Out here at forty thousand miles from earth’s troubled surface and turbulent, warming atmosphere we are well beyond the electronic flux of the Van Allen belts, but only one-sixth of the distance out to the moon’s mean, orbital path. Let’s go on out to Jupiter’s biggest moon, Ganymede, and orbit for a look back at how small Earth appears and how dimly our sun shines from there. Get some “perspective.” (Saturn’s farther than we need to go, and from Pluto our sun is a dust mote lost among countless stars.) We are not in this universe to last unless we get ourselves together and shape up.
Thinking back on the petty, childish squabbles of what we call our politics, even a Martian would notice we don’t pay attention to real process. A man on the Moon would sense that things seem to go on unnoticed by either party. Each side struggles to keep up sufficiently in the race for campaign donations not to be overwhelmed by sheer outlay from the other side on media advertising. It takes no nuclear scientist to see who really gains from all this conflict and the money sucking that gets worse every cycle, just when we need genuine economies. Don’t pretend nobody notices this. Everyone can follow the money trail straight up to guys like Rupert Murdoch. Nobody can be more motivated to egg on and worsen our political divisions and conflicts. He scarcely has to try, his FOX News & views programs run on their own well-greased steam-engines. Why wouldn’t he fund Tea Parties and agitation-distributors like Karl Rove, Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich and a bevy of bought-out, half-baked “think-tanks”? (“Half-baked” means they think only in the Right-side cylinders of the steam-engine.)
Even those media that Mr. Murdoch doesn’t own outright will sooner or later chime in, one way or another, as if by atmospheric convection — or infection. BOTH his meiny of hired minions with fellow-travelers AND all their opponents contribute to the news-cycle cyclones that stir up the public and rip off their money like electrons off the globe of a Van deGraff, electrostatic voltage generator. Of course, that generator can supply electrons endlessly. Not so, the American public’s money. Their money has been siphoned away by the great Real Estate & Banking Scam of bubble creation and sudden breakage, all well planned and managed, within which some of our best leaders have been unwitting, part-time puppets, duped, played with, around and behind, virtually set up to be savaged by still more ignorant dupes. This election is almost too important to be left to an electorate of which over ninety percent seem to be victims of a colorful light show projected on fog-bank and smoke-cloud! All parties need to wake up, get together and put some handles on this situation before the corporate fascists totally take us to the cleaners and down for the long count.
Remember the Duke and the King, fatuous interlopers on Huck and Jim’s river raft on the Mississippi in Mark Twain’s novel, Huckleberry Finn? Who is going to tar and feather these rotten pretenders to sacrosanct royalty so Huck and Jim can meet up with Tom and his old auntie, way down river? A show of hands?
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