Courage and the Twinkie

Having read John McCain's transcript on courage, I have these comments. It is well spoken and elegant prose, but it's more nostalgic, and (dare I say) remorseful, than suggestive. Yes, the political milieu we find ourselves mired in these days, is suffering a severe anemia of the type of altruistic, courageous statesmanship McCain laments in his writing. I think images and sound bites, which should be the artifacts of good character, have been elevated to the point where they, not the underlying structure, are given priority. Television and the destruction of the political caucus, are strong forces behind the wickedness of this situation. Having the courage to speak ones mind will only effect change if it's done in concert.

Why should we run the candidates and issues through the true gauntlet of debate and reason, when ambition, impulse attack and personal grooming suffice to sway the public? The public is so buried in personal interests, or so distracted by special interests, they are more willing to pull the plastic wrapper off someone else's pre-packaged analysis confection, then to bake the Twinkie themselves. What's worse is they have demanded this, through the free exercise of the remote control. It came to the point where, before the blogoshere came along, the only choice was Dan Rather's Twinkies, or Sean Hannity's Devil Dogs, or Peter Jenning's Ring Dings, because nobody was offering up the flour, sugar, milk and other basic ingredients, for any of the issues, on any of the channels. The lone grocer, in the fray, was C-SPAN with it's humble, home baked ratings.

The same pundits shamelessly push their brand of analysis out into bookstores, with companion sales plugs over the waves. Every book is complete with anonymous sources and glorified testimonials. They all cross-pollinate their shows like busy little bees, to pump the readership. All this does is further push the hastily chewed Twinkie up your esophagus, threatening your windpipe.

Statesmen of courage cannot survive on this attribute alone with an entrenched media complex, in which all of the kinetic motion is provided by the rapid peddling of political pundits. Abe Lincoln would be too ugly for television. Theodore Roosevelt's voice would be too shrill. Imagine these 527s armed with television images of FDR's frailty, or Truman's mob ties to Pendergast. Had McCain exercised the courage he spoke of, in his parable about the Confederate flag, he would have been vilified. Joe Lieberman was ridiculed and scorned, by his own party leadership, for expressing and holding his belief that removing Saddam Hussein was a good thing, regardless of the intelligence. Look at what Ralph Nader is getting for his courage; Un-elected legal parasites are doing to him exactly what they hypocritically abhor, the disenfranchisement of his voters. Almost every courageous candidate, preceding the modern information age, would have been ejected, not elected by the modern primary process. This is why every refined choice inevitably becomes the choice between Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dummer, with your personal choice weakly vacillating, toward your particular political north pole. My only hope is that the internet has provided a path for trend reversal here, in spite of the poor quality, and high crap density, of the information therein. E-mail correspondence, even with all of the spamming, is changing the economic, cultural and political landscape.
Yes, it takes courage to speak out, with the threat of adverse consequences, but you still need to be heard by somebody, to have any effect.