You Know What You Have To Do…

[Photo by David Cheskin.]

Considering a Vote

I know someone who has never voted and doesn’t plan to start tomorrow. I also know some people who feel their votes don’t count because they’re outnumbered by the other party in their states. For these people, I present a passage from David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster:

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.”

[Art edited from a Robert Indiana–style illustration by JP Trostle.]

Compassionate Governance

Before we go to the polls on Tuesday, it may do well to consider the words of a long-ago politician of character:
 

“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life—the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey

[Photo by Chalmers Butterfield.]

Campaigning à la Formula One

Saw this on a friend’s refrigerator this week and couldn’t keep it to myself:

“Politicians should dress like race-car drivers. At least we’d know who their corporate sponsors are!”

[Photo from the Jaguar Clubs of North America.]

Caring for Dogs: Another Trailer Story

Remember the woman who insisted on riding for 26 hours in a trailer with her menagerie of hooved critters and a parrot? Here’s a different take on travelling with animals:

I saw this spare, metal trailer hooked to a spacious RV at this year’s Bluegrass Stockdog Trial (a competitive event where dogs herd sheep according to whistles and commands from their human). Yes, while the humans travelled in comfort, the Border Collies were confined to a small space that was open to the elements (which at that time was a deadly, hot sun) and hugged every bump and hole of the road. You can probably guess how I felt about those humans.

I started planning how to open a civil discussion with these people about their dogs’ needs—perhaps suggest that they trade up for a trailer equipped with suspension and climate control. Then I noticed a sticker on the front passenger door that read:

OBAMA
A Good Reason Why Stupid People
Shouldn’t Vote

Hmm. A civil discussion suddenly seemed unlikely. I resorted to telepathically sending my sympathy to the pooches.

Political Chuckle

[One of many Tea Party T-shirt slogans by Jeremy Kalgreen.]

Parsing Political Language

In this final month of the election season, Christopher Weyant’s New Yorker cartoon seems especially pertinent:

Drink of Choice

My husband saw this on a bumper sticker and I can relate. Can you?

No tea for me, thanks. I prefer progress.

[Art by Mary Cassatt.]

Tired of Politicians?

If you’re as weary of “elected” officials as I am, you may be pleased to hear that a new breed of politician is running for office in Virginia. He’s a Maine Coon named Hank, and he’s after a Senate seat.

Hank wouldn’t be the first companion animal to get elected, though. Since the late ’90s, voters in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, have put not one, but THREE different canines into the mayoral position.

So who’s to say a two-legged is better than a four-legged?

“Where there’s Hank, there’s Hope.” (This isn’t his slogan, but it could be.)

Read This, Rand Paul!

I just received an e-mail from Senator Rand Paul thanking me for voicing my opinion about horse slaughter. And now my productive Tuesday morning plan is derailed because I’m seething.

Clearly, Paul does not want to cease the horse-slaughter trade because 1) People should be able to do whatever they want with their property, and 2) If we don’t slaughter ’em, we’ll have to take care of ’em.

I’ve got news for Paul and his ilk on this Super Tuesday, news that I thought the conservatives would have learned in Sunday school: The meek shall inherit the Earth.

And the Time is Now…

“When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.”
—from the Bhagavad Gita and the closing lines of Philip Glass’s opera, Satyagraha

[See video or read an account of Glass reciting this to Occupy protesters outside Lincoln Center.]

Bellow on the Current Presidential Wannabes?

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
—Saul Bellow

Advocating, Not Battling, for Fairness

Satirist Al Franken wrote this before becoming Senator Al Franken, but my guess is that he still stands by it. If you’re part of the 99%, it should make you smile, or at least nod in agreement.

Any time that a liberal points out that the wealthy are disproportionately benefiting from Bush’s tax policies, Republicans shout, “class warfare!”

In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth [sic] Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her.

That is class warfare.

Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top one percent is not.

—from Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right