August 4 is past.
Our citizenry’s spoken.
But as someone who’d love to see us embrace the message of the man upstairs to live ethical, community focused lives, the codger has to talk about a mailing he and his beautiful wife saw foul their mailbox Friday before the election.
I’ve lived awhile, so I’ve seen way too many self-serving, duplicitous, unfair and just plain bull feather political ads. But this one hit me like a kidney punch.
Was it negative? Was it unfair? Was it hyperbolic? Was it laughably erroneous and misleading? Does a bear s**t in the woods?
The old guy knows and likes both the folks running for the seat in question and he had no horse in the race in question.
This column is not about assessing political winners and losers.
The codger may have mentioned before about serving as county coroner years ago when our previous coroner got in some major dutch.
It definitely wasn’t on my bucket list but learned a lot about investigating causes of death. We may not be talking about dead bodies here, but we’re talking about a political process which has progressed rapidly toward the gangrenous, festering zombie state.
Let’s put a little Vicks in our nostrils, put on our mask and surgical gloves and see if we can ID the culprit.
First let’s look at what a healthy body politic might look like. Our system of governance identifies particular jobs which need to be accomplished: legislative, judicial and executive.
Interested citizens then decide if they can bring qualifications to the table to serve in those positions, then present those qualifications and ideas to their fellow citizens so they can make their informed choice as to who should serve.
Then when the choice is made, the winner does the job they’re tasked to do honestly and diligently while soliciting frequent input and direction from their fellow citizens, us; until they and he/she decide another citizen can/should replace them.
Pretty straightforward, huh?
As we’ve talked before, in the early days of the republic, different points of view about our problems evolved into “parties” whose major purpose was not necessarily to solve problems but to get their members “elected.”
And because these election “campaigns” have gotten progressively longer and more expensive, our elected “public servants” have spent more and more of their time soliciting money and accepting larger and larger “donations” from “interested parties”, i.e., businesses, wealthy individuals and interest groups until these purported “public servants” are too often willing to say and do almost anything to get and stay in their tremendously lucrative positions.
And if/when they finally move from them, to take even more money with them when they “retire” to often “serve/represent” the very companies/entities which fueled their political rise/enrichment for years.
Let’s step closer to this specific comatose zombie and take a more detailed look. On closer examination, it shows pretty much every sign of an attempted political assassination. This “knifing” was supposedly paid for by a mainstream, theoretically upstanding state business organization.
What the “autopsy” of the mailer shows:
A garish blood red color complete with photo which, if it wasn’t “doctored” via AI, was certainly in no way representative of the candidate’s appearance. This in turn was overlayed with the same garish red coloring.
Ridiculous accusations scribbled in what appear intended to depict a stalker’s frenzied script.
Three cherry-picked votes supposedly proving the candidate was “no friend” and “unaffordable.”
The codger hates to state the obvious but spending huge chunks of organization members’ money slashing someone in the back ain’t no way for public organizations to act.
And, more centrally, if we as citizens/members of a public polity want to solve our problems, we need to understand that dysfunctional/corrupt political parties, big money and a failure of public voter attention’s bound to destroy our already nearly terminal body politic.
Let’s collaborate and become Indivisible.
