H.L. Mencken

A bit back, while I was out of town for the weekend, some friends of mine decided to have a political discussion about the nature of the Right vs. the Left. My take follows...

"Well, y'all hadda go and start a political discussion whilst I was otherwise engaged.

This could be a Veeeeerrryyy Long Hyperbolic Diatribe, but here's the Reader's Digest Condensed Version - "A plague on both their houses."

The question of Right vs. Left vs. Center is, umm, well, hmmm, - poorly worded. The Center is mostly comprised of the Sheepul that are too apathetic or poorly informed to be influenced by anything much more substantive than the quality of the campaign ads, the Madison Avenue spin on the candidates, and their respective haircuts.

The Right and Left are more alike than not - they both are engaged primarily in getting the Sheepul to lay down for more taxation and spending, thus increasing their ability to buy the votes of the taxed. The only discenible difference is that each of the parties has a traditional set of issues associated with them - as trivial examples, over the last few decades, the Elephants have claimed Defense as their own, while the Donkeys lay claim to Entitlement programs as their turf.

That any of those issues may, or may not, actually have some intrinsic merit is merely coincidental to the Grand Game of Winning Hearts and Minds.

As a strategy, they sniff the polls to attempt to gain an advantage by describing exactly where they want to spend the money in order to increase their constituents, typically my making incremental changes to their basic platforms with the aim of bolstering votes by stealing some from the opposition, with the least possible erosion of their current voter base.

Each of those blocs are guilty of basing their behavior more on political expediency than any tightly held ideals. As a case in point - during their defense of the clearly illegal actions of Slick Willie, the Donkeys recycled many of the exact same arguments the Elephants used in their less successful attempt to defend Tricky Dick, and the Elephants replied with salvos of offensive rhetoric lifted straight from the Donkey Apologists, as quoted from their incarnations in the earlier era.

The more accurate way to represent the political spectrum, I believe, is to place them on the spectrum of Individual Freedom vs. Collective Control.

Fascism and Communism seem to have little in common, other than in this most critical quality - Centralized Authority.

Elephants want your money for more tanks, etc. Donkeys want it for Education. Whatever. Elephants want to control what you see, (porno) Donkeys want to control what you say (hate speech)

While the verses are different, the song remains the same. The Common Refrain?

"There Ought to be a Law."

Allow me to present a recent example - aviation security. After 9/11, the only serious debate was as to what flavor of federal interventions the Congress would enact. Result - increased taxes, more federal employees, industry bailouts with a cost to the taxpayers half again as large as NASA's budget.

Allow me to present an alternative solution - leave the industry to its own devices. Along with the flying public.

Gasp! The Horror!

Allow airlines to implement whatever reasonable measures they wanted, and market the differences to various segments of the flying public.

You wanna board the plane ten minutes before the flight? Quick, cheap, anonymous transport? Fly Easy Access Airlines, and show your flea market ID at the gate.

Are you paranoid? Fly Kevlar Air, with El Al trained screeners, mandatory security interrogations to include all manner of biometric scanning, airline issued IDs, armed aircrew, and exhaustive examinations of the airframe before each flight, complete with complimentary $100 million insurance policies for each passenger lost in any inflight mishap, whatever the cause, along with big media campaigns to tout the unbreachable interlocking layered walls of defense.

Be prepared to pay SugarDaddy BigBucks prices for the added peace of mind.

Of course, there could, and most likely would, be all manner of gradations between the two extremes I've mentioned, giving the public the freedom to choose their preferred level of security.

It is a telling point that such a solution was never even considered, to my knowledge.

So, the major conflict is simply Autonomy/Responsibility vs.Control/Childishness, in which the Government functions in loco parentis for induhviduals not considered capable of making their own ethical decisions, and living with the consequences.

Some of you reading this may be thinking that this is putting me more squarely in the snares of Right-Thinking.

Oh, oh, so not so.

The Right is equally as guilty as the Left. As examples, on the issues of abortion, use of the military as both a symbol of the "American Way," linking it closely into American religious values, specifically homophobism, and as a tool of US imperialism, the use of presently illegal drugs, symbolic acts such as burning flags, curtailment of other civil liberties, and restrictions on domestic living arrangements, the Elephants demonstrate their predeliction for imposing their world-view on the populace

The Left, conversely, imposes, or attempts to impose, its very own values, in such areas as collective responsibilty for induhvidual wrongdoing, the transfer of responsibilty for the disadvantaged and truly needy from family and private charity to government agencies, use of the military as a sociology lab, as opposed to a mission-oriented combat force, curtailment of civil liberties in the area of, for example, freedom in corporate hiring and promotion practices, that is to say, affirmative action, and the idealistic fantasies that are neccessary to imagine a truly pacific planet.

(Before you decide to jump my shit on the affirmative action issue, allow me to explain. It's my contention that any company that widely discriminates as regards the age, gender, or sexual orientation of its emloyees is a dinosaur doomed to a quick death in today's economy, one which is essentially a seller's market. I realize that this is not applicable to, say, Mississippi during Reconstruction, or even in NYC of the early 1960's. I've often dreamed, though, of starting a company of, say, dropout single black mothers under thirty - I betcha we'd kick some major booty on those hidebound whitebread honky mofos in any of several industries. :-)

The parties are indistinguishable in many aspects and issues - as trivial examples - the public funding of political campaigns under rules that effectively exclude any legitimate third parties, and so ossify the status quo, continued support of an litigious society effectively ruled by lawyers, continued bloat of the personal rewards and perqs associated with their roles as solons, and an arrogant hubris that tells them they are a better class of oligarchs better qualified, by virtue of having triumphed in a process designed to bring out the basest from the most power hungry, a popular election, to decide the future.

As I said, a pox on them all. Were it not for the parenthesized D's and R's after their names when we see them on the news shows, we would have a difficult time telling them and their parties apart.

I said this'd be the short version. Guess I lied once again. :-) Well, at least I meant it when I said it.