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 Ice
Cube 
 "It's
a tried and true way of dealing with people or nations that the
ruling elite finds troublesome or inconvenient -- whoever gets in
our way. They're simply lumped into the enemy pile. "
 "You
need gas money and a car that works. Of course, my preference is
to do it in the middle of the night! Leave them little presents,
you know what I'm saying? Like the Easter bunny." "The
surreal-ists wouldn't know what to do with Harvey Birdman. Its ingenious brand of adult animation owes as much to absurdists like Ionesco and Duchamp as it does to Bugs Bunny."  "Word
comes that brother Cat Stevens refuses to lend his support
to our virtuous jihad. May this turncoat's Peace Train be
laden with explosives and rammed into the Mountain of Mohammed,
peace be upon him." "It
is often that we find a corp-orate-controlled president who widens the gap between rich and poor and is involved in nefarious military adventures abroad in the White House, but this goofball is off the scale."  "
I think art and politics are directly related to each other,
and people that deny the cross-influence are kidding themselves."
 "I
wouldn't call it con-fidence or command, more like an overwhelming desire or drive to perform. Because I am a performer, I think, first and foremost. I am a teller of tales, and I want other people to hear."  "Carbs
are the new terrorists. Bread is the new Bin Laden. I can't
wait to order a low-carb veggie Whopper. People are pathetic."
 "I'm
glad the major labels have dwindled to a few, because
they still to this day turn out music that's more or less
all about the money. But whatever -- I understand their
job is to sell product. That's what they do. There are
some good bands that come out on major labels, but the
majority of it is crap."
 "I
crawled out of the car through the sunroof and peered
into the linear glow of homeward-bound automobiles. People
began to shout, frustrated and immobilized in their synthetic
shells."
 "When
I do watch TV, everyone seems preoccupied with partying,
getting laid, materialism and the rest, and I can't help
but think of the band playing on the Titanic as the ship
is sinking." |
by Ross Levine It was actually a so-called Democrat who fired the first rabid salvo in the Republican Party’s campaign to effectively neutralize all vestiges of the two-party system. At the Republican convention at the end of August, 2004, Senator Zell Miller of Georgia had this to say: “Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief!” Unless he thought Democrats were plotting a coup, Zell was apparently outraged that his party had the audacity to run a candidate against Bush during the recent presidential election. In wartime, apparently, a president is no longer simply a president -- he (or one day she) becomes first and foremost Commander in Chief, a title we should perhaps liken to Fuehrer. When our soldiers are dying, it becomes unpatriotic to challenge the president, even when (as in this case) the president is in large part responsible for the fact that our soldiers are dying. (Of course, how one holds an election with only one candidate is something Zell did not address; he may be hoping to sit down with Saddam one day in his spider hole and get a few pointers.) Now some of us have always cherished the idea that the two-party system is one of the foundations of our American government. Truth is, George Washington, certainly an opinionated sort, believed that democracy could better operate without parties. To his credit, Washington, the man who would not be king, managed to hold his familiar face well above the fray of partisan politics. But he’d made plenty of misjudgments as a general, and continued that pattern into the White House. By the time he departed, the nation was already split between Federalists and Jeffersonians, and under the rule of John Adams, the two-party pattern became firmly cemented in place. Thanks to some informal fighting with France, Adams and his fellow Federalists managed to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts, which so outraged Jefferson and his Republicans that the formation of a formal opposition group became inevitable. In the running of any government or nation, differences of opinion always lead to differences of affiliation, and if there are two sides to every issue, there has to be (at least) two parties to every democracy. And so, though the names have changed many times, the two-party pattern has prevailed in America for more than 200 years. So is it time for a change? The Republicans certainly seem to think so. Or at least, the ultra-conservative wing -- now the majority -- of the Republican Party. Heady with the re-election of George Bush and the furthering of their plurality in Congress, satisfied that the Mideast is on the mend and the economy on the march, and certain that the vast majority of Americans want a Christian country where marriage is sacred, conception final, evolution optional, war peace and business unregulated, the Republicans have embarked on a steadfast campaign to reshape America to their liking and to guarantee their dominance in all branches of the federal government for a long, long time to come. That in itself might seem the ambition of all political parties, but the 21st century Republicans have added a new bloodlust to the mix. They don’t seem as if they will be satisfied, in their quest to meet their legislative and ideological goals, to merely take on the opposition -- they want to squash it.
