4/30/22

WHAT’S AT STAKE IN THE MIDTERMS?
DEMOCRACY'S CREATIVE SPARK

HORSENECK BEACH path to the ocean and infinity. Westport, MA. CREDIT: Dangerous Times

HERE’S WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND about the general indifference to the midterm elections.
   Why don’t most Americans realize how much we all have to lose if Republicans win on Nov. 8 and impose their authoritarian vision on the country?
   Every morning I wake up thinking about all that could disappear if a malevolent government transforms the country.
   Part of my daily panic is an increasing appreciation of living almost 80 years in the United States – eight decades as a witness to innovation, creativity and reform that has no equal in history.
   Often, and for good reason, we think of dictatorships simply in police state terms – doors kicked in during the middle of the night, executions, prisons, torture,  re-education,  protesters clubbed and arrested, news outlets closed and confessions broadcast on TV.
   But authoritarian governments also do something else that's equally brutal – they extinguish the creative spark that comes from living in a free society, which encourages imagination, invention and innovation expressed in thousands of ways, some of them deceptively small.
   Like Peanuts.
   I mean the comic strip: Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Pig Pen, Lucy, Linus, Woodstock and the rest of the crew
   Peanuts always struck me as a metaphor for the genius of America,  an example of how democracy and a free society promote stunning advances in art, science,  education, medicine, business and recreation.
   You probably have your own examples of American creativity, and admittedly, my focus on Charles Schulz’s gang of pipsqueaks identifies me as something of an antique, with one foot stuck in a previous century (the original strip ran in newspapers between 1950 and 2000).

   But, along with millions of readers, I identified with Charlie Brown, both his chronic insecurities, as well as his resilience in the face of perpetual disappointments – like how his “friend” Lucy taunted him with a football,  only to snatch it away the last moment, again. And again.
   As for Lucy, I came to see her as an emergent feminist, determined to escape Schulz’s own stereotype of a bossy mean girl, even as he promoted her to become the gang’s small business entrepreneur, operating her own bargain-rate therapy booth.

FLYING HIGH - A Snoopy balloon in the Big Apple CREDIT: Pixabay.com

   Linus was a true conservative, the staunch traditionalist, who heroically clung to his security blanket. I was smitten, of course, by the beagle, Snoopy, for his flights of imagination and his plucky unpredictability.
   Peanuts is an American original.
   Peanuts could not happen in a dictatorship.
   Can you imagine Russia’s Vladimir Putin or China’s Xi Jinping  allowing the creation of, much less tolerating and celebrating, such a subversive, seditious, revolutionary and dangerous attack against the supremacy and authority of the state?
 
MAYBE YOU'RE WONDERING: 'Seriously, is this guy trying to pass off a comic strip as an example of the pinnacle of national creative achievement?'
   Crazyman is at it again.  If you spotted me on the street, you’d probably be wise to cross to the other side. 
   And who’d blame you for grabbing your cell phone?

9-1-1:      Please state the nature of your emergency.
CALLER:    There’s some batty old bald guy yelling at everyone. Probably on the run from a locked-ward, wearing only his socks. He’s raving about the end of the Free World. Something about a make-or-break election that nobody’s paying attention to. But 9-1-1, there aren’t any elections this year, are there?”
9-1-1:   No, Sir. No elections that we know about. And if there were, they wouldn’t warrant an emergency call to 9-1-1.
CALLER: But I’m still scared. This is some weird dude; can you help?
9-1-1:   A rescue truck, three fire engines and a butterfly net are on their way. And Sir?
CALLER: Yes?
9-1-1:    If I were you, I’d run like heck... .

I'M 100 PERCENT SURE that the freedom to create, to innovate, invent and imagine is one of the benefits of democracy.
   If you don’t like my examples,  why not come up with your own?
   Here’s more from me:

• Two-day delivery.
• “Amazing Grace.”
• Arguments.
• Teslas.
• “Hamilton.”
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Martin Luther King Day.
• Zoning.
• Southwest Airlines.
• Genome mapping.
• CRISPR gene editing.
• Velcro.

  THIS KIND  of intellectual, artistic, creative energy isn’t an accident. It’s born of the First Amendment, that bit of awkward language in the Constitution that nominally establishes the right to free speech, a free press and freedom both for and from religion.
   In practice, the First Amendment does much more.
   It creates space for new ideas, and the chance to second-guess the old ones; it produces the fertile soil in which you can plant the intellectual seeds that grow into  cultural Redwoods.
   Vote Republican on Nov. 8, and you can kiss all that goodbye.

