The Worst Government Money Can Buy...

I love this country.  I believe in it still.  There has never been one like it and it would be a shame to allow it to slip from our collective grasp for a return to feudalism. Or worse, a theocratic ultra-nationalist regime whose strings are plucked by a cabal of point one percent-ers.

Until direct contributions to individual politicians are banned by Constitutional Amendment, I fear America will join the list of once great empires that either forgot or ignored the need for a moral compass and the will to follow it.  Perhaps it is us and not those that seek their own advantage over the common good.   I have seen many of them in the mirror.  Just behind the eyes, the thing that dwells there to serve but one god--avarice.

George Orwell was correct in his notion about Big Brother excepting that it is NOT the government but rather corporatists and their brain-washed minions that owe fealty to the company.  

It is a sad short stretch of the imagination that neighbors will put each others children on spits to save their paychecks and the tchotchkes afforded thereby.  Corporate America, nay, the corporate WORLD wouldn’t have it any other way.

A Crisis of Confederates...

I am a Southerner and an American. I am white and a male. My home is near the geographic heart of the U.S.’ continental pudenda. A collection of sandbars connecting an archipelago of high spots now inundated with what passes for civilization. I say that without intending irony.

Florida, like so many places where the water meets the sea seems always in crisis. A crisis in the economy, a crisis in education, a water crisis, crisis ad infinitum and still a crisis over Confederates?  The war between the states may have ended in 1865 but not the strife.  Florida’s role in the conflict was negligible though decisive.  The Confederates held and many ancestral Floridians still take pride in that.

However, our governor and vampire-in-chief, Nosferatu, demurs siding instead with the righteous indignation of the NAACP in barring inclusion of a few distinguished members of the Confederacy precisely because they were NOT United States military.  Honorable service and post-war achievements aside, they were wrong, so nyah!  Serves you right you slavers!

But isn’t this place named the Florida Veterans Hall of Fame?  Weren’t they Floridians?  Or is this a Federally funded installation or another usurpation of state’s rights?  Or just the misgivings of a plutocrat ill equipped to see clear what is dear to many of his constituents? 

Who am I kidding?  By constituents, I meant the people of Florida.  Governor Scott’s constituents are predominantly transcontinental oligarchs sensitive only to a shortage of Beluga and Cristal.  So who can blame him?  He doesn’t know any poor or working class people.  Those characterized by the English author Lord Lytton as the great unwashed.  Those considered mere chattel to be corralled and ruled or at least made into cannon fodder to fight wars whereby some future stone edifice might bear the names of those sacrificed on the altar of a bad cause.  Sound familiar?

The governor should be ashamed for not finding a way to illuminate both sides of gallantry in this latest monument to a sanitized past.  Shame on Nosferatu. Bad vampire, bad!