Represent

"Honestly, I can't tell you how much easier it is to squeeze votes out of these freshmen (lawmakers) or money out of big donors when they think if they say 'no,' I'm going to put a horse head in their bed or something."

--House Majority Leader TOM DELAY

Yeah, that's just what I want to hear coming from one of our country's leading Congressional representatives.

Not.

Yes, I understand the realities of contemporary politics, but speaking so bluntly about strong-arming votes and soliciting (demanding?) money seems so egregiously counter to the notion that these guys are maintaining the cogs and gears of our democracy. (Democracy, an abstraction of the concept of equality -- that somehow we are all equal, and thus should all have a voice. It seems like fairness should somehow fit in there somewhere, but I realize that that's a long dead fantasy.)

He's a Congressman, a Representative. I think representative, and I wonder, "is he really REPRESENTING us?" (For now, separating out the fact that he's technically the representative of a district in Texas). I think represent and I think "looking out for us; looking out for our interests." Is he really doing that?

And then my cynical side says, "no, he represents like a symbol, the way a symbol represents an idea or a larger concept." (Sometimes I wonder if there really is another side. I suppose that would be the blissfully ignorant side.) So perhaps in that way, I can flip the word on its head. And I see it. He represents us, alright. He represents the national temperament of a country that seems to value and believe in bullying others into agreeing with you and encouraging unbridled greed.

But that's just my perspective, I guess. It's how the rhetoric sounds coming out of Washington, it's how economic policies look to me, the energy policy, foreign policy. How much of that translates to the day-to-day living of the NASCAR dad or soccer mom (or Enron exec) in middle America (conscious or subconscious), I'll never know.