MLK

 

The Invisible Whitmanian Republic

If there’s a silver lining to a Trump Presidency, it’s that it exposes to view the many ways in which the Democans have teed up the ball for the Republicrats to hit. 

 

Sadly, too many of our countrymen/women still see politics as a team sport and root for the Blue or the Red team thinking that one or the other has their best interests in mind. They do not. They have their own interests in mind. 

 

When the Democratic Party coalition of George Meany (organized labor), Richard Daley (Chicago machine), and Hubert Humphrey (still smarting over his loss in ’68) undermined their own anti-war Presidential candidate in ’72, the Duopoly was born.

But that was over a half century ago. We’re still here, muddling through. So long as the electorate remains stuck in the two-party binary, there will be no end to this exercise in futility otherwise known as American democracy.

 

By and large, Americans lack the political imagination necessary to escape the prisons of our own devising. Sic transit gloria mundi.

On the other hand, Walt Whitman promises to wait for us somewhere up ahead, “as Adam early in the morning,” “full of life now.” Where are you, Walt? We are surrounded by criminals masquerading as Charity and Justice.

Whitman offered a poetical solution that, if embraced, would eventually prove a political one. 

 

I am of his party.

The Women of Algiers

 

The Lark Ascending

The Theater of the Absurd

 

The Times are Propitious for Some Extracurricular Reading