The Left Column

Politics for Poets

Season of Emmanuel

Being down hearted is hard. So lighten up those hearts and be glad! easy to say. hard to do.

demagogues often win elections

Unfortunately demagogues often win elections. They know how to juggle the various falsehoods that they concoct so that they can 'get away with' half truths, falsehoods, and misleading attacks on the psyche of the voting public. The bad leader class is bent upon their own ruler-ship at all costs. Such people don't care what they burn down that gets in the way of them creating their green-field mono-genomal thought (thought nazis these people are). This is a description of a worst case person. And as with all descriptions of people it is imagined. It is not necessarily true about any one political person, but parts are perhaps true about everyone and anyone. This is a warning about how fallacy spawning can become a habit and cause problems for one's party, one's friends, the people out in the world, and for a relationship with . . . the important things of life. Do any people who habitually farm false ideas out into the fields of public opinion, to grow the weeds of falsehood into the public's mind, actually exist in positions of elected office? Or are such people appointed by bad administrators who have been dutifully elected? Accusing people of it will not make a writer popular with those who get accused.

Any one who is in office who has succumbed to the conjuring of falsehood to mask failed policy and flawed rhetoric will hopefully stop doing it once they realize that they do.

No one should be in office who spouts out lies into the public document stream. If one is a liar in one's personal life then that should not bleed over into the public sphere. But the original premise of this paragraph is actually an assumption with a strong 'falsehood' index. Unfortunately the statement:

No one should be in office who spouts out lies into the public document stream.

Is that kind of statement which we wish were true but, in fact, is not. Liars, and lying, are not a disqualification for office. People of loose moral character often get elected into office. And people of even looser character use an adherence to 'truth' as a way to control other people. And so there are very many people of reasonably high moral character who do juggle falsehood and do it as a way to try and improve the situation of the world as charged to do by their office.

Who that would employ such techniques: undercover operatives trying to crack criminalities of the public at large; people involved in witness protection; high-level people who feel as though they are ruling over everyone and that it is OK to lie because they are doing what is right and they know it and the public-mind is a child which it doesn't matter what they think as long as things get done for them and they need their Big-uncle-fed governor government to do it for them. OK, so this very last one is what I imagine that liars in the current administration must think to justify their lying points that they did after the debacle in Benghazi. Is this an aside? most probably.

Anyway, enough. I am tired of thinking about it. It is easier to tell the truth. Falsehood is what is to be avoided. If deception saves lives then people deceive and don't see it as a moral failing. Too much prying into the stinky oil-spill places of falsehood has a toxic effect upon the political discourse. But hopefully the political toxin will kill-off the careers of those who maintain that such toxicity is not toxic. Make them stand in the field of what they actually did, the things that they spilled out from their mouths, like a giant sheen of oily lies, all over everything. Make them stand inside their field of lies and let them breath it in. Hopefully it will kill their idea that puking falsehood onto the public is something that politicians can get away with.

Ya, we know that people lie. But we have forgiveness for this. If someone is really that good then the public might forgive their lies. So a liar is one who can still be in office. But should such a person ever get appointed? Only after much contrite entreats from such a person that the person understands that what he (or she) has done is not, in fact, virtuous behavior of an officer of the Constitutional government. Then, maybe approved in the right political climate.

But if such a person is approved, even when many know that he (or she) is one who pukes egregious falsehoods (put forward for political purposes), such approval is really just an authoritarian act of pushing the public's face into the dog-poop of the application of heedless power. It is an attempt at intimidation and dominance of political rivals. People, presidents, who do such to the collective polemic of public life; the polemic that adheres to truth and looks for Freedom from lies and falsehood; such people, such elected officials, do so at a risk as to how the world accesses them and their stature. When low people adhere to their mucky lying ways, the things that worked so that they could sling their way into office, when low people do that they make the office a vassalage to even lower forces. The lowest of forces empowered in a high office basically short circuit the authority of that office. The effectiveness of the office holder for the public becomes nil. People stop believing and patronizing that office. They give it heed no longer. It becomes a vassal of falsehood and thus impotent. It gets it metaphorical presidential palace surrounded by large congregations of people who flock to the ideas of freedom and good governance. The public does not like bullies or dictators. We can witness what is happening right now in Egypt if we want to see what results from dictatorially bullying by an elected official. The office of the president of Egypt has been reduced to a vassalage of an organization that probably is more about bully tactics of promoting socialism than it is about worship of that which is holy. IE: these people are akin to any zealot organization that uses whatever religion is popular and current at the time to try and usurp the control of society away from the people and over to a group of disconnected nut-jobs who probably suffer from repressed sexual desires and are probably enticed into the organization through slivers of affection from strong and handsome-looking men (and I do mean men) who tell them they are sinners and so, now, must be as such (as such: whatever way that the 'brotherhood' says to be (they will do what the ridictiphone says)).

