Ask yourself what democracy was like.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden reminds us that back on 4 June, the House once again passed an amendment to the Constitution that would grant Congress the power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.
Sigh.
It’s important to remember that this is, as Democrats have put it, a Republican rite of spring. Score points with the freepi back home by passing a useless law everyone knows the sensible solons of the Senate will decline to bless with a two-thirds majority. It’s happened that way five times in the past eight years, after all. Yawn, ho-hum, they’re wasting time and money and cheapening the country’s rhetoric, but at least the ACLU can use it to drum up a little more when they pass the hat. So laugh it off: ha ha ha.
But it’s also important to keep in mind the rules are changing:
A telling anecdote: When an employee tried to stop Mr. DeLay from smoking a cigar on government property, the majority leader shouted, “I am the federal government.” Not quite, not yet, but he’s getting there.
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There’s no point in getting mad at Mr. DeLay and his clique: they are what they are. I do, however, get angry at moderates, liberals and traditional conservatives who avert their eyes, pretending that current disputes are just politics as usual. They aren’t—what we’re looking at here is a radical power play, which if it succeeds will transform our country. Yet it’s considered uncool to point that out.
It’s also tempting, at first, to laugh off an attempt by one tiny set of non-governmental organizations to decide that the efforts of another tiny set of non-governmental organizations are detrimental to our country, after all. Pot? Kettle’s on line one. Project much? —But watch what’s happening on the ground:
Last week, Save the Children and Mercy Corps, a Portland humanitarian organization, objected to a demand that all contact with journalists be filtered through USAID in order to qualify for the same development program turned down by CARE, IRC and WorldVision.
The media restriction, which one NGO official called “unprecedented,” was imposed soon after USAID Director Andrew Natsios told a forum of InterAction, the largest alliance of American humanitarian groups working overseas, that NGOs fulfilling U.S. contracts are “an arm of the US government” and should do a better job highlighting ties to the Bush administration if they want to continue receiving funds for overseas projects.
So I guess the point is the old one about eternal vigilance and evil triumphing if good folks do nothing: pick up the phone, fire up the email, contact your Senators, and point them to this eloquent argument that an amendment forbidding the “desecration” of the flag strikes at the very heart of the religions of the People of the Book. Then tell them that food and water and aid for the Iraqis we’ve dispossessed is far more important than keeping some NGOs on message. —We can still do our best to keep the rules from changing. Tom DeLay isn’t the federal government yet, by God, and the sky’s still blue in my neck of the woods.
Though it is acquiring a distinctly greenish cast…
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