Friday, April 09, 2004
Hello Lamppost, Whatcha Knowin'?
It is a good thing our leaders live in this place and in this era, because if this became widely known--and if this wasn't a country in which good citizenship is defined as neither doing, saying, nor thinking anything that will distract us from doing our shopping, and if this wasn't an era when people are so damned afraid to stand up and fight back when they see injustice, even when it's spelled out in huge blinking electric letters--we'd be having a damn revolution. Paragraphs five and six are the outrageous nut.
But, of course, some of us would be happy to see our fellow citizens tarred and feathered, and for offenses far less than the rape of the working class and the closing off of the ecomomic opportunity this country has always been so proud of providing to everyone. An illustration: Despite its reputation as a bucolic place with more hogs than people and people with more toes than teeth, my much-missed former home, Iowa, is actually pretty liberal (and not just around Iowa City, Ames, and Fairfield, either). It's gone Democrat for president more often than not (it even went for the Duke in 1988), its senior senator, Tom Harkin, is a leading liberal light, and its Democratic governor, Tom Vilsack, has developed a national profile in recent months. But it was also one of the first places in the country to see its state Republican party completely colonized by the Christian Coalition. As a result, some of Iowa's most high-profile Republicans, such as ex-Congressman Tom Tauke and current representative Jim Leach, have been kept from running for higher office because they are insufficiently conservative and thus unacceptable to Betty Bowers and the rest of the Borg. So it's no surprise that Republicans in the Iowa Senate are having conniptions over a Vilsack appointee to the state school board who is openly gay.
Iowa's state motto is "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain." Including a good Republican's right to be an intolerant fascist, apparently, by making sure people they don't like can't have too much liberty.
It is a good thing our leaders live in this place and in this era, because if this became widely known--and if this wasn't a country in which good citizenship is defined as neither doing, saying, nor thinking anything that will distract us from doing our shopping, and if this wasn't an era when people are so damned afraid to stand up and fight back when they see injustice, even when it's spelled out in huge blinking electric letters--we'd be having a damn revolution. Paragraphs five and six are the outrageous nut.
But, of course, some of us would be happy to see our fellow citizens tarred and feathered, and for offenses far less than the rape of the working class and the closing off of the ecomomic opportunity this country has always been so proud of providing to everyone. An illustration: Despite its reputation as a bucolic place with more hogs than people and people with more toes than teeth, my much-missed former home, Iowa, is actually pretty liberal (and not just around Iowa City, Ames, and Fairfield, either). It's gone Democrat for president more often than not (it even went for the Duke in 1988), its senior senator, Tom Harkin, is a leading liberal light, and its Democratic governor, Tom Vilsack, has developed a national profile in recent months. But it was also one of the first places in the country to see its state Republican party completely colonized by the Christian Coalition. As a result, some of Iowa's most high-profile Republicans, such as ex-Congressman Tom Tauke and current representative Jim Leach, have been kept from running for higher office because they are insufficiently conservative and thus unacceptable to Betty Bowers and the rest of the Borg. So it's no surprise that Republicans in the Iowa Senate are having conniptions over a Vilsack appointee to the state school board who is openly gay.
Iowa's state motto is "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain." Including a good Republican's right to be an intolerant fascist, apparently, by making sure people they don't like can't have too much liberty.
