The Double-Edged Sword

by Colin Hussey

Writing a political column, I find myself in the midst of an ethical dilemma: I sustain myself in the City mostly through freelance digital graphic layouts and photography. After volunteering for a couple of campaigns some time ago, I've just recently gotten paid to do artwork and photography for one campaign, and I'm about to get paid for another in a different race, different town. And because I'm now in something of a business relationship with these candidates, I must recuse myself from mentioning them or their campaigns or their opponents.

If that wasn't enough, I registered Republican to vote for Ron Paul, which I did this past February. What can I say? Of all the major party presidential candidates, I liked his message the best, based as it was, on the restoration of liberties, and the fact that he was willing to back up his talk by sponsoring the American Freedom Agenda Act (HR3835), which didn't stand much of a chance in this frightened Congress, but was designed to revive our historic checks and balances and curb the present abuses of power in the Federal government. There's also something novel about a conservative Republican politician who's actually interested in conserving our Republic. Yet to vote for a Republican in the primary, one had to register Republican.

I figured, why not? If celebrity lefties can kick it with the likes of Fidel Castro, and our global dignitaries have no qualms establishing normal relations with a rogues' gallery of butchers, gangsters, and parasites, I can't see how my registering Republican to vote for my favorite candidate from a dubious field can be so horrible.

Are the Democrats, to whom I've given the bulk of my votes for over 20 years, in any way intellectually and morally superior? If, as many in the City would have it, Donald Rumsfeld is to be designated a war criminal, ought not Madeline Albright to be similarly indicted, given the bomb-and-starve policies she openly advocated as Bill Clinton's Secretary of State?

There were genocidal body counts aplenty on Clinton's watch—not to mention a record number of nonviolent druggie lock-ups—and who's to say a Gore administration wouldn't have sent our forces on some over-costly overseas adventures, just as Bush has done? Democratic leaders were talking up WMDs in Iraq, some years before Bush became president, and Gore's running mate, Joe Lieberman, was an ardent backer of U.S. military involvement. Aren't Democratic leaders just as complicit in facilitating totalitarian crazies, like the Taliban, as their opposite numbers have done? It was Democratic administrations that got us stuck in Vietnam, in the first place. And gave millions to the Khmer Rouge in the '70s. And signed away East Timor's doom.

Then there's our own local contingent of elected dysfunctional Dems, the ones who managed to be more successful at turning me from their party than any karlrovery on the part of the GOP. This bunch outspends entire developing nations but still can't get a handle on a bunch of probs continuously bugging our citizenry. Not showing much competence in dealing with living homeless people, our illustrious Board has seen fit to approve spending a bundle of money lavishly commemorating dead homeless on the spots where they died. That's civic pride for you.

And now, Supervisors Daly, Peskin, McGoldrick, and two Newsom aides are looking to seat themselves in the their local Democratic County Central Committee in the next election, crowding out citizen activists from those seats, if they get voted in. It almost makes me want to register Democrat, so as to vote for David Villa-Lobos and some other citizen activists to offset the City Hall slate.

There's a laundry-list of deeply flawed individuals in all the parties. If the Republicans have Henry Kissinger, winner of history's least deserved peace prize, the Democrats have Andrew Jackson, Mr. "Indian Removal" himself, gracing our $20 bills. What's a citizen to do? No party is free from sin.

It should be mentioned that neither major party lacks for heroes, either. The Democrats can rightly bring up FDR's political and diplomatic acumen as a wartime president, but then so can the Republicans with Lincoln. Many Democrats running for office today like to tout their civil rights credentials, while the great abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were all Republicans. As was Martin Luther King, a century later.

I don't know if I'm that much better a fit politically with today's GOP than with the Democrats, though. I'm not about to vote away rent control, and I can't muster any enthusiasm for a Great Wall of America. In the case of the mega-barrier, it's potentially another Soviet-sized, Big Government bank-breaker, displacing hundreds, if not thousands of American homeowners along the U.S.-Mexican border, which I seriously doubt will stop the longtime influx of humanity without breaking down from the inevitable disrepair. During the Cold War's waning years, Ronald Reagan beseeched then-USSR leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to "tear down this wall", yet many among the present Republican leadership seem to fancy erecting iron curtains. Go figure.

I also don't believe that heavy-handed Big Government regulation of wombs, the private property of women, will make us safer or more virtuous, any more than gun prohibition ever could. Likewise, the "War on Drugs", escalated by Clinton, has been an unmitigated disaster. I'd prefer GOP leaders take a hint from the late William F. Buckley, who favored marijuana's legalization. Nor do I care for the Feds poking their noses in church business, when it comes to marriage, which should be left to the various congregations, themselves, to define and debate. I'm not one to look down on skaters, trannies, pagans, rappers, etc., etc., and the moralism of the party's religious wing would be less troubling, if they'd focus on industrial waste, species extinctions and the defilement of our natural heritage moreso than on salty language and naughty pictures. (Although some do.)

And what exactly is so conservative about Bush's massive expansion of government size and power? He promised to run America like a business, yet instead has ruled the country more like a medieval fiefdom, with much of Congress on both sides of the aisle behaving as rubber-stamp courtiers, letting him do his thing.

Nor am I particularly averse to collective bargaining, with organized labor (unions) checking and balancing organized management (corporate heads), as well as vice-versa. When this system works, it works as well as any in history. The success of free enterprise hinges on everybody's buying power rather than just one or other group of individuals, not to mention a diversity of businesses, in size, function and employment. For all its faults, the market economy still works better in real time than communism, which Chairman Mao, himself, pointed out is "utterly unworkable [and] has less value than cow dung", once in power. So I guess that perspective would put me on similar footing with the GOP.

Still, I have to wonder how unseemly it is for this writer who bills himself as a "double-edged sword" to be affiliated with either major party. And thus, the double-blade turns on its wielder, as it's only fitting I contemplate my own hypocrisy after spending so many words hammering the hypocrisy of others. What the hell kind of political commentator am I, anyway? My background's not in journalism but graphic art, music and theatre. Then again, what does much of politics consist of but graphic art, music and theatre?

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