Blogging Dino Speaketh of What It Knoweth Naught

I resist sweeping denunciations of folk these dwindling days of the election season because we have arrived at a place in American democracy at which we really could elect some S.O.B. who will—almost casually, I might add—either get us all killed or unleash unspeakable horror on an entire region of the earth. What I've seen described aptly as the Republicans' "addiction to misinformation" has infected the larger political discourse, and there's risk of a meltdown of the representative system here and a huge catastrophe being visited on others. Democracies are born, and they die—Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural are an excellent reminders of that. (Democracies and republics are perpetual experiments: we can at least try to keep renewing the original energy, optmism, and relative right-mindedness that made it possible to establish ourselves as we did.) Ours has long borne the risk of going out like a star turning supernova and taking out everything anywhere near it. Ignorance and worse—and an assist from bad actors like UBL—have brought us to this frightful pass. That more than 40% of the country thinks John McCain, who is running about as vacuous a campaign as any I've come across in my lifetime, deserves the nod is proof of how bad many people's powers of discernment currently are.

Many, but not all: progress or decline is a matter of small percentages with us. At present it really seems as if something very fine is happening right under our eeyorish Democratic snouts: a clear majority of The American People™ is looking and listening and deciding that this time around, the Republicans are running on noxious fumes. I mean really, the EPA would ban the smokestack-filth they're spewing—if, that is, the Republicans hadn't gutted the EPA. Self-parodist Rep. Michelle Bachmann and her macaca-peddling ilk aren't going over too well in 2008, are they! Their robocalls alleging that Barack is a moozlum-socialist-terrorist-dope-smoking-radical are earning them hoots of incredulous derision, and even provoking thoughtful defenses of the right to be "other" (from American orthodoxy, that is) on the part of luminaries like General Powell. We should be very pleased about this development. In some cases it may be no more than "the rage of Caliban seeing himself in a glass," but it's something to work with, anyhow.

I agree somewhat with Fogg that if/when the Republicans return to the halls of congress as a humiliated minority party, they'll be in an ugly mood and will do whatever they can to tear down the shiny new Demo-Prez, just as they did with William Jeffuhsun back in the nineties. But for a while, too, their powers will be limited—the thumping they're fixin' to take is Texas-sized, from all appearances. With some Lyndon-Johnson style arm-twisting and drawling, we might get a few good things done: perhaps some measure of improvement in health-care access, for instance, and a saner foreign policy should be achievable—one that won't continue to bankrupt us even as it sows hatred and division around the world. Much that we have achieved over the years has been achieved in the teeth of our most childish, violent, hateful citizens, and usually when we are in difficult circumstances at home and abroad. The country's demographics are shifting decisively, and the right-wingers are going to have to come up with something more sophisticated than race-baiting and Soviet-era commie bashing to keep them going. That will probably take them a while because in truth, many of them aren't very bright.

Finally, what I find most lamentable in humanity (I daily thank the Dinosaur Gods—peace and adulation be unto their celestial green and khaki hides!—that I'm an Allosaurus and therefore not among them, though of course not being among them makes it very hard to type) can be summed up in one word: "fallow." That is, so much capacity so tragically and so consistently wasted. Great art has been created, excellent systems of governance have been opined, science has discovered much, and so forth: and here we have folks like "Crazy McCain Rally Lady" still demonstrating that the first task of ordinary humanity is to make use of NONE of that capacity, and instead give in to the dark primal fear that has always haunted their days on this earth. The other lamentable thing is those pesky humans' failure to transmit in a sustainable way the best insights they've had. Rather than proceeding forwards and upwards, they seem to go round in circles of ignorance and horrid violence; what is realized in one generation is forgotten or denied by the next, saeculum per saeculorum. Still, I think there's not much use in giving in to the force of these Ecclesiastes-like vexations of spirit. I'm going to go have a nice cup of coffee; in multa sapientia multa sit indignatio et qui addit scientiam addat et laborem. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Coffee!