by W.D. Ehrhart
Several days after the inspiring day of No Kings rallies all over this country, in which millions of my fellow citizens took to the streets to let our government know that what is happening to this country is not okay with a whole heck of a lot of us, I learned that senior Democratic Party leaders including Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and the Clintons were stuffing their faces with caviar, Wagyu beef, and truffle agnolotti at the wedding of the son of billionaire George Soros.
Wait! Really? That’s how the Democratic Party leadership spent the day? Hobnobbing with the One Percent at a waterfront 15-acre, 12 bedroom, 10 bathroom mansion with “guest cottage,” tennis courts, swimming pool, not one but two pool pavilions, and four-story windmill.
No doubt it was a swell party, but I have to confess that I was more than a little insulted by the cavalier attitude of the so-called party leaders who are supposed to be helping us non-billionaire rank-and-file citizens save what is left of American constitutional democracy. Wagyu beef? Truffle agnolotti? Indeed, to say I was and am outraged at such callous disregard for the situation this country is in would be speaking euphemistically.
How tone-deaf, stone-cold stupid, and disconnected from reality and American voters can the Democratic leadership be? No wonder they’ve been beaten twice by a narcissistic, infantile, flagrantly corrupt, amoral, lying, hate-spewing, misogynist, racist, philandering sexual predator, huckster, grifter, and convicted felon.
I decided to ask my own Democratic congresswoman, Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, that question. I sent her a lengthy e-mail by way of her website, in which I asked her if she approved of how her leadership had spent No Kings Day. I said that if she did approve of it, she should be ashamed of herself. And if she didn’t approve of it, why was she not vocally making it clear to both her party leadership and to the people she represents that she did not approve of it so that poor schlepps like me could feel like at least somebody who represents me in Washington isn’t totally brain dead or happily kissing up to the folks with all the money.
Today I received an e-mail response from Representative Scanlon consisting of eight paragraphs taking up nearly three pages. It begins by saying: “Thank you for contacting my office regarding recent actions by President Trump and his administration.” It goes on through all the following paragraphs telling me how she’s “horrified by the actions of President Trump,” and enumerates his many sins and shortcomings and decisions to place “his personal, political, and financial interests above the well-being of American citizens.”
That’s all very nice and dandy, but that is not what I wrote to her about. I wrote to her about the outrageous and utterly inappropriate decision of a significant portion of her own party leadership to spend a day enjoying the benefits of hanging around with billionaires instead of spending the day supporting the grass-roots efforts to reclaim the American republic.
Not a word about the actual subject of my letter to her. Not one word.
Of course I am thoroughly and utterly repulsed by our Maniac-in-Chief, who has now dragged us into an unconstitutional war with Iran while his lickspittle lackeys in Congress cheer him on and the rest of our representatives in Congress mill around bleating like the pathetic sheep they are.
But that’s not what I wrote to her about. It is the behavior of the Democratic party that appalls me, that disgusts me, now even more so than the Retrumplicans.
I expect the party of our Kleptocrat-in-Chief to ignore the interests of the nation and the majority of its citizens in the interests of wealth, wealth, and more wealth. (The bigotry, homophobia, deportations, and all that other mean-spirited garbage is mostly there to make the hoi polloi imagine the one percent who are financially raping them blind are looking out for their interests.)
But the Democrats are hardly any better. The behavior of what passes these days for party leadership, combined with the utterly unresponsive response to my request for Representative Scanlon’s stand on the behavior of those leaders on June 14th, fills me with a combination of despair and revulsion.
Representative Scanlon concludes her letter: “Thank you for contacting my office. I am proud to represent engaged and committed constituents, like yourself, who take the time to let me know their positions.”
But she doesn’t know my position because neither she nor anyone on her staff ever bothered to read my letter, let alone tried to respond to it.
So who do I vote for next time around? Her Republican opponent? I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life, but I’m no longer convinced it would make any difference if I did.
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W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.