I had this flash of inspiration from a post by my comrade Owen Paine, who writes for Stop Me Before I Vote Again, where he quips in his trademark beat poetic fashion:

yes the ever more empty “fatal center”
where all hope plunges down and down toward citizen despair
and corporate joy

If you’re like me, you’ve heard the blabbing heads on TV mention the Democrats “reaching across the aisle” and “moving to the center” so goddamn’ many times it makes you want to put your head through a plate-glass window.

If you’re also like me, you do a massive facepalm every time the Democrats attempt another ill-advised and entirely lame “reach across the aisle” and end up being screwed, blued and tattooed by the GOP yet again. You’d think by now the Dems would have learned something about how “the Center” is a great bottomless time and energy-sucking maw of Hell, but apparently they have the learning capacity of a housefly — and if you know anything about houseflies, you know that’s damn’ near absolute zero.

With that in mind, I present the Democratic Party attempting to “move to the center” and “reach across the aisle” and having what I call a Wile E. Coyote Moment. You know how, in those old cartoons, the coyote is chasing the road runner across the top of a mesa, and the road runner — traveling at near supersonic speed — rockets effortlessly over the edge and across the gap to the top of the neighboring mesa while the coyote, recklessly following him, gets about halfway across and suddenly realizes he’s way the hell out there in the air all by himself, and right in that moment he thinks to himself “what the fuck am I…” just before he begins that long fall? Well, kind of like that.

11×17 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 600kb.

Continue reading "The Abyss" »

Anyone out there who’s been paying even the slightest bit of attention knows by now that American politics are — not to be too blunt about it — really, really fucked up. And, nothing’s more fucked up in American politics right now than the way most media hacks and astroturfers define and obsess over “the Center” and whine about “the war on moderates”. After the US mid-term elections of 2010, US media pundits spent endless hours discussing how the Democratic Party needed to “move to the Center” — neglecting to mention, of course, that moving to “the Center” would require them to move to the right. In the wake of the recent elections in Greece and France, the chattering heads on American TV pissed their pants as they desperately asked “will the Center hold?”.

Lost in all of this is the fact that over the past twenty years or so, the “Center” in the US has been moving steadily to the right. President Drone Strike, who’s spent his entire term falling all over himself to suck up to right-wing cranks like John Boehner, is persistently labeled a “centrist” by the media. Rightist whackjobs like Sean Hannity label pro-corporate status-quo mouthpieces like CNN and the New York Times “the Leftist media”. Bland, toothless institutions like the Democratic Party, MoveOn and the AFL-CIO are tagged as “the Left” by the media and, in the meantime, people and organizations with real, actual Left beliefs and values are… which brings us to the inspiration for this large and extensively-researched infographic.

36×15 inch 150dpi .jpg image, 1.5mb
36×15 inch 72dpi .jpg image, 576kb

…and here’s more centrist hilarity from December 2010:
“No Labels: Not Left, Not Right, Not Nothing”.

Continue reading "The American Political Spectrum: an Infographic" »