Democracy's Fatal Flaw

“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.” - Hunter S. Thompson

There’s no need to any anything else.

But I want to add that since 2000, we have had the GOP controlling local and national politics as a ruling minority. The GOP has mastered leveraging inherent power in rural states (thus having a constant advantage in the US Senate), packing the Federal courts when they have control of the US Senate, leveraging the Electoral College so that it has won the presidency twice while losing the popular vote, and using gerrymandering and voter suppression to create advantages at both the US House and state levels. We don’t dare call any of this cheating, mind you.

So if I wanted to pollute Thompson’s perfect sentence with one of my own, I would add that the second problem with any democracy is that it’s deceptively fragile. The ruling party can completely ruin it if the opposition party doesn’t notice, doesn’t care, or assumes they can fix what is broken if and when they return to power. This is particularly the case if the ruling party has no moral compass, no shame, and even accepts foreign assistance to stay in power.

That’s a threshold for a failed state. No form of government is self-correcting. Every form of government needs strenuous maintenance and reform, or it will eventually collapse. Things fall apart.

And I will also add, given recent events -

We should not be upset at Justice Ginsburg for refusing to retire in 2010. She worked tirelessly, days and nights, doing a fine job of being an impartial judge committed to the ideal of the Fourteenth Amendment. If the future of our republic really did hinge on her staying alive, then this republic was already doomed. I think it is. Since 2000 it has been absolute hell.

The Power of The F Word

Shortly before Christmas, I received another reminder from my RSS feed that I hadn't written enough posts in 2016. A story boomeranged and got recycled by lesser news outlets 11 months after it first made the rounds. Way way back in January 2016, a teenage hero named Charlotte Heffelmire rescued her dad from a house fire. How did she do it? Well, he was pinned under a car in his garage, so she found superhuman strength and lifted the car off of him.  That prompted the editor at Jezebel (then still park of Gawker Media) to use this great headline, containing the F word.

I forwarded the story to my parents, who liked it, but my mom felt some reservations about the use of the word fucking in the headline. She shot an email back:

"...here's my complaint. Since when does the four letter " F " word appear everywhere?? It's a noun, verb, adjective, adverb ( just add an ly or an ing) etc. Serious stories and reviews often descend into vulgarity in the use of this word. It's lost all shock value and bite. The use of the word is supposed to be effective? Or a shock? Or describe something so harrowing that the word adds raw emotion and fierce meaning to the event? The overuse of what used to be a word, though vulgar, had a particular place in our verbal lexicon. The article that complained about the vulgar exchange between the public spectacle of Gervais and Gibson used the "F" word. Need I say more?"

Now this news story came out the same week as the Golden Globes. And in 2016, I believe Ricky was the first host to drop an F-bomb. 

"What the fuck does sugar tits even mean." - Ricky Gervais

The word is powerful and should be used sparingly. I like the modern journalist standard of using it in a quote, but not in the copy or editorially in a headline. The late Gawker Media used the word liberally, so that's why we see it above in the headline.

The word has been with us since the 1600s. But I feel it went mainstream during the Nixon administration. The Vietnam war popped that bubble, and a Nixon official used the term "ratfucking" in the media.

I always liked Hunter S. Thompson's restraint. He used the word most often in quotes, often quoting himself. Those were his exclamations. But in describing things, he used very eloquent language. I always liked that mix. There was the character writing the story, and there was the story.

Fuck is a tool. Respect it and use it wisely. Like a cymbal crash.