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The Politics of Politics of Politics of........


Dictionaries describe ‘politics’ as the ‘art or
science of governing’ , the ‘ affairs and activities of
the government’ and just plain ‘political life’. Lesser
known are the last 3 definitions- ‘intrigue or
maneuvering in a political group to gain power’,
‘political attitudes’ and the one I found most
interesting- ‘internally conflicting relationships
among people’. I believe that over the years we have
added these governmental meanings to the word. The
actual meaning should be, I feel, ‘the vying,
maneuvering, and positioning of an individual or an
organization to gain stature, power or control over
others’. I feel this way because, to me, associating the
government with this word is unfair to the
government!! No ruling body should be afflicted with
the kind of nonsense that ‘politicians’ throw at them
every day. The only satisfaction for the average
citizen is knowing that the leader, also being a
politician, probably deserves all the idiocy they’re
putting up with. This is, though, a far cry from the
obvious problem.

We ‘average citizens’ don’t NEED any idiocy in
our government.

When it comes right down to it, we can’t, any of
us, afford to have a government made up of social
climbers, double dealers and mercenary
administrators. The idea that these people are
making our laws, interpreting our needs, setting our
international policies with our neighbors, even
sending us and our children off to war, all for the
gain in the polls that will seem to insure the next
election ( maybe even a higher office, and of course,
much more money) is just plain offensive. Why we
have tolerated it for so long is a mystery to me.

The United States is founded on many premises,
not the least of which is that ‘government of the
people, by the people and for the people’ should
prevail. This is why the system was set up the way it
is. The saying ‘that government is best which governs
least” played a big part in the creation of the
democratic system.. It’s basically a good system, but
as Thoreau once said “when men are prepared for it,
that will be the kind of government which they shall

Well, we are clearly not prepared for it, because
we can’t seem to keep even the most obvious lunatics
out of our Congress, and we have let anyone with
enough money and enough secretarial skills to file a
few papers completely manipulate congress to the
point of having things outlawed because they
jeopardize a business venture, or not out-lawed
because investors would lose money. Expense or loss
of profit is always the reason, no matter what the
excuse is.

The country, and the population, stand to lose
untold billions of lives, trillions of dollars and our
very world if these charlatains are allowed to
continue. There is great evil and disrespect for life in
the way our government operates nowadays. This is
not because of the sytem itself, or the limited social
scope of the founding fathers. This is because our
government acts not as our organizing body, but as a
POLITICAL ENTITY forever trying to gain our trust
by telling us’ how much we matter, how cool we are,
how nice that new haircut is, and by the way, how
‘bout that giving us that tax check now’.

The basic problem here is, of course, that WE are
the government. WE THE PEOPLE have the ONLY
say in what happens, and ultimately, the
responsibility to do something or suffer the
consequences. I’d say we’re pretty far along into
the consequence thing now, so maybe it would be a
good idea to try something else. Like, maybe, oh, I
don’t know,uh........


The only reason that bills before congress, or all
legal contracts, for that matter, are so ridiculously
laden with unspeakable jibbersish is that we allow it.
If we demand our contracts with lawyers and
companies to be in plain, understandable language,
and threaten to withhold payment or do business
elsewhere, you just see how quick the legal
profession will bend to accomodate you.

When you strip away the ‘legalese’, most cases
can be settled or solved with what amounts to high
school level information or logic. The most basic, and
I believe, all the necessary aspects of law can be
taught to the average person in high school. When I
was that age, learning how our legal system worked,
how laws were made and how the affairs of
government were conducted was an easy thing to
grasp. The main stumbling block for most kids, as I
saw it, was remembering the whole chain in detail,
which was no different than trying to remember a
chemistry formula.

The important thing is, they all got the idea of
what our government does very quickly. They all
knew the upshot of the whole thing- the majority of
everyone in Congress has to agree and the President
has to sign his name before a law can exist. Even
then, any judge, all the way up to the Supreme Court,
can throw the new law right out the window if it
hasn’t turned out like we thought it would. Again,
the average citizen knows, or rather should know at
least this much because this information is required
knowledge for a high school diploma or an application
for citizenship.

So, the concept of our government is pretty easy.
Most people pass ‘civics’, as they pretty much always
did, regardless of what it may be called now. No,
mere legality and justice are not so difficult as to
require 4 to 7 years of expensive college education to
understand. The intense schooling is necessary to
teach the complicated ‘legalese’to the prospective
lawyers, and to help them learn to navigate through
the endless catacombs of loopholes, caveats, riders,
extenders, limiters, wherefores, whereas,
suppositions, depositions, admonitions, premonitions
and block partitions that this brave new language has
added to our law-making process. Once they have
mastered this obscure dialect, they are faced with the
daunting task of applying it the the thousands of
equally obscure laws that were written over the last
200 years, and then the individual cases where the
laws were upheld and/or thrown out, and when they
occurred. The level of multi-layering in modern
law-writing is mind numbing. No wonder lawyers want
so much money!!!!

Well none of this would be necessary if laws
weren’t so convolusively worded. The phenomenom
grows, I suppose, out of the way the founders’
documents were written. The prose is very flowing,
and stately, owing much to the Queen’s English at the
time. Try to remember, we’re talking about the 17th
and 18th centuries here. The ‘Shakespearean’ aspect
of the ‘Olde English’ was still part of the American
daily language. Since they spoke this way, it seems
likely that Messrs. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin,
et al, should have written everything this way.
Centuries later, we preserve this old, sometimes
confusing tongue by writing our all legislation and
contracts in it, just as we still drape the black robes
on judges, as in days of yore.

