In Response to Scolding Breathlessness

I won't type for all anarchists, non-cooperators, opt-outers, Orlovians, dirty hippies and apathetic nihilists. But, I do feel the need to scratch a peculiar itch.

It seems that a representative sample of liberals have a gripe with the rest of us. Let's start with one of the cats who got it going, and then get our grubbies on a few more tasty treats.

Take it away Tbogg:

"Every year in Happy Gumdrop Fairy-Tale Land all of the sprites and elves and woodland creatures gather together to pick the Rainbow Sunshine Queen. Everyone is there: the Lollipop Guild, the Star-Twinkle Toddlers, the Sparkly Unicorns, the Cookie Baking Apple-cheeked Grandmothers, the Fluffy Bunny Bund, the Rumbly-Tumbly Pupperoos, the Snowflake Princesses, the Baby Duckies All-In-A-Row, the Laughing Babies, and the Dykes on Bikes. They have a big picnic with cupcakes and gumdrops and pudding pops, stopping only to cast their votes by throwing Magic Wishing Rocks into the Well of Laughter, Comity, and Good Intentions. Afterward they spend the rest of the night dancing and singing and waving glow sticks until dawn when they tumble sleepy-eyed into beds made of the purest and whitest goose down where they dream of angels and clouds of spun sugar.

You don’t live there.

Grow the fuck up."

Tell us how you really feel, Anthony McCarthy:

"I'm certainly disappointed at the weakness of Barack Obama's first two years and the disgrace of the Senate. I think we all have ample reason to feel betrayed, to some extent and exasperated at their political ineptitude. But they aren't violently attacking us. I certainly don't want a Republican controlled Senate to be in a position to block the replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and any other Supreme Court justices who might leave the bench in the next two years. That's just one of the important reasons to vote against them. There are a multitude of other ones. This election isn't about Barack Obama, it's about us."

Come on now, Landru, don't hold back: 

"If you're not voting for some sophist reasons related to class struggle, fuck you. If you're not voting because you think there's some value in letting curbstompers be elected to teach Democrats a lesson, fuck you. If you're not voting because you're an anarchist, you're too fucking stupid for me to waste my time on. If you think that The Kind will win over curbstompers, you're not only too fucking stupid for me to waste my time on, you should go line up at the nearest House O' Curbstomping for your turn."  

Let it all hang out, Driftglass:

"Grow The Fuck Up.

And get out and vote."

Jesus' General, slap that photo on us:

Tengrain, scare us into submission, please:

There’s plenty of reasons to vote the rascals in Congress out. But, from a strictly left perspective I also suggest that what ever significant progress we’ve made these past 18 months or so has been thanks to Nancy Pelosi’s leadership, not President Carebear’s leadership (which strictly speaking has been lacking from day 1). Pelosi has been very effective at getting votes to pass significant bills and move them into the Senate where they become watered down or killed.

You want someone to blame, start with the Senate.

Here’s the deal, as I see it: any vote for the GOP (literally any) is a vote against yourself and a vote against democracy. If you think that the Huns and the Visigoths were dreamy, then you will love the 2010 GOP. They will sell you out to the highest bidder in a heartbeat; they are wholly-owned by the corporations; in a word, the GOP are fascists."

Texas Betsy, show us your failure to grasp the deliciosity of irony by quoting the official Democratic organ:

Vote a Straight Democratic Ticket:

• If you don’t want rightwing billionaires to own our government, vote Democratic.
• If you want billionaires and corporations to pay taxes, vote Democratic.
• If you want a decent job with decent wages – not corporate slavery – vote Democratic.
• If you want Social Security, Medicare, public education, and environmental protection to survive, vote Democratic.
• If you don’t want rightwing thugs to stomp on your head at a political rally, vote Democratic.
• If you don’t want a woman’s body to become the property of the Republican Paty, vote Democratic.
• If you want campaign finance reform that gets billionaires and corporations out of politics altogether, vote Democratic.
• If you want Truth, Justice, and the American Way, don’t wait for Superman – vote Democratic.

***

So, what gives? Why this breathlessness?

I think a short answer will do.

Seems some folks fail to grasp entirely that political democracy is a sham when all the economic relations are organized, with violence and the threat of violence, into hierarchies, where the end result of an election is still the status quo ante. Without economic democracy (I hate that word, but a thirty paragraph explanation is so not a propos, at this point), political democracy just gives sanction to capitalists. All this scolding mouthbreathing does is betray that ignorance, revealing a failure to comprehend that voting for oligarchs won't get you any actual democracy. 

The Democrats are the fucking oligarchs, too. Get it?

As I typed yon Landru's place - changing the baby's diaper doesn't make it stop shitting.

***

And in addition: I wouldn't recommend cutting, but I understand why people do it. I had a coworker who cut herself, and she was pretty sure she'd have killed herself if she hadn't had "that phase." I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know that she believed it to be true, which was good enough for me. Cutting, whilst rather obviously and literally self-destructive, let her feel herself and her own pain (though she didn't feel it as pain, when she was doing it, she said) in a way that allowed her to overcome her own alienation, for a time.

This is how I see voting. As a kind of cutting. None of the self-harm actually changes the world around you, but it does give you control over your reaction to it. In the short term...