FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE FUTILITARIANS - by Jim Kent

For sheer doggedness in pursuit of defeat, it is hard to beat the Democratic party of the United States.  The Aged Incumbent and his band of merrymakers have consistently sought to tie the Democrats to the hoary spectre of communism.  This should have resulted by now in their being laughed off the stage of history, but the Democrats have reinforced this nonsensical blather by allowing the Coastal Crazies to define the party’s image.

The US electorate--never famous for sagacity or even elementary knowledge about such topics as law, history or economics--contains just enough voters in the just the right precincts who will fall for this claptrap and so render a certain Democrat victory in November much less certain. 

So the future of the Republic is in the hands of people for whom “socialist” means Stalinist or Maoist.  When Democratic candidates label themselves thus and are not brought up short by the party’s official  leaders, the frightened ignorant suppose the worst. 

By itself, this may be enough to keep governance ever more distant from the realm of reason.  However, never confident in the party’s losing ways, the Distinguished House Minority Leader has announced that if the Ds take the House in November, they will waste everyone’s time and attention for the next two years by conducting loud and outraged public hearings about what everyone already knows—that this is the most unblushingly corrupt administration in US history.  He thinks these rehashed revelations may culminate in impeachments, but leaves out the part where those will fall far short of the votes necessary for conviction. 

In other words, a few weeks before a midterm election which the Democrats still had a decent chance of winning, their leadership has proclaimed it will ignore all the polls that describe voters’ actual concerns in favour of even more dreary theatrics and tiresome bombast.  What, citizens may wonder, is the point of voting for them, or indeed for anyone?

Even with a clear majority for one of the parties, of course, there is very little Washington can do in the short term—say three years--to allay concerns about high food or petrol prices, or climate change, or crime, or any of the more popular forms of injustice.  It would be helpful if politicians would stop pretending about this, but they won’t.  It would be helpful, therefore, if some political party were to put together a few modest proposals for mitigating the human effects of these problems in the short term and trying to solve them eventually. 

My party of miscreants, misogynists and marshmallows have given up on this for the nonce, and turned to self-dealing supported by  fear-mongering to keep themselves employed.  This opens the door for the Ds to adopt the role always available to the minority party of crafting an image of an alternative universe where peace and prosperity reign.  If the vision is sufficiently realistic and responsive to the needs of the times, it can prevail.

Peace and prosperity will almost surely not ensue immediately, and maybe never,  but that’s a lecture for another day.  The point, if there is one, is that voters say at every opportunity and in various ways that they are tired of overstuffed public officials shouting bumper-sticker slogans at one another while eschewing the adoption or even the proposal of possible remedies for voters’ actual concerns.  Alas, the Democrats have not heeded this message.

Despair in the face of futilitarianism is always an option, I suppose, but democracy is doomed without at least some optimism.  Keep the faith.