What is the evidence for this? For one thing, the fact that they are taking a no-holds-barred approach in Congress demonstrates their firm belief that the Democrats are not going to be in a position to do the same any time soon. And then there are the tactics themselves. Forget Elbridge Gerry -- Tom DeLay has succeeded in Tommymandering the congressional districts in his home state of Texas to make sure Republicans have as many assured seats as possible. And let us not “delay” mentioning the ethics charges against him that Republicans, when they were out of power, voted as grounds for dismissal from a leadership post, a rule change the -- guess who -- Republicans have since nullified because the offender is one of their own. And then there’s the so-called “nuclear option,” the move to deny Democrats the use of the filibuster in the Senate vis-a-vis judicial nominations, so that the Senate’s power to advise and consent becomes more like close eyes and rubber-stamp. Perhaps the Republicans are thinking that once the judiciary falls further into their clutches, they won’t have to worry about the possibility of checks and balances in any branch of our government for a long time to come. And what right do Democrats have to complain, when it’s the citizens themselves who have been culling their numbers in government? Like we said, there was a time when, it seems, Republicans and Democrats belonged to the same institution -- the U.S. government -- and worked together to both temper each other’s excesses and support and improve each other’s legislative proposals when they seemed sound. But now -- can we recall a time when, within a party, there seemed to be such a vigilante mentality as exists in the Republican ranks today, where a wing of that party appears just as willing to devour its own as those of the other side, should they not tow the majority’s line? We refer, of course, to the ultra-conservatives who view moderate Republicans with the same -- if not greater -- contempt than their liberal adversaries across the aisle. Let’s face it -- America has always been a conservative country. In fact, it’s been ages since a progressive Democratic candidate has won an election without a good deal of help. Kennedy squeaked by in 1960 when Nixon forgot to shave, and exceptionally scary atomic rhetoric from Goldwater assured Johnson his victory in 1964. It took one of the worst scandals in U.S. political history to give Jimmy Carter a chance, a four-year blip followed by 12 long years of Republican trickle-down rule. We can all thank Ross Perot for the “revolution” of 1992 -- Bill Clinton got 43% of the vote, Bush pčre 38% and Ross “sucking sound” pie-chart Perot 19%. Add 38 and 19 and you get 57% of Americans casting their vote on the conservative side. When we arrive at the year 2000, we can only say a silent prayer for a democracy on hiatus, while in 2004 -- well, Kerry came awfully close, but again, it was hard to overcome America’s overriding red-state ethos amidst the propaganda blitz known as the war on terror. And so, because our country’s propensity is to move toward the right, how important does it become for there to be a viable left, a knot in the anchor rope that, were it not there, might end up dragging all of us down into an authoritarian void? How can those who claim to believe wholeheartedly in democracy then behave as if living in a democracy were the greatest impediment to the implementation of their vision, suggesting that their vision is quite possibly something a democracy might not support? A year ago this March, a terrorist bomb killed nearly 200 people in Madrid. Not necessarily a direct consequence of that disaster, a newly elected Spanish government withdrew its military forces -- some 1,300 troops -- from Iraq. Now the South Orange County (California) Community College District has voted to end the district’s participation in its study-abroad program in Spain. This ban was championed by trustee and former Orange County Republican leader Tom Fuentes, who claimed Spain’s pullout was tantamount to abandoning our fighting men and women. We bring up this example because it gets right to the heart of the matter. If Spain is indeed a democracy -- and last we heard, it is -- then shouldn’t its government be responsive to the will of its people? And thus, if we are fighting for democracy in Iraq, why should we punish it in Spain?
By the same token, why would an American political party, as a subset of our American democracy, want to work so hard to disempower its political opposition? It makes sense democratically only if the party believes its actions are supportive of our democratic system. But like the effort to penalize the Spanish, the Republican campaign to destroy its Democratic competitors is a maneuver that runs counter to the principles of that democracy. There is no denying the sense in the country these days that the conservative Republicans in Congress and the executive branch believe that they alone know what is right for us, and that what stands in their way is bad for America. And what stands in their way is democracy itself. That’s because democracy, as practiced in the U.S., is, at least ideologically, more than just simple majority rule -- it's supposed to be government by, for and of the people. It's government that protects the rights of individuals, even when they don't in and of themselves constitute a plurality. It's an acknowledgement that just because the majority of people may want this or that, there are still safeguards in place that allow a dissenting minority to bear some influence on the final result, whether it be enacted legislation or executive writ. This ethic is what is lacking from the present political arena, and it's more than just a failure of civility -- it's as if the Iraq war, so deeply partisan, has put our government itself into a state of war, a conflict that, at the present moment in time, the Republicans seem to be winning. Democrats are walking about like trauma victims, awed at how successful the Republicans seem at getting their way. The fact that pro-choice may soon be gone from the Democratic party platform and that national Democratic leaders would rather obfuscate for 20 minutes than let the words “gay rights” pass their lips only adds to the sense that the donkey is in its death throes. And although it was certainly done in a spirit of cooperation in the face of the devastating tsunami, all the footage of Papa Bush and Bill Clinton palling around together has only helped foster the subliminal notion that the Bushes and their shrubs are running things now, and even the once great hero of progressive politics has gotten the message and fallen into line. We can only hope that the GOP’s present stranglehold on power won’t contradict physics and create a pendulum capable of swinging in only one direction. We’ll know they’ve managed it, however, if, four years from now, Bill Frist is standing in the D.C. cold taking the oath of office from Clarence Thomas. The Democratic leaders must convince the nation -- especially Democrats themselves -- that they are not standing in the way of the future, but that they are the future. Commander in Chief Bush likes to say that we’re fighting a war in Iraq so we don’t have to fight it over here. Wrong. We are fighting a war over here, and whatever supposed gains democracy may be making along the Euphrates, along the Potomac its prospects are not nearly so good. 17 March 05 Ross M. Levine is an author, Marcel Proust marathoner and manatee-hugger who feels safer on the edge; i.e., in New York or California. He agrees with the King of Brobdingnag that we're "the most pernicious race of odious vermin to crawl the surface of the Earth." He thinks Americans have too much freedom -- fries, that is. 
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