Plato’s dark cave

If you’ve paid any attention at all to today’s Republican Party, and the sniveling cowards who “lead” them, the real heroes of Athens, the Western World’s first recorded democratic state, were not Socrates and the philosophers, but Socrates’ students.

Allow me to cite these quotes from the students, lifted straight out of Plato’s "Dialogues" (Jowett translation.)

“You are right, Socrates.”

“Of course.”

“Who could deny it?”

“Certainly.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

And so on …

‘Nuff said? All right, then, send money, sign here, and you’ll be a paid-up member of the Republican Party. Now march behind some moron and shut up.

Whereas, if you sign up to be a member of the Democratic Party today, you get … umm … what, exactly?

Beats the shit outa me.

Six years ago I wrote on this page: “U.S. politics can be summed up in seven words: Republicans are liars and Democrats are cowards. Today [July 20, 2018] I propose the 2018 Corollary: Republicans are liars and cowards; Democrats are cowards and stupid.”

Here is my 2024 Corollary to the Corollary: Republicans today are even dumber than Democrats. Greedier. More shortsighted. Rabid. But more powerful.

I wouldn’t trust a Republican today any futha than I could th’ow ‘im.

Stick a hundred thou up his keister, and he and she will bow down, kiss the smelly ring and foot, and come outa that meeting feeling good about themselves, and their chances in November.

Feeling good about themselves.

And their chances in November.

After kissing the foot and the ring.

And feeling … what? — good or bad — about what else?

Child poverty in the United States?

Maternal death rates?

The return of measles?

Sprawling camps of homeless people?

Vicious political attacks against poor families who can’t afford to buy a house or pay $2,500 a month rent?

Barring poor people from sleeping in public parks with their kids, under penalty of arrest?

Muzzling of science.

Muzzling of college professors.

Muzzling of public schoolteachers.

Banning thousands of books.

Burning books.

Breast-beating neo-Nazis, a minority of a minority of Republicans, dominate the U.S. Congress today, through legalized strangulation of laws.

Got to be pretty smart to do that in the short term, and get on TV as competing Nazis; but how smart is it for the rest of us?

And what are our chances in November?

Hitler’s first political party began with nine people. And look at what he managed to accomplish.

I had a Nazi landlady long ago, in Portland, Oregon. She lived across the street from me. One time when she picked up the rent check, she reminisced about “za Hitlah days.”

She’d seen I had a German name. Kahn. A Jewish name.

As if she knew that. She knew nossing.

“‘Vas not like zey said,” she told me, standing on the porch, rent check in hand, “it vas good. He deed good sings foh za people.”

She was beyond annoying. I couldn’t stand it. I asked my girlfriend to hand her the check from then on. I know my limits.

So, returning to today’s topic, which is wise men and politics, I’d like to quote our country’s wisest man, Mark Twain, from an Aug. 28, 1876, interview in the New York Herald, during the presidential campaign between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden. The Herald asked who he’d vote for, and Mark Twain said, “Hayes.”

When the Herald reporter asked if that was because Sam preferred Hayes’ platform, Twain replied, after spanking both parties and the interviewer with the working end of a hairbrush: “Platforms are not the things now; men are.”

Twain continued, railing against both parties: “If you could understand what Mr. Tilden means, it is only because you have got more brains than I have, but you don’t look it.”

That’s what I call political commentary.

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