AN EGRET reflects on the state of US politics at Gooseneck Cove, Newport, RI CREDIT: Dangerous Times

More from my list:

• Next-day delivery
• Wetlands preservation
• Saugy hotdogs (They're a Rhode Island thing).
• The original "Star Wars."
• The ACLU.
• Covid vaccines (Any kind).
• Strawberries as big as tomatoes.
• Johnny Cash.
  
• Tomatoes as big as pumpkins.
  
• The paper clip.

MORE WILD TALK from the Crazyman?
   Let's ask Tinkerbell to fly us to Florida, the Disney playground, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has picked a fight with another icon of American imagination, Mickey Mouse.
   Right after the corporation criticized Florida’s new laws that monkey with discussion of gender and racial issues in schools, DeSantis got the state legislature to move faster than a speeding bullet to revoke the Disney empire’s self-governing status,
   Censorship, meanwhile, continues to leap tall buildings and ride powerful  trains to other red states.
   In Tennessee this week, the legislature approved a bill that would require libraries to submit lists of their books for approval by a state commission.
   During  debate on the bill, state Rep. John Ray Clemmons, a Democrat,  asked Rep. Jerry Sexton, a Republican, what the state would do with books that  it found to be unacceptable:

 CLEMMONS: You going to put them in the street?  Light them on fire? Where are they going?
 SEXTON:        I don’t have a clue. But I would burn them.”

    That’s what I mean about the coming election.
    We have so much to lose if Republicans expand their thought-control, book-burning, don’t say gay, don’t think, don't talk, don't sing and all the other things that go with the war on reason. 

 ANOTHER OF MY NOMINATIONS for Democracy's Inspiration Showcase is  “The Victor,’ a mousetrap manufactured by the Woodstream Co. in Lititz, P.A.

BETTER MOUSTRAP - The Victor, solving our mouse problems since 1898. CREDIT: Dangerous Times

   Remarkably simple, it features a small piece of wood, onto which is attached a U-shaped metal bracket,  powered by a strong spring. When Typhoid Terrence, the disease-spreading, wire-biting mouse, saunters by, he stops for a nimble of peanut butter that's plastered on The Victor's trigger. 
   WHAM!  

    It’s just another example genius-in-action, brought to you, in a roundabout way, by your country’s First Amendment.
   Here's more from my list. And granted, my lists sometimes include things that aren't exclusively American, but that are the product of free societies:

• Same-day delivery.
• Shareholder rights.
• The UAW.
  
• Black Lives Matter.
• Tenure.
• Bike lanes.
• Olivia Rodrigo.
• The atomic bomb.
• Physicians for Social Responsibility. (A doctors' group that gave rise to the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize).
• The New York Times
• Helicopters.  

 
STILL NOT SURE that Republicans are dictators? Think they’re just your grandfather's Republicans?
   They’ve been around for years. They’re as much a part of American tradition as Charlie Brown, the A-bomb and better mousetraps. There’s not a dime’s difference between them and the "other" party, Tweedledum & Tweedledee.
   NEWS BULLETIN: There is a difference.
   The difference is that Democrats are your same-old, run-of-the-mill political party with older-than-average leaders, who mean well and usually govern well, except they don't come up with great campaign slogans or bumper stickers.
   Republicans, on the other hand, have undergone a brain-altering transformation, becoming seditious, mean and delusional crackpots, a violent and gun-carrying band of extremists, channeling instructions from their clownish but unfunny real estate huckster and TV apprentice reality star, who, when he got to the White House, turned out to be a cruel, racist, sexist, vindictive and authoritarian sociopath.
   You want crazy?
   Jan. 6, 2021. A mob overruns the United State Capitol; it's not just another protest that’s gotten out of control, but a deliberate attack aimed on stopping the process of certifying the winner of the previous year’s election, a first step in resurrecting the candidate who got the fewest votes.
   They’re at it again. In state after state, Republicans are passing laws to give them the power to reverse elections if they don’t like the outcomes; they're smearing opponents with slurs like pedophile “groomers;” they're bullying suicide-prone transgender kids; and sometimes they're talking nice about Vladimir Putin.
   So, yes, there’s much to lose in an election that lots of people either don't know about or just don't care about.
   And it is an emergency.
   We don’t need to call 9-1-1.
   We do need to make sure that we - and everyone that we can convince - vote.
   Peanuts and a lot more are on the line.

HORSENECK BEACH CREDIT: Dangerous Times