More Democracy Deficit

While yours truly was enjoying a day off by picking numerous large trout out of a Big Hole riffle, my dedicated wife decided to go see what a "Listening Session" by Montana's right-wing Representative Dennis Rehberg might entail. After all, in a Democracy, it is important that our elected representatives hear what We the People are thinking so that we can remain One Nation Under God. Right?

Dennis Rehberg is a fabulously wealthy "good old boy" who wears a big white cowboy hat which instantly identifies him as someone who is oppressed by Big Government. His "listening" consists mostly of telling homey stories and jokes, then going through the seven or eight conservative talking points he has managed to memorize, and finally asking "The People" to come to the microphone to describe how much they hate the government and all its programs. Imagine his surprise (and that of his gun loving constituency) when Mrs. Trout pipes up in support of socialized medicine and paying for it by reducing the size of the military-industrial complex! Boos and jeers erupted along with demands she give up the microphone (which she refused to do) while Rep. Rehberg smiled like the Chesire Cat. "Listening" to vets on disability, old people on Medicaid, ex-loggers in job traing programs and ranchers with subsidized grazing bitch about "Nazi govment" and taxes is music to his ears.

Meanwhile our Senator, the erstwhile Max Baucus has dispensed with even the pretense of Democracy and announced he will not be meeting We the People during the August recess. He won't even be bothered with the shoddy facade! Which in a perverse way is admirable.

I do admire my wifes courage in speaking out to a crowd of well-armed nuttos but I fear she still clings to the idea that this is a discourse, that "public reason" still guides communal life and that "virtuous " citizens still accord preeminence to their interests as "indivisible parts" of "the whole community" who will discount their merely "private interests" and support an open and experimental social order. This ,of course, can never be the case when the state is not "nuetral" ,when it is a capitalist state with a capitalist government and hers are only capitalist rights protected by a capitalist press/media and capitalist judiciary.

Following that ordeal we went to an evening concert by the Drum Brothers where cowboy hats were replaced by tie-dyed shirts, the BudLight replaced by chardonnay and Chai, the gun toting fear and beligerance replaced by dancing and smiling. The two Bitterrroots, and never the twain shall meet. At least never under capitalist "democracy".