April 1st 2012: If the roused rabble in Dane County cries, “One year longer, we only get stronger,” then its flip-side in Waukesha County rallies around “One year later, we only get delayed-er.” For once again, after a spring election in Wisconsin, none other than Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus finds herself in the center of a centripetal incompetence where even moderate conservatives begin to wonder, “dude lady, WTF?”
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As best as I can recollect, this country founded itself on three essential matters: no taxation without representation (which credo is abrogated daily for the half-million residents of Washington, D.C., said country’s very capital, but that’s another story); self-rule by way of representational government (democracy, not monarchy); and freedom of (or from) religion. The only thing that truly keeps us as a nation bound together is a piece of parchment that begins “We the People.” Our common denominator is neither racial nor religious, unlike so many cultures of the world. Even what literally grounds us could hardly be more incongruous; from the Olympic Mountains, rain forests, and glaciers of Washington to the swampy gators of the Florida Everglades, or the windswept hush of Kansas to the roar of the New Jersey Turnpike, our basic geography alone divides us. Regional distinctions abound; for the reality of a back-to-the-land Vermonter might as well be its own subject of anthropology when compared next to a Sunbelt computer programmer in Tucson, a shrimper’s day to day humid toil in the Gulf of Mexico to a Montana rancher baling hay in the first snowstorm before Labor Day. Our dialects and our diets wildly diverge; we are what we speak and eat where we’re from, and Southern ain’t New England any more than a Midwest casserole hotdish makes a lick of sense to a Tex-Mex plate of frijoles con carne asada. No, what keeps us together is the Constitution, that we are a nation of laws. And we vote. Call us “e plebiscite unum.” Read the rest of this entry »
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