Originally published in The Wiscasset Newspaper (Maine), June 29, 2006

I should like very much to spend my fifteen hundred words here this week giving you good and happy readers just the kind of dirty, greasy, wild, nasty stories of outlandish personal behavior in sensitive circumstances, game poaching, drunkenness, blasphemy, idol worship, flagrant and loud and semi-public and multi-participant sexual engagement, and general failure to keep to the right except when passing that you have come to expect from me and my little newspaper column. I'm good at that sort of writing (and, apparently, living, since every word I've written, every conversation I've reported, every detail and event I've passed on to you these eight years we've wallowed together in this warm bacterial trough of a journalistic hot tub has been true and exact and reported as I have seen and experienced those deals going down).

In a better world, in less parlous times, if burglars were not at our doors and the guard dogs asleep on their chains under the catalpa trees, I could indulge myself and enrich my audience with an unending stream of such splendid tales. But those good days that really never were are now so far lost to history somewhere in the Roosevelt or Eisenhower decades that the young people today have of them not even heard, and many adults retain no more memories of how much better we then knew how to be than they contain of thirty cent gasoline, or boys riding bicycles without outlandish headgear and nasty fingerless gloves and padded ass leggings, or of just how rich and royal a man could feel when he had raised the full purchase price for a whole set of four retreaded tires for his old truck and had found a mechanic not unnerved enough by a questionable muffler joint as to deny him for his three dollars a bright new inspection sticker.

Men like me then, we could write our sarcastic little humor pieces for the underground papers, all cheap pulp and smudgy black ink and Bob Crumb cartoons and dominatrix advertisements and Karl Marx posters by mail from San Francisco. Not so, now. Today we are driven to sober up, clean up, stand up, stop all the goddamned alliteration and puns and fun and stare full on at a reality of a sort they told us in school could never happen here. And our editors must print our revelations, however disturbing. And you, poor sad wretches, must read them, whatever the cost to your peaceful pursuit of an evening with America's Funniest Desperate Tramp Slut Housewife Castaway Island Treasure Hunt Audience-Call-In Talent Show program.

None of us requires details. The country is unravelling. You know it; polls show it. We've killed fifty thousand Iraqis and twenty-five hundred Americans because a couple dozen Saudis blew up two of our buildings in an attack that our government had been warned about but ignored. China makes our products and lends us money at interest to finance our endless wars. Wal-Mart paves our farm fields so that we can there exchange our dwindling incomes for their imported schlock merchandise and corporate foodstuffs.

Congressmen either say (if Republican) “stay the course”, or (if Democrat--except for Joe Lieberman, a putative Democrat, but really probably some sort of creepy alien presence who will some day split his hide and reveal the corrupted, seething mass of worms inside its hollowed-out husk) “I support the President, but I'd do it better”, or “The President is wrong, but we must be cautious.” Everybody loves the flag as a thing never to be burned and much to be died for, but none of 'em much cares for the principles of that “republic for which it stands” as so succinctly and clearly laid out in its Constitution or Declaration of Independence.

So we know where we are and we too well understand that our leaders are corrupt, devious, conniving liars (the guys running the show with their friends in the biggest of Big Businesses) or inept, cautious, bumbling wannabees who hope after another election or two to be running a quite similar show with their friends from the second-tier of Big Business. Me and you and a dog named Blue, and all the fishes in the deep blue sea are nothing much more than a source of revenue and votes, oil consumers, infantrymen and Humvee drivers, and puzzled old people wondering which government drug program might abuse them the least. Everybody loved Jack Abramoff until the stink of his dirty deals got too noticeable, and then the skies over D.C. went black for a fortnight with the smoke from autographed photographs of Jack with members of Congress being burned in barrels by staffers.

As usual, the conventional wisdom offers a solution. We must, my liberal friends tell me, “Get the money out of politics.” Only “Public Financing of Campaigns” will restore to us a Congress and a President who understand and honor the virtue and necessity of serving the principles and the people of the nation they are now so busy privatizing and polluting. Here's what I think about that: public financing will give us the same bad lot doing the same scurrilous work, but without the necessity of dredging up the wherewithal on their own—you and I will be granted the privilege of payment, rather than Exxon or General Dynamics or Tyson Foods. I know this public financing idea has a great hold on the minds and hearts of most conventional liberals (and I'm proud to call myself a liberal, and America a liberal nation), but conventional thinking is usually wrong.

