PowerHouse—Or Corrupt House of Power?
By: Susan Scharfman
Two weeks to Election Day and like the rising tide that lifts all boats, the rising mounds of excrement in political ads make me want to throw up! Sadly, what should be an exciting and productive time in our history has degenerated into the lowest common denominator for the American people. We are a generous, educated and sacrificing people who deserve better than politicians desperately trying to hang on to their corruptive house of power.
Alexis de Tocqueville was a 25-year-old Frenchman who toured the United States in 1831. It didn’t take long for this insightful author of Democracy in America to figure us out. Here’s just a sampling, not all bad by the way, of what he said about us: “There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.”
The House of Representatives could be a powerhouse of democracy. But political parties do not work for the benefit of the people. How can they when they are in the pockets of the corporations? The very word political says everything about them, and principles have nothing to do with it. The public has seen the Virginia candidate for the United States Senate, George Allen utter a derogatory term “macaca” to a person’s face. I had never heard the word before. Thanks to the media it didn’t take long before I had heard more than I ever cared to know. I doubt whether Mr. Allen was even conscious of what he had said. What’s more, I do not think he is a racist. But to take the heat off him, he approved an ad by his party drudges that vilifies his opponent, James Webb for having written sexually explicit sequences in his novels involving children and women. Novels by their very nature are fiction.
As novelist Stephen King appropriately says, “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” There is not a novelist alive who would not agree. My own novel is factually accurate, even though the story is fiction. As a civilian working in Vietnam during that war, I witnessed human behavior so heinous I still cannot verbalize it much less put it in writing. If in fact Mr. Webb, a decorated combat Vietnam Veteran, is depicting scenes in his books that include facts, it is to his credit as a former journalist and novelist, of which he was both. I advise the creators of the James Webb garbage to stay away from this one.
Our Founding Fathers wanted a government with checks and balances, one that protects us from the kind of totalitarianism from which they fled. Instead of inundating us with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of moronic commercials that are as insulting to our intelligence as they are to the various adversaries they try to destroy, why not do something uplifting? If half that amount of energy and money were directed to raising the level of the American poor, we would have no poor. So what’s a citizen to do? Don’t vote for a “party.” Vote for the best qualified individual. The following person says it better than I.
“While conservatives overwhelmingly support Bush on his tax cuts and judicial appointments—and while many, if not most, back his claim of broad executive authority to wage the war on terror, the discontent on the right has grown so intense that a number of well-known conservatives have openly argued that the Republicans should lose their hold on Congress this year, either to punish conservatives for abandoning the cause, or because divided government actually produces better policy results.”—William F. Buckley, Jr.
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A writer/editor, I work with one client at a time for a cost effective solution to your writing and editing needs. Visit me at http://www.susanscharfman.com My novel The Sword & The Chrysanthemum is available in paperback everywhere, and in eBook form at http://www.AuthorHouse.com