What happens when a political party conspires to put forward falsehood as truth and the public lets it go on? If the political spiels laden with falsehood are not, by an outraged and loud-mouthed public press, deemed ineffective and impotent; and the body politic keeps bowing to the demagogic party's poopy-mouth lies, kissing the falsehood; then the situation in a nation can devolve into despotism. We have seen these things happen in other countries where the falsehood is worshiped as truth by a fully puppetized press and forward facing political apparatchiks. Do I need to go on and describe what happened in those not-so-long-ago places? The public must not eat and swallow the egregious poison of habitual liars. It is a poison pill that leads to gulag. Stand firm against the ones who puke the lies. Make them atone. It is for their good too. It isn't just for the good of the public and the nation. It is for the good of the soul who is hypnotized by his (or her) station in life, the soul who does not see the problem in spewing out falsehood for political gain. Such a person is deluded in their power and needs to be shaken awake by an earthquake of public indignation when it doesn't work that polite and public people try to nudge such a person awake from their falsehood by calling them out on it in a private way.

The senators tried to nudge her awake. She is sleeping to the truth. But, no, she is fully awake. "They must all be racists" the professional race-baiters chant as a poison choir.

Wake up, wake up all ye who always see it always as about your pet causes. The debate about race is not what this essay is about. This is a discussion about the truth. We need that. Without truth the structures that we build with our system of public governance are always flawed. They can not be maintained.

Well, I can wish about it all day long. I can imagine a world where public servants shut their mouths instead of spewing out constant falsehoods. I can imagine a world where people in high office don't spend precious hours spinning falsehoods for puppet-ministers to read from a teleprompter. I can imagine a world where the presidency doesn't have a parrot-press that trumpets the falsehoods with grand flourish. I can imagine a world where public monuments to great leaders don't defame them and make them look petty and arrogant; where monuments don't misquote a great orator; where monolithic monuments, in the tradition of the giant Ozymandias statue, do not get commissioned or built; where modesty is respected; where habitual and unrepentant liars are not promoted into high office; and where candidates for public office, or political positions, aren't chosen solely based upon actual or ideological nepotism.

Why do I not say that government should have no liars at all? Because that is an unrealistic goal. Politics is all about creative 'massaging' of the truth. Also, nepotism is a fact of life. Some times the person who gets to a position through nepotism is the one who does the best job. But when nepotism seems to be the only qualification that may be a recipe for disaster.

  Less is more.

Dec 12, 2012 (12-12-12)

well . . .

I think I've blogged enough today.

Life goes on.

Thank Veterans profussly and unexpectedly!

~ OK Now.

   That pony 
   was free to roam
  where it was safe
  and far from home
     or close by the window
 feeding her apples
    she drinks from a bottle
   she doesn't
     fret or neigh
  she's my darling
     pony
  on this
 Christmas Day.


 
here is a song fragment:
 
                      All your old
   letters you wrote
 when you were done 
    drinking your note
 and I sought
    the things you forgot
 to remind you
    that it's
  praiseworthy on
      this day
 to say
      Praise God!
   Praise
       God
    For His
    Unfailing
   Love!
  Praise God!
 

  Rumi Moon
   Sing me a song
  of happy happy
   Egypt
  at peace
  








Wake up!

The solution to bad governance is
   good people.