Hell, the very persons so convinced we should hand buckets of our money to the mostly shallow, self-serving sorts of candidates the two-party collusion puts forth are the same everybody-on-the-same-page thinkers who won't even say straight out what we think they mean because it might alienate some potential voter from that great, stupid, ignorant, but much-coveted “middle”. So we get “Pro-choice” instead of pro-abortion and “Single-payer” instead of government-funded health care. (And of course the other guys offer us “Pro-life”, which they mostly don't mean and almost never honor, and “Ultimate sacrifice” because, I guess, “Box of guts with a flag stapled to it” is just a bit too unsettling or straightforward or true.)

No, my friends from Left and Right (and any of you dimwitted “Undecideds” or “Swing Voters” out there in the churches and strip malls of the great bland center), I don't think we need better funding mechanisms; I think we need better people. Washington is a disgrace because most of those people liked Jack Abramoff. A whore will take your money and may or may not render you good service. A nice girl will tell you money won't buy you her love.

Stop wasting your votes on Democrats, praying against what your eyes and ears tell you and your heart knows so well, that they'll not turn out to be Republicans in disguise, Republican-enablers, or cowards. Don't, under any circumstances, vote for Hillary Clinton. Watch Al Gore's movie, applaud his new mission, but don't expect he can be made new as a contender. Vote Green, vote Independent, vote for Gus Hall, if you like, if he's still alive or running.

Teach your kids to question authority. Demand that their teachers do so too. Challenge shallow thinking, poor policy, stupidity and corruption whenever someone puts forth untruths or unreason, even if to do so causes discomfort (theirs or yours).

Here in Maine we will see the occasional selectman say or do something stupid (well, OK, quite often, really). But one almost never finds a local elected official taking a bribe or fixing a contract or selling out his neighbors. We know how to draft decent people to run for and hold local office. We do truly provide for the common welfare. I was first selectman of Alna Maine for twelve years. I never spent a penny on an election. Twelve times I won; the thirteenth I lost. My experience was not unusual. If the Democrats or the Republicans ever ran a presidential ticket that didn't pander and lie and speak in catch-phrases and code words, that wasn't connected through dozens of corporate boards and banks and golf club memberships with every other comfortable incumbent and his corporate sponsors, the public would be astounded by the bright, shining difference.

Today, Monday, the very day of the late night I write, Warren Buffet announced that he's giving away his many billions of dollars to be used to help alleviate human suffering and improve the condition of his fellow creatures. He does not believe either his children or our country would benefit by their inheriting his wealth. Imagine that: a rich man not whining about the burden of the “death tax”. There are others like him, rich and poor, black and white, men and women, young and old, who would do right by our once-great nation if only they would run for office and we would elect them. Such persons do not seem to find a home in either major party.

There was a time, when I was young, that we mocked Hubert Humphrey, and too true, the Happy Warrior was flawed, but men half as decent or honest do not today operate the wheels and circuits of our public engine. We are not led by even Jimmy Carters or Lyndon Johnsons or (I'll say it, yes,) men as worthy as Richard Nixon in several of his better efforts (and not meaning to overlook a bit of his craziness or venality). The Potomac swamps today are awash in creatures of a lesser, debased sort. Do not, I must beg, give any of them any of my money so that they may pay their consultants to tell them how best to tailor their lies to my focus group.

Mr. Cooper has many faults, and he invites readers to consult with his wife and children and the citizens of Alna Maine for details and discussion thereof. Among his defects, he is proud to proclaim, is not middle-of-the-roadism. He understands that nothing will come of his objecting to the conventional wisdom, but he feels better for making the effort to express himself. He does understand that most fellow leftist like the idea of tithing to the sad sacks, simpletons and schemers raised up by the two parties, and he hopes that the more devout believers will not contact him at ckc2@prexar.com.

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