Fantasy Baseball

The following is a letter I just got published in the Progressive Populist (8/1/07 Vol. 13 No. 13) I will be posting more of my letters, published and ignored, as I go along:

Editor:

As one who subscribes to nearly all of the so-called Progressive publications, I am in deep despair over the lack of meaningful influence we have on real life. The precipitous decline of our putative democracy is accelerating despite the plethora of well-written, brilliantly reasoned criticism being published these days. Demonstrations are essentially irrelevant. It is no exaggeration to compare our oppositional activity to participation in a baseball (or football) fantasy league - a certain amount of ego satisfaction, but no real world results. We are "out of the loop."

The list of grievances is virtually endless: spineless Democrats, a bonehead President, his treasonous Regent (aka Vice-President Cheney), an unwinnable, seemingly endless war, a clueless Supreme Court that is hell-bent on reversing a half-century of legal precedent for the benefit of powerful interests at the expense of basic human rights, a morally and economically bankrupt Healthcare system; well, I could go on a lot longer, but we all know too much already about what has gone wrong with our beloved country.

Impeachment is off the table. Even the subpoenas being issued by a few insistent Congressional Democrats will wend their way interminably through our turgid legal system and are likely to be disallowed by this Supreme Court in any event. Bush's commutation of Libby's prison sentence makes it clear that even criminal convictions will be moot as long as he is in charge.

To make matters worse, except for Dennis Kucinich (who has no chance) and John Edwards (who has virtually no chance), the candidates for the 2008 Presidential election (in both parties) have "business as usual" written all over them.

Again, I feel impelled to evoke Martin Luther King, who once observed: "Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity comes along and asks the question, 'Is it popular?'" "But, King added, "Conscience comes along and asks the question, 'Is it right?'"

Do we really want to keep playing Fantasy Baseball, or are we finally ready to do something about the mess we are in? Just asking.