Lots of heavy breathing and leg-tingling these days among the blogs and commentators over what is being touted as the impending (and, some would say, inevitable) efflorescence of “real conservatism” in a heretofore little-known congressional district nestled into the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Douglas Hoffman, an accountant running as a third-party “Conservative”, appears likely to defeat his Democrat opponent for the 23NY District House seat after the Republican dropped out of the race … and endorsed the Democrat! You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Politics generally has finally morphed into a real-life version of a Magritte painting … a discontinuous gruel of nonsense images and surreal misrepresentations of reality.
Overlooking the festering goofiness of this electoral terpsichore for a moment, we could perhaps focus on what, for want of a better term, I call the “so what? -ness” of the situation. Does anyone really think that one pencil-necked CPA with born-again conservatism just welling up within him actually represents the genesis of effective reform of a political system whose baseness tends to persist like the stench of a cheap cigar? Not bleedin’ likely, Nigel.
Moreover, a conservative, whether of Republican, Democrat, or Rosicrucian persuasion, being elected in NY23 is not exactly a stop-the-presses development – can we all stop huzzahing at least long enough to remember that conservatives have held this seat since before Reconstruction?
We could also pause to reflect that folks in that neck of the woods tend to raise extra-party contrariness to high art – recall that just across the state line to the east those fusty Vermonters have for years continued to send Bernie Saunders (an avowed, often apoplectic, Socialist) to Washington.
So – twitch and quiver all you want folks, but you might as well move along … nothing to see here … just one more permutation in the often confusing, sometimes bizarre, but always entertaining kaleidoscopic world of American politics.
To close, let me quote from John Steinbeck, who understood and elegantly expressed the folly, the sheer ineptitude, of the political process:
“We wonder whether in the present pattern the pieces are not straining to fall out of line; whether the paradoxes of our times are not finally mounting to a conclusion of ridiculousness that will make the whole structure collapse. For the paradoxes are becoming so great that leaders of people must be less and less intelligent to stand their own leadership.” [The Log From The Sea Of Cortez]
Be well.
