Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Common Cause - "Democracy On Drugs"The problem with political analysis is the mud. In order to show how dirty “dirty politics” can get, one invariably gets muddy. Such is the life of the muck-raker watchdogs from Common Cause. In this report they outline in not-too-heady terms how the Bush administration along with both houses of Congress hid from the public just how the Medicare/Prescription Drug Bill was raked into law.
The story behind the report is more than a little disconcerting. How easily proponents of the bill were able to corrupt the system (how does one censor C-SPAN, exactly?) perhaps points to a kind of "reciprocity effect" for old and very large democracies like ours.
The Reciprocity Effect in photography is a phenomenon whereby images exposed for a very long time begin to react more and more slowly to the exposure the longer they stay exposed. So while in the first few seconds of exposure film is highly reactive, after that film becomes less reactive. Which is to say, the more you expose film, the less effect that exposure will have.
The political metaphor of course is something like persistent and willing civic neglect. The more we Americans become exposed to the wrong-doings of our government, the less we are willing to react to it.
There are a number of reasons that I worry about the political course of my country. And they all seem to have roots in how misinformed Americans are and consequently how reluctant they are to acknowledge failures of this magnitude. The government is too big. As individuals one's effect on its policies is too small. What's more, the individuals who have the most to gain from law-makers and the policies they architect do so at the greatest expense: a dollar-gain for Big Pharma and elected officials, a liberty-loss for you and me.
Democracy on Drugs shows us how we can trade our laudable capitol abstractions like Democracy, Checks and Balances, Due Process, Equity and Public Health for the capitally myopic greasing of the wheels of greed. The net loss is this simple: we’ve traded quality of life for quantities of cash.
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