Dear Democratic Elected Officials of
the United States (with damn few exceptions),
I am writing this open letter to
call your attention to the
remarks made
yesterday, May 17, 2005, to the United States
Senate, by British MP George Galloway of the independent Respect Party. I do
this because he serves as an example of why your party should be abandoned by
the U.S. working class, by U.S. women, by oppressed nationalities in the United
States, and by anyone who professes to be a progressive or a leftist.
George Galloway did that for which
you have proven incapable; he spoke as an opposition. Since there seems to be a
great dark space in the middle of your heads where the notion of opposition
should be - a void filled by parliamentary molasses and the pusillanimous
inability to tell simple truths - I suggest you all review the recordings of
Galloway's confrontation with Republican Senator Norm "Twit" Coleman to see
exactly how effortless it is to stand up to these cheap political bullies. While
you are at it, you can watch your colleague Carl Levin demonstrate exactly what
I mean about most of you and your party, as he alternately hurls petulant
cream-puff insults at Galloway and kisses Coleman's stunned, clueless ass to
give that toothy dipshit some comfort in the wake of Galloway's verbal drubbing.
Galloway didn't have to walk up to
the docket and slap the cowboy shit out of Coleman - though I admit I still
struggle with my own secret urges to do just that with most of the air-brushed,
combed-over, Stepford meat-puppets who now people the United States Congress.
No, all Galloway had to do was tell the unvarnished truth, and it had exactly
the same effect. If Democrats had half the spine that Galloway does... if you
would stop chasing your creepy little careers through the caviar and
chicken-salad circuits of duck-and-cover American political double-speak, then
not only would people like me not be calling for all to abandon the Democratic
Party and take their fight to the streets like good Bolivians... not only that,
but you'd have won the last election.
The reason Galloway was able to
break from your mirror party in UK - Blair's sell-out Labour Party - and still
get elected, is that Galloway fights for his convictions and the real needs of
his constituents, and doesn't run for cover every time the bully-boys of the
capitalist establishment attempt to take him down.
Here's a hint.
People follow those who speak
plainly and fight. Aside from Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Cynthia McKinney
(not surprisingly Black women who know where it goes if you let rich white men
get away with giving you a bunch of shit) and a precious few others, the
Democratic Party is not only just another party controlled by big capitalists;
it is not even a good *capitalist* opposition party (much less a real
opposition).
You don't deserve anyone's support,
not even as a tactical matter any longer, because you end up doing ritual verbal
combat then giving the "cornpone Nazis" of the Republican Party any goddamn
thing they want. That's why Galloway rhetorically spanking that
soap-opera-looking shitbird was the most satisfying thing many of us have seen
in months.
That's exactly why some of us are
saying go Bolivian on their asses. Tell the Democratic Leadership Council to eat
shit and die. Stop working, stop obeying, block the streets and highways, shut
down the capital, and watch them choke on their own sewage. If Americans weren't
so bewildered by television, so addled and soft from junk food and cars and
electronic appliances, and so addicted to their own cultural superficiality,
they might begin organizing general strikes: women's strikes, workers strikes
(without union bureaucrats to calm them down), Black people strikes, Brown
people strikes, info-tech strikes, eco-strikes, all working our way up to One
Big Strike.
It's a ways off, but it's coming. Of
course, there won't be any Democrats there. They'll be wringing their hands
about their defunct careers, and conducting focus groups to see how they can
shift further to the right in the next election.
And the reason this doesn't happen
is that people still hang their thin hopes on you, on electing Democrats who
stab them in the back the first chance they get. But Galloway's appearance
before the U.S. Senate moved us an inch closer to the Big Strike and an inch
further away from your worthless asses.
Because Galloway didn't, as some are
saying, expose the Republicans.
Someone with a full frontal lobotomy
could expose a Republican politician.
He exposed the spinelessness of the
Democrats.
Yours very truly
Stan Goff
