My Advice to Voters

After reading my last (first) blog entry, I received some private email. Naturally the most amusing emails were the ones more hateful than you can imagine. Laugh? Thought I’d surely die! But seriously, folks, to answer jmacue241@xxxx.xxx: I don’t really think of Queen Elizabeth II in quite that way. Honestly. And, no, I won’t send you any articles of clothing.

However, I’d rather people left their comments at Aunty Em’s Place, so we can debate some of these anatomical suggestions. However, I promise my dear readers that I will pass along any really good email I get.

Rosy Lamstock wrote me a thoughtful email from San Francisco, one of my favourite cities. (Neither of those two assertions should be read as sarcasm.) Rosy wonders why, if I care so much about the election, I didn’t offer suggestions for voters. The biggest reason is because these are mid-term elections and my candidates in Florida are not the same as yours running in San Francisco, a city that Right Wingers consider Gomorrah. My best advice is to stay away from those politicians, for starters, because San Francisco proves to the rest of the nation that tolerance makes a city more beautiful. San Francisco is the Toronto of the States, only with hills.

It never occurred to me that anyone would want my advice before voting, but since I was asked: I say that wherever possible, vote against the incumbent, whether they are Democrat or Republican, Red or Blue. Toss out every each and last one of them, Senators, Congresspersons, Governors, and School Boards. Let’s start fresh. The world is in such a mess we need new people running things. It’s a bet they can’t do any worse than those currently in office.

Remember that litmus test you were once asked to think about before you pulled the lever on Election Day? “Am I better off today than I was 4 years ago?” Now ask yourself, “Do I feel safer today than I did 4 years ago?”

I don’t. No, seriously. I don’t.

In all honesty, I felt safer on nine-twelve, with the tears still wet on my cheeks, than I do now that BushCheneyRumsfeldWolfowitzRice had time to tinker with the biggest set of Lincoln Logs a kid ever got at Christmas. They feel no shame at telling us they are re-making the Middle East.

Who asked you?

I want to make a radical suggestion: Regime change is really not up to the United States, unless we want to start at home and do it democratically. Every one of those jokers who frog-marched American soldiers into this illegal war needs to be standing on the unemployment line November 8th. Also, every one of those bone-headed politicos that supported the erosion of freedoms enshrined in The Constitution of The United States of America™ should be swept away like toast crumbs at IHOP.

I say it’s a radical suggestion because Regime Change seems to be as All American as Mom, Road Rage and out-of-control condo boards. It’s what American seems to excel at. In the past 114 years (or so), America has overtly, or covertly, removed the leaders of sovereign countries 14 times. That’s an average of one just about every 8 years.

I learned this from an excellent book that I just finished by Stephen Kinzer. “Overthrow; America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” is a clean, polemic-free, just-the-facts-Ma’am reporting, in which each coup is taken up by a separate chapter in the book. I highly recommend it to anyone curious in the political term “blowback.” The amazing thing is that Kinzer never mentions “blowback” or even presents the concept. That’s how “facts only” this book is. “Overthrow” is a sobering look at American foreign policy, or what passes for it, and goes a long way towards answering the ultimate question, “Why do they hate us?”

Anyway, it’s a funny thing about Democracy. It gets harder and harder to prove what a great institution it is if the example one keeps setting around the world is that of a schoolyard bully.

I say throw them all out of office, right down to the last dogcatcher. If I lived in Texas, however, I’d definitely vote Kinky—Kinky Friedman, that is—for Governor, a job once held by George W. Bush.

With all my love,

Aunty Em