Monday, November 8, 2010

The Morning After

Maybe you remember the Twilight Zone episode when Burgess Meredith went into the bank vault and came out to find that the world had been destroyed. I had some of that same feeling when I saw the election results on Wednesday morning. Of course the news nationally was terrible: the House in the hands of the very same party that spent eight years driving this country into a ditch, and the Senate salvaged only because Tea Partiers insisted on nominating unelectable candidates in Delaware, Alaska and Colorado. There but for the "grace" of right wing crackpots goes the country.

And here in Kansas, the news was even worse. All four Congressional seats taken by rightwingers; the statewide offices swept; 15 seats lost in the State Assembly. All in all, about as bad as it could have been.

But unlike Burgess Meredith in that Twilight Zone, my glasses are not broken. And this is what I see: Sam Brownback is the most far-right governor in the state's history, and in Kris Kobach we have a Secretary of State who seems to think - contrary to the actual job description - that his job is to suppress voter turnout. Mike Pompeo is a bully and the hired hand of the Kochs (not that those are two different things), Kevin Yoder is a cynical careerist, and Lynn Jenkins is so ineffectual that I doubt she's even able to throw a shadow.

In the previous state Assembly there was a working majority of Democrats and moderate Republicans that was able to pass the sales tax that kept the state from going broke, and which upheld gubernatorial vetoes that protected us from the worse legislative excesses of the rightwingers. That's all gone now - not that there will be any vetoes of repressive legislation from the likes of Sam Brownback.

All in all, a truly disastrous outcome. This will become even clearer in the years of truly bad governance to come.

But maybe the right comparison isn't with the Twilight Zone, but with Mad Max. You see, we've lived through political Armageddon, even though we now live in a one-party state, subject to all the depredations that rightist Republicans and their corporate masters can devise - well, you know what? we Kansas Progressives are still around. There are a few of us in Johnson County; I know of some in Wyandotte; a few in Topeka; a goodly handful in Wichita; there may even be some in the center and west of the state, although they probably keep their copies of Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot well-hidden.

Well, my friends, the question now - to you, Kelly, and to you, Chad, and to you, Nicki - is, where do we go from here? I'll have some ideas to throw out there as well, but I'm hoping this blog can be part of the effort to collectively come up with a Kansas progressivism that works.

<more to come>

1 comment:

  1. I truly hope we can come up with some ideas and solutions to save our state from the insanity that seems to have befallen it. The Brownbackolypse is a disaster, the Kobach, if you are poor, old or brown you can't vote - is criminal. We have to find a message that will get passed the Bible politics, something that will resonate with regular, run of the mill Kansans.

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