The video above is pretty straightforward. It’s a town hall meeting, open to the public, in a small town of 3,600 people near the California border – Quartzsite Arizona. The woman who will be arrested in this video, Jennifer Jones, was informing the town council that they had violated Arizona’s open-meeting laws. Doing so irked some members of council, who demanded the local Police Chief, Jeff Gilbert, to arrest Ms. Jones. The Mayor of the community, one Ed Foster, can be heard in the video telling the council it is out of order, and further instructing the Police Chief to back off, as he is infringing on Ms. Jones’ first amendment rights. The Chief carries on anyway, and Ms. Jones is arrested and led out of the meeting. Towards the end you can hear a resident say ‘it’s the same thing every time.’
It turns out that the Mayor is correct, as is Ms. Jones. Mayor Foster was elected on a campaign promise to rid City Hall of its corruption. Foster has proof of financial mismanagement and impropriety, which likely would include council members and Police Chief Gilbert.
Today the town is under a kind of martial law, with the corrupt Police Chief in charge and the duly elected Mayor ousted.
The United States of America is no longer a protector nor promoter of democracy or progressive values. It was one thing to see the Tea Party’s ugly head as a protest movement, but a perverse ideology has developed over the past few years – stemming from this resurgent delusional idiocracy, and its allowing people to get away with massive, heinous crimes against the People. Now, a citizen who discovers proof of fraud – and a fraud which may have cost the residents of this community millions and millions of dollars is herself arrested, instead of those responsible. What an indignity to anyone who has ever championed the democratic ideal.
The Tea Party mentality has infected all strata of the American political system, and it is a disease, a vicious and tenacious cancer. From the lunacy of the RNC nomination process to the regular royal fuck-ups pertaining to basic American history and law by their star candidates, the GOP has become the party of the damned, the fools, the wicked. Who in their right mind would ever have anything to do with the Republitards in times like these?
And why are they constantly getting away with bullshit designed to prevent democracy?
Why are the people of the United States allowing them to get away with destroying their nation?
How is it that the Republican Governor of Wisconsin can take away state worker’s collective bargaining rights, set the police on their own people – the people they’re supposed to help and lead, and then stoop so low as to run fake democratic candidates to give the unpopular Republican incumbents another month to practice?
Remember Alvin Greene?
You thought that was bad – no one has ever taken of these people to task for their fraud, their deception, their lies and treason.
And as long as people keep looking towards the United States as the supposed defender of the democratic way, and this shit goes unchecked, the very notion of democracy may be lost forever, as it will have to leading light, no bulwark. It seems to have already succumbed to the inertia typical of the American mentality – the Dutch have even coined a term, roughly translated to ‘American Conditions’ to describe the progressive decline of a Western Power, and the subsequent destruction of its society and civilization, through excess and ignorance.
And now we come to Casey Anthony. I’ll let Bill do most of the talking here; he always manages to cut through the horseshit as far as I’m concerned.
Admittedly, I did not follow this case to the same degree as most of the daytime cable news hosts, and it took me a while to catch up with what this case was all about. After looking it over, the only thing I can think of is that, if this Casey Anthony woman was named Monique Washington and she came from Baltimore, I don’t think she would have even gotten a trial – least not a fair one. She’d a been tried in the public’s eye and put away. But the Anthony case reminds me that deep down, regardless of guilt, the World of American TV has its own rules it needs to follow. The World American TV lives and operates in is not the same as the one our laws belong to. There’s no democracy on TV, unless someone’s dying for it. And in this world someone so clearly responsible for the death of her infant can be ‘reformed’ through the endless excruciatingly close focus on every aspect of her life. In the process, it turned her from a celebrity prisoner to a celebrity murderer. Her family was represented by an entertainment lawyer. She’s been offered a contract to star in porn. Some people say ‘she’s suffered enough’. She’s a star now, and something tells me that’s all she wanted. Haven’t we all seen those Facebook photos?
At the end of the day we don’t want to pay attention to all that’s fucked up about the real world we live in – its too hard and we’re too lazy. But the world we invented for ourselves? The world where whatever fiction we can think of convinces us of its veracity? That world that plays by TV rules, and its the only rules we seem to be following anymore. We’ve created a fiction where philosophy, politics, rhetoric and reason are rated based on the graphics and sound-bytes that go with them.
Heaven help us – who knew it would be so easy to destroy.
