| One year ago I turned in my blogging footy-pajamas. After three years of writing, I made a concerted effort to stop caring about the madness that is South Carolina politics. I fully embraced the cynicism. I quit just in the nick of time, and actually, it felt pretty good.
Let’s do a brief stroll down memory lane and see what I missed. You don’t need me to go on and on about the nuttiness that is Mark Sanford. (Personal diversion: I hiked the Appalachian Trail a few months ago - the real one, not the newly-metaphorical one. I recommend it.) But why has no one pointed out the obvious - that Mark Sanford, unstable and useless though he may be, poses much less threat to the well-being of this State than power-hungry legislators sanctimoniously out to settle some personal scores?
And you also don’t need me to tell you about Joe Wilson’s shamelessness, or Rusty Depass comparing our first lady to a gorilla, or the GOP county chairmen who thought it a compliment to reference penny-pinching Jews. You’ve no doubt heard quite enough about all of that.
But I will say this...The most telling part of all of that is not that they said those things. The most telling part is that they were utterly baffled by the resulting national uproar. The ease with which they wrote these things - and the surprise they expressed about the response – tells us something not about them, but about us. It’s a commentary on the world we live in here in South Carolina. In their (our) world, it’s surprising that anyone would even notice. Especially gorilla descendants and penny-pinching Jews. |
We South Carolinians haven’t ever been a people to act in step with the rest of the country, or to act even in our own best interest. I get that. I even get the up side of that. But are we so short-sighted that we can’t at least take a step back and ask a few questions?
I’m talking big-picture stuff. Like: How did we become a haven for nuts? Is it in the water, or the genes, or what? I want to know. This, ladies and gentlemen, is tea-bagging ground zero. Now that I’m no longer trying to be constructive, no longer caring enough to parse my words, I can say it: Your next door neighbors – the one who berated Bob Inglis at that town hall and the one who thinks Lindsey Graham’s support for climate change legislation makes him a communist – they’re crazy people. And they’re electing the people who run the asylum that is this state.
Fill in your own favorite reap-what-you-sow paragraph here. I’m not writing it again.
So, in the meantime, we have newspapers going down the tubes. The people who are gleeful about that clearly don’t understand that we’re about the lose the few checks and balances we have. Did you read Sammy Fretwell’s articles on DHEC some months back? I’d been trying to say the same thing for three years, but he did actual reporting. Really top-notch reporting, as a matter of fact. He gave us a peek behind the curtain of all those little phone calls from legislators to DHEC, just checking on that latest polluter's permit application. And he did a great series of articles about the ways - even apart from the improper influence - that DHEC completely fails to do its job. Where will we be when Sammy Fretwell is let go by McClatchy?
Drinking even more polluted water and breathing even more polluted air, for starters. More broadly, we’ll be left with absolutely no checks on the people running the asylum.
Even the bloggers have dwindled down to a personality-disordered few. We’re left with the ones on the right who don't even seem to know they're afflicted with Crazy Attention-Getting Disorder. ("I drive the debate". . . . Really? Maybe add "delusional" to the diagnoses too.) They're cut from the same cloth as Glenn Beck and balloon boy Dad: Greed may be good, but so is attention, no matter what the reason.
We have the same legislature dominated by people who are going to be waiting a long time for their invitations from Mensa. These are the people who will be deciding, to pick one example, whether your child is taught evolution in school. (Personal diversion: I went to the Galapagos Islands about six months ago. Out there, snorkeling in the islands among blue-footed boobies and tropical penguins and marine iguanas, I actually thought of Mike Fair. Weird, I know.)
And thank goodness for Twitter. We can now follow the tweets from elected officials raising idiotic pandering to a whole new level (see @henrymcmaster tweeting about the ominous one-two threat from Craigslist and terrorists in lockdown.) Or Larry Grooms excitedly gushing about “the greatest tea party in our nation's history.” (Hint: He wasn’t talking about the one 236 years ago.) There’s something both enlightening and terrifying about reading the tweets from these people who are making the decisions about the future of our state.
So yeah, I’ve given up "constructive" and fully embraced "cynical." Don’t bother with the “You know where I-95 is” cliches. I do, and some days, it’s tempting.
I do recognize, however, that there’s an upcoming legislative session. And somebody is going to have to start paying attention to these people again. More craziness is in store. Expect most of it to be of the score-settling variety, while none of the big, complicated issues holding us back even get addressed. It’ll be about emotional button-pushing, just like it always is. They're about to make Nero’s fiddling look downright wise and proper.
I'll close with just one example of legislation being offered. Mike Fair’s back, pushing a new bill this time to require the State Board of Education to examine whether what’s being taught in school is “hostile” to religion. I’m not kidding. And by “religion,” I’m thinking he means his religion. Just a hunch.
So get ready, you science teachers. That stuff about how the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and the stuff the animal fossil record teaches us about our planet's living history - you’re going to need to run that stuff through Senator Fair’s Garden of Eden mythology and see what comes out the other side. Have faith: Maybe there will be a scientific explanation for how the dinosaurs missed the ark that day.
But just make sure that your science, along with pretty much everything else you teach, isn't hostile to Mike Fair's religious beliefs. If it is, you'll get a long and costly court battle. Like the one still going on over the Christian license plates, a grand and glorious waste of time and resources for which there will never be any political accountability.
Repeat reap-what-you-sow paragraph.
I’m back briefly to remind you that these people require constant vigilance, even if I don’t have it in me anymore. If you do (including the Indigo Journal bloggers still fighting the good fight), you have my gratitude. |
