Corpocrats...

Walking through the Met today, I wandered into a fantastic exhibition of Gilbert Stewart's portraits of early Americans. I haven't been to a museum in a while, and as I meandered through the wonderful paintings, I was flooded with resentment toward this government and our president.

Seeing the faces--stoic George Washington, or the piercing, intense portrait of 90 year old John Adams, I was struck by how far we've fallen. Ours was a country founded on religious tolerance and a belief in government for the people, not a theocracy devoted to corporate welfare at the expense of the people. To have so abdicated the principles our founding fathers held dear, and to have done so in their names, seems to me the worst sort of hypocrisy.

I have suspected (since the election of 2000) and am becoming more and more convinced that ours is a society in irrevocable decline, that the glorious vision of those great pasty-faced men will gird the history books alongside stills from desperate housewives and political loyalty oaths.

These eight years will be remembered as the beginning of the end. I'm furious at democrats for abdicating the moral high ground here. Republicans aren't conservatives: they are corpocrats. And we aren't liberals, or even progressives, the values we cherish are enshrined right there in the constitution and the federalist papers. We're the originalists. It's time to take back the title.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Special Exhibitions: Gilbert Stuart