Talkin' About a Dope-olution

Album: Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman, 1988

Best Track: "Across the Lines"

Lasting Memory: I had a fast car, fast enough to go 110 mph before I slowed down out of terror and concern about getting pulled over. I had to sell that 1972 Pontiac LeMans to raise money for college tuition for the spring semester of 1993. It was a tough but necessary choice I made to give up something then to make sure I could have better things in the future.

Life is like that, and adults understand this. Adults don't always act in accordance with that knowledge, but that is a the subject for another day.

What I'm about to start riffing on is how adults all too often go out of their way to pretend that they don't know that current pleasures and luxuries can be done without if there is more to be gained by forgoing them.

And, yes, I'm talking about elective politics.

As I've been watching the Democratic National Convention, I've found myself shaking my head at hearing over and over again, "We can fix all your problems if you put all your trust and resources into government." I know I will hear the same thing next week from the Republicans during their convention, with the slight variation of "... and we won't tax you to pay for any of it."

I ask you: Who I should I hold in more contempt, the politicians who can bring themselves to speak the lie or the delegate on the floor who force themselves to believe the lie? Like the ne'er-do-well vehicle owner and the delusional baby's mama of "Fast Car," both are are to blame for the mess in which they find themselves.

At least "Fast Car" ends with a glimmer of hope when the woman tells the guy to take his car and "keep on driving." The Democratic National Convention is sounding notes of hope, as well. The reasons those notes are sounding discordant to me, though, is that the hope being expressed is desperate.

We should all vote for "change" because no one is better off now than he or she was four ago. The podium speakers and the delegates are "Talkin' About a Revolution" without seeming to recognize that revolutions demand enormous and usually irredeemable costs. They fail to acknowledge that change can be for the worse as easily as it can be for the better. They can't seem to wrap their minds around the fact that 99 percent of people succeed or fail despite of what elected officials and bureaucrats do. They assume that literary everything is awful and that only having Democrats in charge can make the sun shine again, put food on people's plates, get rid of dogs' fleas.

Again, the Republicans will be hammering home the same messages next week, asking voters "Baby Can I Hold You"? and trying to make those same voters feel ashamed if they decline the offer.

I'm not naive or a Bush apologist or someone prone to saying what G.K. Chesterton considered to be the greatest abdication of patriotism and rationality, "My country, right or wrong." But I do know that not everything in the United States is shot to hell. I know that I AM better off than I was four years ago because I took chances to change my job and my living situation that paid off. I know that if I had failed, I wouldn't have blamed the government.

I know that the Patriot Act needs to be abolished, and I know that narcotics need to be legalized. I know that the Democrats can't keep people who take bad loans under false pretenses from losing their houses. I know that the Republicans can't rid the streets of crime, even if they do succeed in throwing more than a few women in jail for crimes they confess to "For My Lover."

I know that politicians are lying because their lips are moving. I don't know "Why." I just know that neither Obama nor McCain will be do much to change any of it. I just hope that whoever wins November's election doesn't make things worse.

Up Next: The Kinks, Live at Kelvin Hall, 1983 (Spanish cassette reissue of the 1967 album)