I begin this small bit of writing on the day after learning that a great gentleman from Ohio had passed from among us, and gone on over to the other side. A gentleman who was, at least in my opinion, a giant of humanity's legend, towering above the fray of politics by remaining distant from it. A gentleman who could have, had he sought it, had the political position of his choice, up to and including the Presidency, handed to him on a silver platter. A gentleman who, from my knowledge of him, could not have on his worst day forced himself to embrace the pure, unadulterated, metamorphic sewage that has become today's Republican Party.
To Mr. Neil Armstrong: We'll catch ya' on the flip side.
But this isn't about that gentleman from Ohio; that giant; that one-small-step of an entity that will forever in the annals of the human record represent what we as a species are capable of attaining --- unless the soothsaying profiteers and false prophets that are today's Republican Party have their way in November.
It's about a tiny bit of text, gleaned from another's writing, and how that tiny bit becomes a giant leap for all mankind....
Today is a Sunday. It's the last Sunday in August of 2012, and these United States will be going to the polls in just 72 days. We will be setting aside the rhetoric, and stepping into the ballot booth.
Some of us will be casting our vote for a vision that still embraces the dream that once put Mr. Armstrong on the face of a celestial body separate from the one I'm sitting on right now --- and no matter how hard I try after more than four full decades, I still get the heebie-jeebies when I try to address him, or even think of him, by any other mantle than "Mr. Armstrong." I do not expect that to ever change, just as I do not expect my respect for the individual and his accomplishments to ever change.
Some of us will not be casting our vote at all on Election Day. I will not go into any details as to whether this is or is not a legitimate choice, because there will be those who for any one of many reasons will chose of their wn accord not to cast a ballot. Some will say it is a wasted effort. Some will say that voting in an election violates a deeply-held morality against judging others. Some will, for any one of many reasons, not be able to get to a polling station. And still others will, again for any one of many reasons, be barred ---legally or otherwise --- from casting their ballot on Election Day.
And finally, some of us will be casting our vote for the unmitigatedly-heinous, anthropogenic disease that is today's Republican Party. An organized cartel; a machine designed in its current revision to do nothing more that seek power for the end sake of ultimate power; a bottomless pit no less destructive to all the species on this planet than a black hole. A nightmare designed for no other reason than to feed a carnivorous, ravenously-insatiable, bipedal arachnid we all know as Willard Romney.
And herein lies a particular truth as regards the aforementioned candidate: His entire appetite consists of a single-item menu.
Wealth for the sake of more wealth.
This candidate has demonstrated, over the decades of his own history, that his sole obsession is to possess what someone else possesses. It is not enough to merely admire what someone else has, and it is likewise not enough to covet what someone else has. He is Gollum incarnate, and everything is "his precious."
Everything.
The last smidgen of basket currency anywhere on the planet. The last drop of oil under the deepest point of the ocean. The last crumb of coal under the last mountain on Earth, and the last morsel of food in your pantry. He wants it. He wants the power to take it, because there is profit in it. Profit, at first, for him and his friends; profit, in the end, for him alone.
Willard Romney is not merely the final cog in the machine of profit. He is the AntiChrist of profit itself; the mechanism by which even the notion of profit, and of possession, and of what could be any form of healthy capitalism becomes an irreversible obscenity. Given his opportunity, he will ensnare everything in his web of deceit, from the poorest to the richest, until he has it all.
Willard Romney, you see, doesn't like to share. We've seen that in the way he treats anyone and anything that stands between him and his endless march for profit. We've seen that in his affinity for not answering simple questions. We've seen that in the way he has treated not only this country, but other countries as well. What we fail to see, but what we must begin to see with pure clarity, is that he is not, as was perhaps intended, the tool of the hyperwealthy.
He is aware. He is Mary Shelley's Prometheus unbound. He is the political monster; the giant arachnid, and his endless web is his campaign.
He is The Spider; the whole world is his Fly --- and we all know what happens to the Fly. Now try to imagine the entire world at the feet of Willard Romney as nothing more than the empty husk of a fly carcass.
If for any reason you can vote in November, do so. If for any reason you can't, give what you can to help defeat this horror. Pick up that penny on the sidewalk. Smoke one less cigarette per day. Skip mowing the yard for one week, or revisit your childhood by eating a peanut butter sandwich instead of eating out. Find ways to scrape together any small bit of money you can, and invest it in the Cause.
Even if you don't like our current President, take heed in the warning: Better the hazard you know, than the hazard you don't....