That was a great line in “Brokeback Mountain” spoke by one cowpoke to the other. And this week I heard it in reference to party politics. A neighbor came up and informed me that he’d just been to Helena, our state capital.
“The Republicans are plum out of their minds up there, ” he said. He was referring to the new batch of nonsense that clog up our legislative process every two years although it sounds like the atmosphere is not as bat-crap crazy as last time.
“I bet they are,” I replied. “Yes, they are bat-crap crazy and it’s why I guess it’s good to keep an eye out at the local and state level. But I’ve quit politics altogether since the D.C. bunch seem either incompetent or crooked but probably both. Nope, don’t want to play anymore. ”
“Well, I wish I were where you are,” he declared ruefully. “But I just can’t quit ’em. Wish I could though. ”
He then shrugged, tipped his hat and made his way out the door.
I admired his honesty. Party politics is an addiction. People get the warm fuzzies (John Michael Greer’s term) around the halls of power especially if they let you feel like your a player. But like all addictions, the love that one has for it is mostly unrequited. I’m glad I quit the party politics part. Not sure when I’ll quit blogging about it though.
Started a new inquiry – poked around in the basement looking for scraps of information about the history of capitalism, got side-tracked by the word “enclosure”, and ended up on The Commons. There’s quite a current of anarchism and Marxism running through sites like this one, though of course those are forbidden words to utter!
Thank you for the link to “The Commons”. I wonder if Greer reads it since he is writing a series of articles on “The Commons”. I had a discussion with a Libertarian and talked about what I knew about the “enclosure” movement. He hadn’t a clue. I am working on a piece about that conversation. I ran into the only lefty in town that isn’t a raving Obama fan and he is reading Heinberg’s book “The End of Growth”, so something is going on. People instinctively know that this whole “progress” thing is suspect.
Do let me know when JMG posts on the subject of The Commons. I would very much like to read it.
He wrote an essay a couple weeks ago called restoring the commons. Last week he addressed education as the commons. Several commenters asked him to read John Taylor Gatto on education. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/01/restoring-commons.html
By the way, I ordered Dimitry Orlov’s new book “The Five Stages of Collapse”. Meanwhile the Bakken oil field in North Dakota predicts oil for a hundred more years. We have quite a few people from this county that have gone to work in the oil fields.