Shakespeare, like the American legal system, is
a high school subject. Every kid is exposed to the
Victorian /Elizabethan dialect of English at that point,
be it through history, civics, or ‘English Literature)
They must actively avoid it to not be exposed. If they
don’t get it they are at a point when they can demand
help until they do. The ability is there for everyone to
fully understand the langauge in which our laws and
contracts are usually written. That is not enough.

The real problem is the endless stream of riders
and needless, distracting or sometime evil clauses
and disclaimers that any confusing language will
disguise to the average reader. These hidden verses
in the law are the means by which politicians achieve
their ‘compromises’ and satisfy their political favors.
They are conditions, exceptions or variances to the
law being passed or contract being signed (or in some
cases, totally different legislation, included because it
could not pass on it’s own). These bills and contracts
are always all-or-nothing-at-all deals, and some
fancy talkin’ is required to keep the lid on. Most
people have to ask, or worse, in fear of being thought
illiterate, will just nod their head and go along with
something they don’t understand. The language is
often difficult on purpose- so you will feel that way.
Ask for an explanation. If it doesn’t make sense,
don’t buy it, or don’t let them do it, or do it to you.
You have this right.

Likewise, you have the right to demand that
your lawmakers and enforcers adhere to this, as well.
These people work for, represent and protect the
State, which is actually you. I mean it. The State,
government, nation, whatever you want to call it, is
just a conglomeration of the people in it, and they
are, well, US!!!! Without us, there would be no
government, no elections, no polls, no junkets, no
taxes, no write-offs, no lobbying or influence
peddling. All these things exist because of the
delicate balance between grooming us as constituents
and fleecing us like sheep. The sheep don’t know that
there’s only one dog, and anyone who can outrun him
is free. We don’t know, collectively, that politicians
aren’t the only ones who can run a government, and
like sheep, we keep re-electing the same old
sheep-dog to watch over us with no fence. Meanwhile,
the dog, well knowing that we’re just sheep, does
whatever it damn well pleases, so long as it can keep
it’s eye on the flock.

We are not sheep. We, the people, not the land
we stand on, are the nation. Our laws are designed so
that we, the people, have access to our lawmakers and
complete power over their tenure in office. We alone
are qualified to make our personal decisions about
who should lead us. That is, unless we abdicate them,
as we have done.

We have totally relinquished our choice in
candidacy by acknowledging the '2' party system as the
given reality. The ‘political’ (there’s that word again)
superiority of the party is the only real concern of the
party, and it does not matter which. They are, for the
most part, interchangeable beyond their own
understanding, as percieved by the common voter,
and one has little reason nowadays to trust any of the
major parties for any reason. Their methods are
identical. Only their motivation differs.

They accomplish their monpoly on our very lives
by appealing to us through our most desperate needs
or fears and making them seem solvable.

In this fashion, they effectively shut our true intentions
out and shift our scope of vision, until right after
they’ve been elected, and immediately take off to
pursue more ‘profitable’ constituents, usually with
very large cars and expense accounts. These liaisons
inevitably result in a bill or a ridiculously irrelevant
rider to another bill, enabling a special interest of
some kind to continue to operate unfettered, or to
remove obstacles to a new endeavor. In any case,
YOU are not deciding the issue in any way, and the
less you know about it, the better, as the politicians
see it.

So, the Republicans and Democrats have both, by
sheer money and influence alone, turned the entire
American governmental system into a popularity poll
between the two of them, thus negating everything
the founders envisioned, to the detriment of the
entire population of the United States. For nothing
more elevated in character or conscience than
politics- ‘ the vying, maneuvering, and positioning of
an individual or an organization to gain stature,
power or control over others’.

They should be ashamed- everyone of them.

Fortunately, the advantage is on the commoners’
side. Technology is advancing as fast as we can blink,
and information about everything you could imagine
will soon be available to the average person on a level
that would leave Ben Franklin dumbfounded for life.
If the average high-school student is now getting
more education than a Harvard level degree in
Jefferson’s time, just imagine the scope of an
average 17 year old’s exposure to knowledge by
the 22nd century. Their potential intellect will
undoubtedly dwarf that of those that govern them.
There will be no excuse for getting away with hiding,
censoring or masking information, since information
will be the stock and trade of the future generations,
and they will not be fooled by mere Shakespearean
dialect or fancy riders.

The only ways to truly control someone with
knowledge are to know something that the other
person doesn’t, or to make up something that they
can’t check or disprove. Soon, every type of
information on the planet will be available from
direct sources, and the capacity for lying will be
greatly reduced. The citizens of the near future will
have the ability to immediately check the voracity of
anything that their politicians say.

If our system of government is to grow into it’s
full potential, it must be stripped of the rhetoric and
deceit that it is riddled with today. Half-truths,
distractions, lobbying and influence peddling must not
be tolerated. The common person must assume that
their voice can be heard, so long as they bitch long
enough. Protest with your vote, with your money,
with your jokes and your gossip. Make the legislators
hear you, no matter what. Just be civil and to the
point, so they can’t dismiss you as some kind of
crackpot. Keep at them and the media. Technology is
on your side. Soon, the very existence of politicians
will depend on your input via cable, newsmedia,
web-surfing and consumerism. Beat them all to the
punch. Tell them what‘s on your mind now! I know
they’ll be pleased to hear from you.

Well, maybe not!

copyright 2000 Pegwood Arts all rights reserved 

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