I'm watching too much C-SPAN!!! Maybe you are too?

And I have been now for too many years... At least eight of them, if you know what I mean?

It's like a depression. No, it is a depression. I'm OK for a day or so and then something on NPR in the car, or an overheard headline in the grocery store, and suddenly that night I'm not sleeping again. And instead I'm writing this Post (and I don't even know what I'm doing blogging)

It's like an addiction too. C-SPAN, I mean (blogging may come later). Because I'm terrified I'll miss something if I don't keep the TV, every TV on.

Because the convicts are running the prison!

But wait, if I'm addicted, does that mean my depression is like a twisted up backwards kind of detox? But how can I be in both states at once?

And that's my point. I shouldn't have to be watching C-SPAN 24/7. I shouldn't be getting 20-50 emails a day from Politico, or MoveOn, or ONE, or any nunber of other progressive, independant, grassroots, documentary film makers, Democrats, and yes even the RNC organizations, institutions, conservatories, or the endless number of Barnum & Bailey "hope in home typing" email opportunities from familiar sounding names like Bank of America and Morgan Stanley and some old woman in England or South Africa who wants me to help her hide her late husband's fortune. All the originating IP numbers come from China or Turkey or Australia.

And everyone asks me to sign a petition or call my elected official or drive 500 miles on gas I don't have to spend two days in the freezing rain waiting for the cops to arrest me for exercising my 1st, 4th, 6th, hell any of my Constitutional Bill of Rights. Or, and often as well, they say "please" give us some money to "continue the struggle", "keep up the fight", "make change, resist change", "vote for this" or "vote for that". Or not, if I'm Gay. Well what the hell have I got to be gay about? I just wish I had the money to buy milk without having to plan for or think about it first!

The White House invites me to help "stage" a live conference call alongside a "town hall meeting". Our new president knows how important it is to get as close to the "people's will" as he possibly can. And he has the "screeners" to make sure the right ones get close back. He also knows how to do this grassroots, hands out to the people thing, better than any politician has in history. Except perhaps Franklin Roosevelt. If Roosevelt had the Internet? I wonder...

President Obama also knows that this is all about media coverage. About the message. No one can deny that "perception" is important. Your Father, Mother, or maybe an Aunt or Grandparent told you about "first impressions" when you were very young. And that all encounters were potentially first impressions. Unless you were family...

Follow up:

But the thing is I shouldn't have to constantly be looking at my "government in action", like they were small children in a crowded playground knowing there may be molesters in the bushes, after all these years since I did so once in High School on that field trip I actually really ditched, wondering why anyone would want to do such a thankless job as politician. It all seemed so stodgy and boring. Like most adults did back then, even though I was quietly glad that someone did want to keep us safe from atom bombs and communism. And in spite of the fact that I was now a legal adult in the Army's eyes...

Unless I'm going for my Docturate in Political Science, or finance... I couldn't understand why I need concern myself.

For all I cared about some thing called "politics", that was practiced far, far away from my swimming hole, or the woods where we smoked our "pot", I couldn't see the potential ramifications of their decisions, or the ensuing ripple effects on my distantly simple life.

Of course I was a child then. Post Hippie wannabe. "Long hair blowin' in the breeze, just tryin' to find myself" (-- Wicked Eye 1970 VAFB.)

There was a prolonged war going on too in Vietnam, that people were getting really tired of, including me. I turned 18 in February of 1971 and pulled the number "20" in a pool of certain to be called numbers in the 1972 Draft Lottery. I could have been a draft dodger, but a personal hero of mine, Mike Gravel, was morally firm enough to try to Filibuster the Senate and thereby help to facilitate the expiration of the Selective Service Act just two months before I would have been called to fight in a war as unjust as the ones we are fighting now.

Another hero of mine, Daniel Ellsberg worked for the RAND Corporation, went to Vietnam, came back and went to work for them again. He subsequently enlisted Senator Gravel to help him break the "Pentagon Papers" story while avoiding arrest in order to show the public how the military and government collectively conspired to continue the war in Southeast Asia, escalating into Cambodia and helping to establish the Khmer Rouge, which led to the genocide of over a million forced workers after the thousands that had already died between 1969 and 1975 because of the war and resulting famine.

Those were great years for bringing down the "house of cards" that was our corrupt government. Nixon would have gotten away with it all had he been president in the 21st Century. Hell look at Henry Kissinger today. Not a political scratch on him. "Watergate" too I suspect would have been ignored in these times of iPods, YouTube and Andy Warhol reality show fame, just as Rendition and Torture are today. And Global Warming. And Peak Oil. And all that they bring with it and are the causes of.

Hell we can't even get Harriet Miers to testify before Congress about an ex-Attorney General. Much less another goofy cowboy president and his evil twin stepbrother, the VP. She was their lawyer for cripes sake. The lawyer is the one who's supposed to do the talkin'. I thought.

Didn't we used to have something called the Grand Jury?

And along with all the other military imperial engagements we've instrumented since WWII, it has been the real purpose to exert control over resources, territory, industry and financing! Human Beings are part of the natural world too, and therefore a resource. And therefore a commodity. Anything can be traded it seems these days... Someone somewhere in a deep basement or a high office building is probably "hedging" bets on the number of people who will die from the result of our out-of-control climate change, and the peak oiled collapse of the "motor-car-man" age. (Someone noted future archeologists would name us "Carbon Man" on the evolutionary ladder.) Then the very clever, expensive and indispensable, by congressional hearing standards, will "bundle" those mortal bets and "SWOP" them to Goldman Sachs for later failure and another bailout.

Who's gonna bus the tables when only the rich people are left? Well, don't you know, the order of hierarchy will just get readjusted. Membership in "the club" will have to be restricted. I mean someone has to take out the garbage.

And that would be the Middle Class folks who have been the most collusive in the last 50 years, and particularly in the last, hmm, let's see, Bush 8 years, Clinton 8 years? Senior Bush 4. That would be 15 to 20 years.

I can say this without guilt because I'm not in the Middle Class anymore. Not since President Reagan. I learned that part of the truth in the late 1980s when the furniture manufacturer I had built a career with was bought by an Equity Firm before most people had ever heard the term used. They broke it up and off-shored it little by little until last summer I read they were moving executive jobs out too. That's 20 years of slow painful economic death for the local economies that suffered from decisions under the "Reaganomics" mindset. Can you say "trickle-down"?

Too bad we didn't take out the garbage before it piled up so high...