Both major-party candidates are unpalatable to the vast majority of voters. Yet most of those very same voters respond to the suggestion that they cast votes for a third-party candidate as though it were outlandish.
In a World of Lunatics, the Sane Voter Is Terrifying
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Putting a green shirt on the sensible guy is subtle, but a nice touch. Thank you!
I can’t tell you how many times I have had this “conversation,” if you can call it that.
Just read this:
“Mattias Desmet, author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, pointed out some time ago that a psychotic political regime would require the people to swallow ever-greater absurdities as things played out in its death-wish drive toward national nullity.”
Our “regime” isn’t the Dems, as opposed to the Repubs, or vice-versa. It is, as Ted notes in the URL for this page, “the insane duopoly.”
Several of my friends — yes, even curmudgeons have ’em — are frequently alarmed at my unabashed glee at the coming election. Invariably, they ask/lecture/scold: “So, you want a lunatic who’ll dig up the national parks for oil? You want a maniac who’ll start wars? You want a sex fiend having the nuclear launch codes?”
We’re pumping more oil than ever. Under Team Biden, we’re paying Ukraine to fight an unwinnable war, and we’re helping Israel kill every Gazan civilian who can’t sidestep a drone strike or a wave of rockets. And I’d rather have a sex fiend handling the Big Red Button than someone who refuses to draw a clock face showing 10 o’clock.
Our system has served its purpose. Almost all the wealth has been set up to be transferred to the top tenth of a tenth of a tenth of the one percent of the people who own all the goodies. People dying from horribly lingering illnesses can get down to astonishingly low weights before they die: 80 pounds is not uncommon. That last 80 pounds doesn’t get consumed by the illness because the body fails first. How close is our system to the 80 pound limit? How much more wealth can be skimmed and transferred before a cascade failure collapses everything in a few months?
The only thing that will fix the current failing system — people living paycheck to paycheck is not a successful system, except for the tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a percent; people being unable to afford their own home is not a successful system; jobs that lay people off as a feature and not as a bug is not a successful system — is its collapse.
I sometimes wonder what the triggering event will finally be. All the 401(k)s imploding down to a fifth of their value, rendering millions destitute? Perhaps it will be when people suddenly realize how many teenagers are suddenly standing on street corners peddling themselves hoping to get food for their families? Maybe when people start dying outside hospitals because the armed guards won’t let them enter?
I really hope that whatever replaces the current factoryfarm system is more humane. It would be quite a thing for it to be less.
Forgive me for parading on your rain, but the poor are getting less poor, healthcare is covering more people, unemployment is mostly reasonable, …. We have Ukraine and Gaza instead of Somalia, Tigray, and Yemen, so the war situation is continuing atrocities, and abortion rights have regressed, but mostly we are moving forward. And yes, we need to improve more and faster in so many categories. But the slowness and irregularity of our forward rate … I’m not seeing that as evidence that we are dangerously near that 80 pounds.