Sept. 6, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: Maybe the Parties Are Finally Almost Over
 
By Joseph J. Honick
 
Bainbridge Island, WA (HNN) -- Please pardon the awful takeoff from the name of the popular song from the 1956 hit Broadway musical “Bells Are Ringing” that really had something to do with the end of a romance. But, then, just maybe that is what is happening in America in terms of the peoples’ romance – or whatever it is with the two major political parties.
 
Republicans have a growing number of discontents even among some of their leading lights and most articulate national members of both Houses of Congress. Senator Joe Lieberman’s primary defeat and the campaign leading up to it caused profound rumblings in the Democratic backrooms.
 
If it’s a great year for anyone associated with politics, it is for the species popularly, or unpopularly, referred to as pundits. They can’t all be correct, or maybe like economists, they are so busy hedging their analyses and predictions, it’s getting tougher every day for you and me to figure out what they’re telling us we’re supposed to believe and therefore support.
 
I don’t know how global warming may be impacting the real geographic poles that are said to be thawing and threatening to render the earth to be a bug mushy pond one of these days. But I do know that the nation is polarized politically in ways not known since the late and generally unlamented Joseph McCarthy waved a lot of papers around and drove many to fear the communists were taking over the country. They didn’t but mostly because we wouldn’t let them do it, and they probably weren’t doing much of a job anyhow because we like the good life better than what they had right up to the time of the Soviet collapse.
 
But here we are in the crucial year of 2006 and November elections that most believe will be the real checkup on President George W. Bush and his policies, whatever they are as well. When the debate, no that’s too dignified a term for the language that is emerging: let’s say that when the polemics (still a little gentle) fall to the levels of dissenters being accused of being anti-American, you just know the situation is bent on some pretty undignified and embarrassing political combat. And that event is two whole years before the next presidential election!
 
Several things further compound this whole messy business. Among other things, we’ve recently learned that fully 12 percent or thereabouts of our people live below the poverty line. But many of them are also exposed to what most of the rest of us have in the way of the good life, and, logically, they want it, and that makes the vulnerable to demagogues who make t heir livings stirring up the have nots among us without really helping them.
 
Beyond this, literally hundreds of millions already are being expended in the kinds of electronic media that have come into their own and are increasing rapidly in intensity and sophistication and aimed not only at those of voting age (when they do show up) but school kids as well.
 
What the corrupt across the entire political spectrum count on is not an informed public but a combination of an apathetic society and one that heeds best when it hears slogans, mottoes, jingles and clever commercials. You never heard of a successful laundry soap campaign by discussing the chemical advantages of one over the other and packing the stuff in plain brown sacks, did you?
 
But, obviously, I have diverged from my original thesis -- or maybe not. The reality is that the laziest, most spoiled and most apathetic electorate in the world, the American people who have proved the charges by the evidence, will be fed some of the smarmiest stuff over the next couple of months in the most sophisticated way you can possibly imagine -- and enough will swallow it to cast their ballots -- if in fact they take the time to do it.
 
A smart person once asserted quite truthfully that we always get the government we deserve simply because most of us do so little to know what’s out there to vote for, take the time to learn the issues and, worse, know anything about the people, called candidates, to make a voting decision.
 
Result, far too few show up on Election Day and grouse when it’s over and their side lost.
 
Of course, if only by default, one of the political parties will gain a majority in the US House of Representatives and one may gain or retain in the US Senate. Whether the result will be meaningful for the people depends almost entirely on the people.
 
Apathy is one of the most lethal of collective crimes against society, whether in response to criminal activity or in the election of people who make the laws that control our lives. Perhaps it is time for the party to be over for the parties that do these things if more and more of us take the time to fulfill the responsibility and accept the rights handed down to us by those who did not suffer from apathy.