Obama’s opponents are trying to tag him like a gang in the ghetto of American political speech. I’d like to see the candidate boldly incorporate the tags, redefining them and making them part of his platform. If people see this divisive language being defused and de-clawed, they will begin to have hope again for the future of American politics, and isn’t that what his campaign is all about? Here is one tag I’d like to see him embrace.
He will raise taxes. Two-thirds of all corporations paid no taxes last year. Your darn right, we need to raise taxes. Make no mistake. Corporations use the benefits from taxes more than individuals. It is trucks that eat up roads, not cars, and taxes are needed to build heavy-duty highways and to keep them in repair. Corporations use a disproportionate amount of the national infrastructure. Their massive requirements for energy and water and waste management depend on massive public utilities networks. Schools educate their workers for them. They damage the environment and then the public needs to clean up. It’s time they started paying for what they use instead of getting a free ride on the back of the average American worker.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Obama Tagging
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The Cult Vs. the Culture of Life
Cult - a closed group or religious sect devoted excessively to one idea or person; an unothodox or false religion
Culture - growing, cultivated organisms or social community; refinement
A cult is narrowing and hierarchical. A culture is expanding and communal.
Cults point the finger outward and find everyone else evil and advise either isolation or evangelism to cleanse it. Cultures hand everyone some seeds and a hoe and sends them out to the garden together.
Cults are ultimately about death. Cultures are about life.
Evangelical Christianity is a cult. Liberalism is a culture.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
An Election of Hoaxes
A flock of birds. A herd of cows. A school of fish. An exaltation of larks. Many nouns in English have another, special word to designate a grouping. In the run up to the elections, I have been listening to the reports being circulated about the candidates and noticing they resemble nothing so much as those emails friends forward with capital letters and exclamation points, full of dire warnings or outraged sensibilities that turn out to be pure hokum. The aggregate of the missives is what I propose we call “an election of hoaxes.”
