Lots of family stuff going on so not much time–and not much to say, except to belabor the obvious. But a happy new year to you all.
I'm reevaluating the value and purpose of this site. I'm not sure it's worth the time and effort and whether my energies couldn't be spent more productively on other endeavors. I find I can't bring myself to read most of the blogs I've been reading regularly for years. Most of the time I know what they are going to say before I read them, and I fear the same may be true for what I'm posting here. So I'm groping around right now to see if there's a better way to move forward.
This time last year I didn't have much to write either. I called it slack tide because it was an in-between time waiting to see what shape Obama would give his presidency. But now we know, and knowing now that Obama is someone who has no intention to change the rules and that he has aligned himself with the interests and agenda of the corporate New Democrats makes it difficult for me to care anymore about the success of his presidency. Obama was only interesting so long as there was some hope that he could find a way of rising above the mediocre norm.
He had some magic for awhile; too bad he didn't know how to or want to exploit it for the public interest. I'm feeling now pretty much the way I felt in the last part Clinton's first term: Politics is such a predicatable bore. Why should any sane person care about what these morally mediocrities do in a game determined by the lowest common denominator? Nevertheless, we have to care about Obama's presidency because the alternatives to it are so much worse.
But it has been sobering to be confronted with how crudely power- and greed-driven our politics is and how diminished the role the public interest plays in shaping policy. Greed and power are always a factor, but I think I reserved some hope that with the right people in place it could be countered and balanced, but I no longer reserve such hope. The system is rigged so that the right people are never in place or if they are, they are coopted. To be an effective politician means simply to play the game skillfully where the greed and power sharks set the rules and dominate. The public interest is no longer a player in this game; it's just one greed-and-power faction competing against another. Some are less awful, and so we root for them if we bother to root at all.
So I'm resigned that it's just going to be politics as usual until something happens that forces a change. And sooner or later that will happen. Until then, there really isn't much interesting to say about politics–it's all so drearily predictable–but there are other areas to explore. So we'll see.
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