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Patriotism is not being afraid to lose your seat

By MARTIN DYCKMAN
Published November 6, 2005

America owes much to people like Rosa Parks who were more than just sunshine patriots, who never lost their faith that a great nation, like a good soldier, must be all that it can be.

As America mourned the lady who was jailed for refusing to stand up, a patriot named Tom Palumbo was willing to be arrested for refusing to keep his seat.

Palumbo, a psychiatric nurse at Norfolk, Va., was the odd civilian among the military uniforms assembled for George Bush's war rally there late last month. He had gone to the Chamber of Commerce for his ticket.

Security would have spotted any hostile sign but the Karl Rove Bush Production Company does not strip-search the extras at Bush's carefully managed productions. That may come next, as a result of the "Dump Bush" T-shirt Palumbo revealed when he stood up and stripped off his top shirt.

Bush had just begun his righteous war pep talk when Palumbo started shouting. One newspaper heard it as "War is terrorism! Torture is terrorism!" Another quoted it as "War is terror! War is terror! Do the right thing and resign!"

Bush seemed befuddled. Security got Palumbo out of there fast. Expecting to be jailed, he was surprised when the Norfolk police just took his picture and let him go.

The picture, it is safe to presume, will be circulated widely wherever Bush's advance parties prepare audiences in the same manner as Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin prepped the peasantry for Catherine the Great.

"Why shouldn't I get in?," Palumbo asks. "If he were saying, "We're bringing the troops home,' I would have applauded."

Though heckling is very much in the democratic political tradition - for the best of it, listen to a debate in the British House of Commons - there was a time to have frowned on such disrespect as to interrupt a president in mid speech.

But how else can citizens make him hear them?

Bush boasts about not reading newspapers. All he ever needs to know he can learn from the minders who know what Dick Cheney and Rove want him to hear. But for the courage of a low-ranking aide who made him sit and watch, he might not know yet what had happened at New Orleans. It cannot be presumed that he even knows just how sickened and angry most Americans are by the reports of torture and death in secret prisons run by the CIA.

"I'm a veteran and up until Bush got in office I was what I call an armchair activist," says Palumbo. "I would write a check, I would write my congressman. Now, the stakes are much too high. If he really believes the people are behind him, that is a delusion."

But it is not just the Bush administration that fancies itself beyond the public's reach. Most of the U.S. House and most state legislatures act as if they are unaccountable. The typical incumbent is, by design of the district, safe from everything but the rare and almost inevitably unsuccessful primary challenge. Between gerrymandering and special interest campaign contributions, the people don't have a chance.

For proof, look to your telephone bill. It's creeping up, and has a LOT higher to go, because of the Florida Legislature's election-proof districts and a mutual understanding that neither party would use the other's whoredom as a campaign issue.

That's why the most significant elections in the nation's near future are not for Congress next year but the referendums in California and Ohio next week on initiatives that would get their legislatures' sticky hands off the computers that draw district maps.

Both initiatives, it is sad to hear, are in trouble. One ad attacking Ohio's entire slate of election reforms features a picture of a pregnant woman under a headline that screams, "Family values are on the line . . ." It warns that the reform package would "dilute the power of pro-life supporters to elect pro-life candidates who share our values."

It was news to me that Common Cause is a nest of "anti-family activists," but then you never know. California's independent districting initiative is in trouble largely because Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked for too much else. But he, at least, has the courage not to be a hypocrite. He endorsed the Ohio initiative even though his party is the one more likely to lose fairly designed seats there. That was the mark of a patriot for all seasons.

Nothing in recent memory was so funny, or so sad, as Gov. Jeb Bush trying to explain why he was helping Schwarzenegger raise money to do in California what Bush is dead set against for Florida.

[Last modified November 5, 2005, 01:12:02]