Insane At Any Speed

When did Nader become irrelevant? I nearly voted for him in 2000, until I watched him speaking and the red face and flying spittle was too reminiscent of the sad mental patients I had to roll up to the fifth floor when I worked at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. How do you define something like that? There was something in the eyes, the flushed appearance, the strange movements, and the oral spray hurling itself towards the audience. I can't be specific, but the sum of the parts resonated with gurneys and four point locking leather restraints.

His position that corporations run America also resonates with me. I've railed on that numerous times here as Dictators Incorporated have become more and more brazen in twisting the once lofty ideals of this country to vehicles for their personal enrichment and coronations. Paris Hilton. Donald Trump. Bill Gates. Paul Allen. Dick Cheney. Nicole... The list goes on. American royalty, who even when they bestow alms tarnish the charity by attaching strings to favor their pet philosophies.

I agree wholeheartedly with his disgust, but not his denial of culpability. He made the election close enough that Diebold, Jeb, and the Supreme Court could override both the popular and electoral votes in 2000. He probably believes that level corruption is the norm in our once great land more than I do, but refuses to acknowledge that he was used by them. Instead he says there is no difference between the parties. Democrats are political cowards, the republicans use and encourage mob cowardice to serve their ends. The semantic difference may be small, but the reality is not. Ask nearly 4,000 dead American servicemen. Ask a million dead Iraqis.

Nader can play semantics all he wants. I don't blame him for the deaths -- that blame is for the cowards in the white house and the bigger cowards who support them because they aren't strong-minded enough to develop their own opinions. He was a mere tool, a spoiler, and if he is too proud and blind to acknowledge the fact I can't take him seriously when he talks about it.

Despite the flying spittle and unbalanced denial of reponsibility for installing dubya I like what he had to say in his candidacy announcement. I'm reminded of one of the stories our preacher told when I was a kid and didn't view the church as a betrayal of the words they claimed to cherish. A man gets a flat tire, a blow out, and has to stop immediately. He's not happy being outside an insane asylum, and hurries through the tire change. Jacks up the car, removes the lug nuts, carefully puts them in the hubcap, pulls of the flat, pulls the spare, puts it in place and turns to discover at some point he'd klicked or stepped on the hubcap. There was no sign of the lug nuts. The shoulder was muddy and the ditch even worse. They were totally lost. Be curses.

"Lost your lug nuts?" calls a voice from a window in the institutional building.

He looks up to see a patient in a white hospital gown. He'd rather not say anything to a crazy person, even less so at this unpleasant moment in time. "Yes!"

"Well, take one off of each of the other wheels. You could drive a very long way with three lug nuts, and the next town with an auto parts store is only few miles down the road."

The man is a little taken aback. He'd tried to ignore the crazy person, but it was the simplest solution to a sticky problem. "Thank you," he calls back. "How did you ... know?"

"I'm insane, not stupid."

I like that story here for several reasons. I like what Nader has to say. I despise what he's done lately to the point where he doesn't seem to always be be connected to reality. Sanity and good ideas are not the same thing, and this reminds me of the fact. Politicians aren't the only ones who conflate unrelated issues. For me the difference is the corrupt ones do it intentionally.