Although I consume more political content than is probably healthy, I don’t create much of it. I say my piece every now and then, and I’m about to scatter a few more nuggets around, but over the last decade or so, possibly because of the inanity of the arguments that are being manufactured for the warring factions of left and right, I’ve tried to keep my political discourse to a minimum. However, since we now have less than a year until the election that has already been running for nearly a year, I figured I’d share a few of my political thoughts before getting back to my songs, poetry, stories, and other imaginings.
In the ’80s, when I was a teenager growing up largely in the Baptist Church, I remember wondering why a glorified real estate developer and millionaire braggadocio was getting so much screen time. As an ardent follower of Jesus Christ and the religion I was brought up in, Donald Trump was the antithesis of everything I thought admirable, heroic, noble, and good. Although I no longer consider myself part of the Christian religion, I do still hold great affection for Jesus Christ, and nothing that has happened since I was a boy has changed my opinion of Donald Trump.
Of course, that makes me no great fan of Joe Biden either. I identify as a radical pragmatist, a thinking human being who recognizes that the complexities of our individual and collective makeup makes it impossible, except through the most explosive method of cultivating idiocy by offering only two choices, to truly classify any human being as simply left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. It is my opinion that the two most vile, reprehensible, nefarious organizations in the history of our civilization may just be the Democratic and Republican parties due to the divisiveness they manufacture, and hopeless as some may think the dream may be, it is my fervent wish to see those two corporations one day disbanded and remain as nothing more than bold print in our textbooks.
Nevertheless, for the time being, we are beholden to the Democratic and Republican parties because we have granted them carte blanche in crafting the rules to our legislature so that they can remain in power and also draft the most lucrative agendas for themselves and their campaign financiers. For instance, although we have had three other contenders sign up as candidates for the Democratic Party on this go around, the board of directors for that particular corporation have decided to forgo having a Democratic primary and give the candidacy to Joe Biden without input from the party members, regardless of the fact that the majority of Americans do not want him to run again. Meanwhile, the Republican corporation has given complete allegiance to the former Celebutante in Chief in their hopes that their twice impeached presidential circus peanut will be as exonerated of the 91 criminal charges against him as they have exonerated him for being a sexual predator, fraud, and all around bullshit artist, and if not, he will simply exonerate himself as they continue to cower and venerate him as the first president to have so little grace or class as to not pass power to honor and support democracy, and the first one to not have a pet (which obviously shouldn’t disqualify anybody, but being in that sort of position and not having an animal to connect with just seems kind of sad to me).
So I’m not a big fan of either of the two parties in perpetual power. And again, although it may seem like a fevered dream, I just want you, as an American, to consider the possibility that these two corporations could be dissolved so that their monopoly on our legislature can be surpassed. If anybody has any other ideas beyond ranked choice voting, I would certainly love to hear them (although I do fully support the idea of ranked choice voting).
Anyway, a couple decades ago, I was living in Los Angeles and got a book called Healing The Soul Of America from the Los Feliz library. Reading Marianne Williamson’s previous book, A Return To Love, had given me a lot of comfort and spiritual insight after I left the Christian belief system yet still resonated with Jesus’ two commandments of loving God and loving others as myself. When I read Healing The Soul Of America, I wished Marianne Williamson could be president, and I was very excited when she was the first to sign up as a candidate for the Democratic Party. However, I find it somewhat tragic that her nostalgia for the Democratic Party of Roosevelt that she heard stories about as a child has left her vying for a spot in a corporation that is no longer democratically operated.
Of all the people currently running for the office of President of the United States, Marianne Williamson is the only one I actually want, and the only one who I think could really affect the changes we need to make.
I appreciate that Joe Biden has been in office for most of the time I have been alive, however, the best that I can really say about his presidency is that it hasn’t been a complete disaster. He made some things happen that worked in our favor, and he did some things that worked to our detriment and were not what he sold himself on in his last campaign. While I congratulate him on achieving his lifelong goal of becoming president, he was my last choice of the 25 candidates in the Democratic Party’s 2020 Pageant (yes, I would have even gone with DeBlasio over him), and I would still much rather have Marianne Williamson, even if she does have to take a position with an organization as corrupt as the Democratic Party to do it.
Cornel West is amazing. Definitely my second choice, I think it would be an incredible thing to have such a mind offering its influence to the United States. Unfortunately, the electoral process the Republican and Democratic Parties crafted does not make independent candidates viable so I don’t have much hope for him.
I don’t know much about RFK Jr, but he doesn’t knock my socks off. For starters, perhaps I am a shallow, overly sensitive, artistic, acoustic perfectionist, but I just don’t like the sound of his voice. I appreciate that he was so open-minded and decided to do so much research into the happenings of the pandemic and development of vaccines, and all of the other stuff that I just didn’t want to spend time getting anxious over, but I still don’t want to go down that rabbit hole, I’m not thrilled about a Camelot redux, and I have an aversion for people who went to Harvard. He is working with Charles Eisenstein, which is cool because his books The Ascent of Humanity, Sacred Economics, andThe Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible are sheer brilliance, but it’s still too early to say whether I’d want RFK Jr. leading the country. But if Eisenstein is his running mate, I’d probably be down for that.
Dean Phillips has decided to run in the Democratic Party, and I appreciated some of what he had to say in conversation with Bill Maher. That’s about all I know, and I’m not really interested enough to learn more just yet. Maybe I’ll come around to him again sometime in 2024 if he lasts that long.
If I had to choose from the other entries into this year’s Republican Party Pageant, I think Chris Christie would be my first choice because I used him in a webisode I made about the opioid epidemic and he showed genuine compassion and humanity in his discussion of it. DeSantis is the governor of my home state, and I find him to be petty and unsure of himself as well of what is truly important to his constituents beyond his narrow-minded and short-sighted crusades. Choosing between Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramiswamy, and Tim Scott is like choosing between whether you’d like to be kicked in the teeth, punched in the gut, or kneed in the groin.
I truly hope that my insights help to alter, support, change, or expand your perspective and that you consider the outrageous idea that the Democratic and Republican parties are not eternal entities. Imagine how well they will burn on the trash heap of history. Enjoy your role in our political process, and I hope I don’t have to write anything more about this again for a while.
