A Break From The Internet

The only benefit to having my new, fancy, high-speed internet service down (for the seventh time) last Thursday was that I got to detoxify from main-lining up-to-the-minute political happenings. Once the D.T.s subsided, I even turned off cable news, so that I could sit and reflect a bit on more of an overview.

It is so easy to think of politics as a pointillist’s portrait, but the lousy wi-fi gave me a chance to sit and paint more of a landscape and with a broader brush. No, the finished work was not exactly a masterpiece, but since you asked…

Politicians will be politicians and my favorite politician sure took his time getting over the (oh, gosh, they really ARE a bunch of low-life, conniving, unscrupulous, criminal, spawn  of Satan on Capitol Hill) learning curve but, once he and his party took the not-so subtle hint from the American people and grew a spine, I grew ever hopeful that our country was yet capable of steering a safe course out of troubled waters.

But then I had to factor in the current overall state of the opposing Party. Even after 40+ years of following politics like some fanatics follow baseball, I had still underestimated the extent to which the GOP would adhere in lockstep to such a depraved, heartless, amoral modus operandi. Fed 24/7/365 on a steady diet of gin-soaked, Viagra-laced, corporate financed hot foie gras-fudge sundaes, with a way-too-generous sprinkle of right-wing mixed nuts on top, I lamented that the Grand Old Party had morphed, mutated from the party of lean, mean, fiscal conservatives, into a voracious, psychotic Jabba the Hutt-esque monster, bent upon busily and unashamedly devouring large chunks of our country.

Not satisfied to binge solely on its political opponents, this big-money behemoth has extended its viral (not like the cute video) purview onto the Beltway and into the heartland, even eating its own, purging its ranks of any moderates who still prefer political compromise to a virtual reenactment of the Crusades.

Make no mistake about it, the ultimate goal of today’s GOP is total economic hegemony, but the nuts I mentioned earlier appear to serve as both a facial disguise as well as a lure for millions of low-information, fearful, angry, needy, servile, voyeuristic, wannabes, who wanna believe that because the monster, as disgusting as it smells, still looks like them, it must represent America’s salvation.

Along the way to eviscerating and engorging itself on various local, state, and federal government competitors, the GOP (Jabba, the Blob, monster from Alien, GOPzillla, I don’t know!) doles out a few choice nuts among the more intellectually challenged disciples. The tactic being not to actually feed the ignorant masses but as part of an overall strategy to titillate as many as possible with fantastical distractions, so they don’t feel the last coin disappear from their pockets.

And so we get treated to red meat news stories such as how contraception prescriptions are secretly an affront to religious freedom and women who use them are secretly whores and prostitutes, and Hillary’s  deputy chief of staff is a secret Muslim extremist, and the gummint has a secret plan to massacre civilians so they can take our guns and our other freedoms, and the new Batman villain was secretly named Bane (in 1993)  after Romney’s company, Bain, to affect the 2012 election, and there are 78 secret card-carrying Communists serving in Congress, and there is a secret liberal conspiracy to make different people intermarry so that we are less white and less Christian, and I won’t use the word monster to describe our foreign President of the United States, but, ha, ha ,ha, you may feel free to, ma’am.

The GOP also seems to banking (and I mean in the Cayman Islands to the tune of a tax-free, $2,000,000,000,000), on the rest of us non-fringe citizens being so darned busy just trying to keep up with our own workloads (as well as loads from co-workers already laid off) to really focus on whether corporations should take over Social Security and Medicare, or whether millions more middle class jobs should continue to bleed out to Asia and South America, or whether it’s right that the new Walmart just put seventy local small businesses out of business, or whether we should/can stop the next big oil spill from flooding the ocean with benzene, or whether we should/can require the vulture capital guy who’s running for the highest office in the land to tell us how he scavenged so much capital. Wow.

Okay, so my general observations did not exactly produce the smarmy pastoral scene I had hoped for, but rather, a reasonably accurate overview, I’m afraid, even given the broad brush with which I allowed myself to paint.

Still, my short break from the media onslaught was curiously refreshing and gave me renewed perspective. I felt like I really could make some sense of it all. The next day, Friday, July 20, 2012, I broke down and switched on the T.V. at my home in Denver, to catch up on the latest news.  

J. Brandeis Sperandeo