovern into the Democratic nomination. At the same time, with a majority of delegates at the 72 convention, they passed rule changes to help democratize the Democratic Party. Carter's win in 1972 as an obscure governor running against the approved Democratic machine candidates could only have happened under such rules.
Since then, the Democratic party has changed its rules to reverse the 72 reforms. And the obvious intention and effect is to make sure that you never again see the anti-war movement win as in 72, or even to never again see an obscure governor be able to upset the party machine candidates as Carter did in 76. Since Carter, you've never seen a candidate who wasn't supported by the core of the Democratic party machine win a Presidential nomination, nor get enough influence to ever do something like try to democratize the Democratic Party again. There might be debate between wings of the machine, but you haven't seen a winner outside this since Carter.
This is why the Kucinich campaign is a Don Quixote-esque tilt at a windmill. Its admirable for the same reason Don Quixote is an admirable character. But believing that the Kucinich campaign can win, or that it can even influence the direction of the Democratic party in any way, is to ignore the reality that is the undemocratic Democratic Party. The key is that the top of the Democratic Party doesn't give a damn what the people at this picnic think, and they've structured the Democratic Party in such a way that they don't have to care. If you doubt it, Nancy Pelosi just told you this is the way it is when she started calling anti-war protesters "nuts".
Dems at the picnic oppose the war and support impeachment. Then 52 out of 73 support Presidential candidates that don't support these positions. And that's not knowing how many people said "waiting for Gore" which would also amount to the same thing. So its probably more than 52 out of 73.
If we keep voting for candidates that are pro-war, then our government will remain pro-war. It doesn't matter if those candidates have a (D) after their name or not. And when determining whether a candidate is pro-war or not, watch their actions, not what they say. Right now in Congress, any position other than supporting cutting off of funds for war is pro-war.
Just now on Democracy Now!. Jimmy Carter being interviewed by Amy Goodman. Q: Why do Americans not know what you've seen (in the middle east)?
A: Americans don't want to know.
great interview I'm watching ... I'm sure its gonna be up on democracynow.org later today.
Caroline, Let the jaw-bones get used to saying:
commercial theft = war
elite = privileged wealth
beltway rulers = theft through bribery
common folks = sovereign citizens
president = psychotic monkey
elections = media profit season
Truth = moribund
" the rights that we have enjoyed for two centuries may evaporate"
-- Except that the majority NEVER ENJOYED THEM.
The majority of laboring people never enjoyed them. There were no rights for organized labor against exploitation until the mid-20th century, and then they were rapidly repealed.
Women enjoyed only a shadow of rights until they gained economic autonomy within marriage & reproductive autonomy inside or outside -- and they still don't enjoy equal rights in hiring or firing or pay.
I look forward to the true institution of human rights after we do away with all the lies about how freedom-loving the country has always been. The regime has ALWAYS whipped up hostility towards anyone who believed that rights belonged to all, and not just to certain male descendents from a certain small region of northern Europe.
Live long and prosper!
Vote Green
Kermit in `08
I'm never going to vote for another spineless sellout Democrat AS LONG AS I LIVE!!!!!
Thanks for a particularly good column, Caroline. Knowing what intelligent action and talking is occurring in Portage County gives me something to smile about. But your conclusion is correct. There is only now, and what we can do in the now, and it is right to stay focused there.
Historical lessons, current events, and rational interpretation of intellegence have normally precluded egotism &; theocracy for major decisions in our republic. Unfortunately, this is not the case now.
The current administration is manipulated by ego, the energy cartel,& the radical religious right wing to extents never before experienced in our history. The ill conceived invasion of Iraq, the plans to provide arms to some Middle East Countries, current suggestion to invade Iran, & the dreadful war on our environment are only some examples.
Those who object or oppose his policies can expect retalation( ie the dreadful character assassination of a trip;e amputee Viet Vet because he promoted an investigation into the9/11 disasster which Bush opposed).
Unless Americans begin reacting to logic rather than rhetoric, and take back our country from this illegally placed administration now, the rights that we have enjoyed for two centuries may evaporate--and Americans we can blame themselves for this