Twain 09

A question has been raised in America as to priorities that I fear will prove devisive for a long time until a passive form of social darwinism takes hold. It occured to me as I caught a snippet of interview on the radio before turning the dial (metaphorically, I actually just pushed a button) to triple j as at the time a whim had overtaken me to make pancakes and another whim reminded me that triple j didn't lay much music during the day.

Anyway, it was a series of interviews in Texas that proved curious because the constituents were firmly laying the blame at the feet of George Bush for more or less every catastrophy that has beset the world...

YET


Many said they would vote republican, because they believe abortion is a sin.

Frankly I am of the mind that neither candidate really presents arguements that convince me they have the stones, the chutzpah, the cajones, the kathy bates and the aretha franklins to make the necessary reforms.

But it just strikes me that there is a heirarchy of voting preferences such that -

people can lose their jobs.
people can lose their homes.
people can lose their civil liberties (patriot act).
people can lose all their retirement savings.
people can be deployed to war on false pretenses.
people can be killed in universally unpopular wars.
a country can lose all respect in the global community.
a global financial system can be brought to virtual catastrophic collapse.
tax payers can fork out trillions of dollars in buying up bad debt.
But I will not abide one form of murder that is abortion not even if the pregnancy is the result of rape because GOD hates that.

I mean I sort of understand the logic, it's the same as if I found a cake tin with $10,000 cash stashed in it (or better yet 1 euro) and whilst clearly I would be better off just keeping the money, I know the right thing to do is to report the item as 'found' to the police.

I would probably do this simply because it has been engrained into my brain as 'the right thing to do' from my formative years.

But woah, I mean Bush's legacy will hopefully be a lesson learned that a bad president can do way more damage than any extremist terrorists could do. On 9-11-01 many Americans watching the news were gripped with the terror that planes were just going to start falling out of the sky and America would be obliterated.

As resource intensive and widespread a hijacking would need to be to achieve this, the government still grounded all planes partially to assuage this fear.

Yet it turns out much more likely to destroy your home and leave you fending for yourself on the streets was the irresponsable fiscal and economic policy of the Bush administration.

That's why it breaks my heart that Mark Twain had America stitched up and nailed down in the 1890's and it has deteriorated from there.

Religion plays more of a role in politics than it did then thanks to mass media.
Nationalism and patriotism are far more fanatical now.
America (and indeed the world, but the world didn't produce someone as brilliant as Mark Twain) still vests huge amounts of money into alienating itself and promoting unrealistic ideals.

I'd vote for Mark Twain as president because there would be no way 'Intelligent design' would even be allowed to get off the ground.
America's foreign relations and immigration policies would be a whole lot more constructive and relaxed.
And most of all instead of hearing, lofty empty rhetoric all the time we might hear something witty and insightful.
Abe Lincoln never went to church. He'd never get in today, too devisive.

Democracy must be inherantly flawed if the system has evolved in order to keep leaders like Mark Twain and Abe Lincoln out.