Go on over and read Joe Bageant’s latest rant.  It will sound a lot like David Michael Green’s latest rant.  Here is the part of Joe’s rant that is the hardest to swallow even knowing first hand that it is true:

If you have watched any old mob movies, you know that any racket needs a front. In America the front is called democracy. Like the term populism, the people have no idea what democracy really is, but has something to do with the free market capitalism that issues forth such things as bass boats. And it certainly it has to do with every citizen having a small piece in the determination of national matters. Clearly untrue as that is, nevertheless it is one helluva a sales point, revered by the proles and not to be fucked with if you are to maintain the illusion of the consent of the people among the people. The front.

So the people are given such narrow electoral choices as not to even be real choices, but packaged in somewhat different wrappers — such as skin color. Or if a president and Congress can see a clear path in rolling over the dimwits out there, the dimwits are given no choice at all. Such as going to war against Iraq.

Still, there are always those citizens who will not settle for simply voting based on what they have been fed. They detect the odor of swill, but cannot quite name the ingredients. So they feel they must test democracy, exercise their uncontrolled “freedom of choice,” as fully as possible through activism.

So they turn to one of the two controlling political parties to put them to work. After all, anyone who doesn’t is considered a kook. Right?

In a marvelous bit of Mobius strip logic, the activists end up working toward the success of some minute difference in national policy that serves the purposes of the established power cartels. The main difference is in the degree of profitability for the corporate state. More profit or a helluva lot more profit.

In the end the activists find themselves working for the election of someone who, by the very nature of being selected as a candidate by the system, has been vetted by his or her own elite peers as one who will — ta ta! — preserve the system from change.

I keep reading in various places the concept that the D’s are not better than the R’s and only slightly different.  Also keep seeing “vote the incumbents out” in a lot of recent articles.

It seems people have finally awakened and realized that there is mostly only one Party in DC and they (the citizenry) are not invited.

So what happens now?  Capitalism is a failure.  Corporatists, with their stranglehold on the media, have convinced most everyone that “socialism is too terrible to contemplate”.  Voting out incumbents just puts another preselected candidate in office who will serve only to maintain the status quo.  Activism is a waste of time since it goes ignored by those in power making all the big decisions.

So what happens now?  A new Middle Age of staticism captured in HD?