It's easy to break things. Much, much easier, it seems, than building them.
The flaw in, say, austerity, is that its success is predicated on the relative exactitude of math rather than the shifting, liquid imperfection of people's lives.
The element which is conveniently missing from today's Republican Party is the human one. People's hopes and realities become numbers and words, devoid of personality and easy to erase.
I've rarely gotten a good review in my life, yet, to paraphrase Noel Coward, I am happy to console myself with the bitter palliative of commercial success.
Everything sells. Like integrity. Like democracy. Like truth. Like deeds.
I know it's sappy, but I bet there's a market for civility and niceness out there that, while probably not as titillating as a junkyard scrap between shirtless adversaries, it'd sure be healthier.
The guard rails on a highway may restrict some folks from driving the way they want, but those rules mostly end up saving the lives of those other drivers who understand that living in a society means behaving in a commonly beneficial way.
A culture cannot lie down with dogs and not become utterly infested with fleas. The dogs, in this case, are the mongrel media and the corporate overlords who have grown fat on manufactured controversy and fear mongering.
Fantasy-based ideologies invariably have neat happy endings where all the bad people and all the bad behavior goes away when the volume is turned up and enough force is applied.
The spectacle of insensitivity that is the gun lobby and its outspoken, out-of-their-mind apparatchiks, is the apotheosis of what the Republican Party has allowed itself to become.
The irony is that the people we tend to vote for actually look down on voters and voting. That's just idiotic, right? That's like a snake eating its own tail! A wolf in a trap gnawing off its own head to escape!
No matter what your political persuasion, you can find a guide that makes it quick, easy and painless to exercise your right to vote. Wanna know what a certain proposition put forth by a cadre of undisclosed billionaires which cuts funding for public education, arts and infrastructure means? Use the voting guide!
The GOP/corporate right-wing, it seems, never really considers the consequences of their actions.