August 03, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - The Democratic Livestock Sales signal the start of our Presidential election root canal with its pimps and whores money scramble, evoking the pathos of a 4H sale of prize hogs and heifers.  4-H stock is pure blue ribbon, though, which can’t be said of this sad herd of pampered bipeds, bawling and bellowing through their own live auction.
 

What if their number were an embarrassment of riches instead of an embarrassment?  What if there were a basis in the derelict Democratic Party for elevation of the most visionary, acute, and ethically, ecologically, economically rigorous and penetrating minds America could offer?
 

A fantasy, of course.  The Parties--malformed twins joined at the wallet--are giant filtering mechanisms to identify and exclude minds of integrity and the morally courageous.  They are the Praetorian Guard of Capitalist Imperialism that has abused the world with impunity for so long that it believes it’s invincible, despite its serial humiliations.  That hubris--that vulgar, ugly arrogance--and the cruelty and folly that define it, is a poison always fatal to empires.
 

The hardening of America’s aged political arteries has had the odd result that neither political Snake Oil Wagon owns a massive tranche of the people.  Odder yet, people get it.  
 

Republicans, ever the liveried footmen of wealth, are just window dummies, performing seals cued by the decrepit Kentucky swamp turtle, shilling for the Capitalist Cancer’s owners, conning both the prosperous, and gullible hicks, that theirs is the true gospel of virtue.  Finally, with Main Street dissed and dismissed by Republicans, and the hillbillies dumped on and disabused, they aren’t buying the old catechism, and instead are rallying to the Standard of No Standards, the What Me Worry Banner of The Bozo, where the pustulent sores of their closet racism, sexism and xenophobia can be flaunted openly as MAGA badges.

Democrats?  A clique run by a brittle, doddering Crone and Geezer Politburo mired in mendacity, paralyzed in a retro Cold War brainfreeze, smelling of yesteryear, of betrayals and cowardice and moral failure, like the cowboy in the song,“...always in search of, and one step in back of, himself and his slow-moving dreams”.  In deep thrall to Big Money, they stand foursquare for the few who own it all, and are horrified by rising demands of the young, sharp and vital who might be theirs if they offered anything but visionless stasis, baseless, perilous hatred of Russia, and endless money for the War Machine that will destroy us.
 

And the answer..?  Don’t look for it, as Saint George of Carlin told us.  Ain’t gonna be one.  Vote, if you like; do a citizen’s paramount duty, if it you pleaseth.  But don’t hold your breath for hope and change.  Don’t chant yes, we can, again.  And never fool yourself that we did it before and we can do it again, because we’ve never done this before.  Never.  Greenland lost 10 billion tons of ice yesterday.  We’re in uncharted waters.  Here be dragons.

Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net

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