On The New York Times Assessment Of The Vice-Presidential Debate (John Edminister)

  (World News Trust) -- As it turned out, I listened to some of last night's presidential debate on NPR, and I think this morning's New York Times editorial gives a very fair assessment of what I heard. But how dreadful Sarah Palin sounds! How mindless and how insincere! And can you imagine any human soul feeling honored by being referred to as "Soccer Mom" or "Joe Sixpack?" But Biden was a disappointment too. They both infantilized their audience, treating us like children whose only reason for voting would be short-term and unreflective self-interest. I'd like to think that this country's conscience has come too wide awake in the last eight years for that to be appropriate any more, if it ever was.

  I've got too much work to do on my desk today to spend much time emoting over this, but if the Biden-Palin debate reflects the prevailing level of public discourse in this country, then this country is doomed. Our system of government, notwithstanding the fact that it has enough money to hire the smartest people, enough power and authority to get practically anybody to do practically anything, and enough technology to spy out all the information it could ever want on everybody and everything, is not fit to deal with the complexities of modern reality. Our body politic is a dinosaur and has to soon become extinct. It's not fit to deal with the complexities of modern reality because it avoids the truth, and in many ways knowingly traffics in lies. I don't know what might replace it, and I'm not optimistic so long as the whole people doesn't wake up, sober up, wholeheartedly renounce "Plan A" and take up "Plan B." But not just a Plan B that takes up a responsible collective stewardship of the earth's bounty, but one that outlaws mutually predatory behavior like disinformation, credit-card loan-sharking and the manufacture of cluster bombs.

  I know it'd be too much to hope for to have one or both of the vice-presidential candidates (1) express fear that it wouldn't be a fair election because many voting machines are rigged and hacked (or at least known to be riggable and hackable), unscrupulous Republican County Clerks are hard at work disenfranchising Democrats, and a clandestine machine has already decided (I am told, and I believe it; I'm waiting for the documented news to break) that the official vote-count is to give McCain 51.5% of the popular vote and 3 more electoral votes than Obama. But what about (2) having one of the candidates say that we have a moral obligation to make life better for all classes, not just the middle class, and have to consider the well-being of all creatures on earth, not just the human beings of the United States? (The refusal of Obama and Biden to even mention the lower class makes me not want to even try to register voters in the ghetto, the barrio, the hillbilly town, the migrant workers' housing or the Indian Reservation. Why should they bother?)

  Or what about saying, (3) not merely that we have to support our ally Israel, but that Israel, dominated as it is by fear, is guilty of great cruelties to the Palestinians, and that we, whose fear level is lower because we don't have suicide bombers in our shopping malls (yet), are in a position to restrain the mutual injuries of Israelis and Arabs and so prove ourselves a good friend to both sides? For that matter, what about saying (4) that the United States has earned itself a reputation as the No. 1 world bully and international scofflaw, and that by repenting its former ways and ceasing to be a bully it expects to promote peace, trust and disarmament everywhere?

  What about saying (5) that it's clear that major sacrifices will now be called for on the part of everyone in the United States, and that the government should do its part to see that no one is burdened unbearably by (a) profiteers driving up oil prices or medical insurance prices, (b) the heedless defiling the earth with needless waste, whether nuclear waste that we've never found a safe and permanent home for, or toxic golf-course runoff whose herbicide content kills off all life downstream from it, or the exhaust of the private jets of the super-rich, (c) hapless people being forced to drive cars they can't afford because the United States has so long refused to develop public transportation, (d) the economic devastation caused by so much of our resources being diverted to empty activity that does nothing to feed, clothe, house or educate people -- like the out-of-control production of weapons of death, the crafty manipulation of wealth, the pointless shuffling of papers in offices everywhere, and the generation of mindless entertainment, manipulative advertising, and other forms of pandering to human greed and vanity?

  Where there is no vision, the people perish! Here and now we don't lack bearers of a saving vision, but the will or ability to express it in our public forums. If the candidates aren't going to talk about the elephants in the room, they're doing little to get me out of my armchair and down to the polling place.

  John Edminster <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>