Hateful Screed; Politics Edition!

Benazir Bhutto has been killed. It is a sad day. The primary impact is always one of loss - here was a person who let us understand the movement she represented, who was willing to die for it. That kind of political devotion is unheard of in America, which brings me to point two of why the day is sad - our own political race, and how the candidates are going to try to use the death of this noble person in order to further their own careers. If they mention it at all, that is. I understand most of the republicans have something against People Who Are Not White, and want to hide them all behind fences.

I once recall hearing that although you are white and American, it does not mean you don't suffer - just that your suffering pales in comparison with what other people have to go through. Which is true. There's been a push with recent American policy to appeal to use what sounds like the logic of the suburbs internationally - the fence metaphor returns. If you don't like your neighbors, block them off. Don't do anything to upset your important neighbors, too - the US can't come down too hard on president Musharef, because if they did, where would the US stage it's forays into the middle east? How many people even know or care about what's happening?

Before I am swept away by the tidal pull of despair, I must try to come clean about some things. I am cynical because deep down, I feel that I'm helpless in the situation. I'm not even sure that if I knew how I could help that I would. At my core, I hate politics, and all that they stand for. I think that they're nothing but an outlet for the most vile, bullying, putrescent pieces of semi-sentient human waste to achieve something resembling, in it's most exterior aspects, a respectable life. I even hate the candidates I like. There's nothing admirable about public office. It's a circus of balding old men and their sycophants, mistresses, and saducees.

And the worst part seems to be that, like a disease, it's spreading. Ted Haggart, Larry E. Craig, Rush Limbaugh. People who abuse the faith that the public has in them, who lead tiny, pathetic shadow-lives behind the public image that constitutes all that they really are. Say what you like about Marion Barry, at least DC knew what it was getting when they re-elected him.

Why do these drug addicted whoremongers get to continue with their unusually wide-stanced ways, whenever someone so generally admirable as Benazir Bhutto gets blown up? The American Political/Fame system seems to be irreversibly corrupt, where one achieves power through falsehood, lowest-common-denominator appeals, and apparently, the guiding hand of Satan himself. The person who stands up is the person who gets cut down. I hate to sound like them, I hate the thought that this post even echoes something that they might suggest, but perhaps ignoring the problem will no longer make it go away. The American Way, anymore, is about access, and as long as you have an iPod, radio, satellite radio, TiVo, elaborate smoke message system, or effing telegraph, these people are going to be worming their way into your life. We're like Whatsisbucket in A Clockwork Orange, tied to a chair, and forced to witness not atrocities and horrors, but rather, the overwhelming cowardice, lies, and pabulum of the modern age. Is it any surprise, then, when America produces not monsters, but yawning, gawking sociopaths, unable to feel anything other than greed?

I, too, am a victim. I strive for something resembling legitimacy, morality, respectability. Would I even be able to recognize it, if it would present itself? Probably not. I am one of the yawners, the gawkers, the ones who casually shrug off increasingly depressing systems of jurisprudence in favor of talking about who should have "won" Tila Tequila's show. I may be suffering, but it does not mean that I have any idea to what degree others are in pain. I can only hope to take some lesson away from the assassination, some aspect of Benazir Bhutto's work, that maybe there are worse things that can happen to you besides death - you can live a life of complete mundanity, dulling your senses from a universe full of wonders.