Edge of Darkness: Maybe We Deserve Jim Jordan

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Just about every weekend is a long weekend when your "work" is being a member of the US House of Representatives.   Your workweek begins somewhere in mid-morning on a Tuesday and you head back home to your district - or fly off to visit exotic destinations - on Thursday afternoon.  Congressmen are then free to spend four full days dealing with the concerns of their constituents, or not.  And while that may not sound overly rigorous to their constituents who make their living in factories - or in schools, hospitals, or behind fast-food counters, or on farms - those three-day workweeks can be quite draining on members of Congress, so they then must compensate by building plenty of extended breaks into their busy schedules so that they can take those important fact-finding trips abroad to political hotspots like Fiji.  (Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, I'm still looking at you!)

But Jim Jordan didn't spend last weekend on a beach sipping daiquiris.   The jacketless congressman from Ohio has clocked four busy days working the phones and making personal visits to fellow members as he tried to cajole, promise, and threaten his way into the House speakership.    He also had his minions in conservative news outlets blanketing the air with unsubtle threats to the reelection chances of members who dared to oppose him.

This afternoon Jim will get to roll-up his sleeves, pose for more photos, and count the votes of his weekend of crass intimidation.  Politico calls it "Jim Jordan's Day of Reckoning."

Jordan, a founder of the House "Freedom Caucus," the right-wing rabble whose membership was largely responsible for ousting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, will learn this afternoon whether the full House will give him the respect of electing him on the first ballot, or if he will have to  suffer the indignity of multiple ballots before ultimately reigning supreme.  All of the public signals that his camp has been sending are of cocky self-assurance that ultimately the prize is going to be his.

Perhaps it will.  Jim wins, America loses, and life goes on.  Sadly it is never about us, it is always about them and their egos.  Democracy seems to have gotten lost in the details of governing.

I'm old (not as old as Trump, but old nevertheless), and I won't be around long enough suffer much from this new political dark age that we seem to be entering, but my children and grandchildren (and yours) will have to deal with a government of mean-spirited retribution that a minority of angry conservatives seem hellbent to foist upon us.

My generation found the world a better place, one filled with hope and promise as civilization emerged from the Great Depression and a monstrous global war, but we have faltered in our stewardship of the planet and of democracy, and are leaving the world poised at the edge of a new darkness.  

Shame on us.  Maybe we deserve Jim Jordan.