bt’s Weblog

Here and there some maple trees have been turning red and gold for over a week. During my daily commute over wooded, two lane roads I see the brown of dying leaves replacing the green palette of summer. The peak of the season for color is month away but for me the transition is defined by familiar places and even individual trees. I see the whole as well as the parts that contribute to it.

This Autumn I am in a melancholy mood which comes and goes with the news from the front. My decision to stop watching TV made five or six years ago has detached me from fads and news propaganda to the extent that I am disconnected from what passes as mainstream America. I keep up with the news but through my own channels of Internet, newspaper and sometimes a magazine. I am mostly ignorant of entertainment and sports “celebrities” whose pictures grace headlines that often make no sense to me. And I couldn’t care less. I have escaped from the grip of advertising, commercial and political, as well as the insidious propaganda of the Republican Party’s power grubbers.

It is difficult but necessary to accept that our president and his supporters in and out of the administration really do approve of secret prisons, torture and spying that are against the law. They really did start a war for their own political reasons. They brand Harry Potter as having a bad influence on children and ignore the effect of a president who shows off his criminal acts as the right of the leader of a democracy. If teaching civics was difficult in the past it must be impossible now because children are not deflected by nuance and specious reasoning.

The president is our leader. Bush is our president. Bush tortured men in secret prisons. Follow the leader.

While not violating laws that protect humanity, Shrub and his party are busy putting up barriers to voting by those who tend to be Democrats. The Republican candidate for Ohio governor, J. Kenneth Blackwell, has a long history as a front man for GOP voter suppression efforts. He was the chair of the Presidential Census Monitoring Board - the Republican half of the Board that did Rep. Dan Miller’s (R-FL) bidding in trying to skew the count of U.S. residents to favor rich white folks. Blackwell is Ohio Secretary of State and as election supervisor used the GOP partisan Diebold company and illegal rule changes to suppress minority votes in Ohio in the 2004 election. He will supervise his own election with (of course) no conflict of interest. He’s another Katherine Harris, who did Karl Rove’s dirty work in the 2000 Florida vote fiasco.

There is reason for melancholy as the Fall of American democracy heralds the bleak winter to come.