Having now selected their national leadership and the representatives of their national legislature, Americans face a more important decision; perhaps the most important in the history of their country. They must make a choice between politics and preservation. Not the lower case preservation of personal or political consequence but the towering CAPITALS that spell out the preservation of what may well be humanity’s last-best hope for truly representative government: of, for and by its people. Of even more enduring consequence, is the physical preservation of a healthy, socially and economically viable populace, for centuries to come.
The most immediate and crucial task facing Americans is a decision on whether or not to allow black-mailing bullies and fiduciary frauds, like Grover Norquist, Carl Rove and other self-appointed despots of their ilk, to continue dictating their heresy to an entire nation, in the name of partisan political tyranny that they’ve dubbed: ‘the public good’ and to boot, shrouded in the flimsy camouflage of: ‘the public will’.
This should be a simple and compelling choice but time and timorous acceptance by weak-willed congressional legislators have allowed these subversive schemers to ply their perverse power, as though they were lawfully entitled to it when, in-fact, it is Constitutionally and ethically illicit. Their continuous infamy having been tolerated through the sway of several politically greedy administrations, its poison now literally threatens the vital well-being of our body politic. In the mid-eighteenth century, Jean-Jacque Rousseau wrote: “ The body politic,….. bears within itself the causes of its destruction.” The validity of his reasoning is more-than-ever manifest in the treacherous manipulations of these political prevaricators and makes the need for their expulsion more pressing than ever.
The choice for our country’s citizen-voters is starkly urgent: to rid our democratic peoples’ republic of their sleazy grip on the mechanics of vitally necessary government activity. In 1979, the brilliant (recently-deceased) poet and essayist, Adrienne Rich, wrote these lines (they referred specifically to women, at the time but are pointedly on-target for all of us, in today’s troubled American atmosphere): “Re-vision,” – she wrote – “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new direction – is—more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.” What Rich has described here is a necessary act in the process of preservation. In truth, it is the preservation of our body politic, as envisioned by our founders, that we must now ensure.
For those of us more in-tune with religious notions, what we are about was aptly described by Mary Wolstonecraft, in a letter to a friend in the late 18th century: “It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals,” she wrote, “which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.” By whatever process, it’s our fragile and rare form of government we now must preserve, and the time to do it is now.
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