An Open Letter to Local Politicians

Local government needs badly to rethink its structure. Despite our living in an age of ubiquitous communication why are our so-called "representatives" so conspicuously absent to the mass majority of the population. Unless local citizens make it a point of personal pride or even identity, it's unlikely the average citizen will usually know what or who their representatives are let alone what they are up to. It is less likely that they will know what the issues are. It is certain that less than a handful will ever think about what the issues should be.

Just as likely in this age of individualism the rare well-informed citizen will surely blame the uninformed for their supposed ignorance. Aside from the irony if not contradiction between a world characterizable on the one hand as an age of information and on the other as an age of individualism, it is nevertheless unjustifiable to place sole blame for the disconnect between politician and the people on the individual. Yet it seems to make sense to blame the individual when the only seemingly real agent of action is this very individual. It moreover seems to be even more justifiable when the politician's responsibiliity is covered by announcing his/her actions/activities as necessary information. When the social context and agency of the community is non-existent, except in Sociology class, only the abstract, isolated "individual" can act. And he/she essentially and on the whole does not. At best he/she reacts and behaves within the mechanisms of mass propaganda and ritual legitimation of the status quo of the war-mongering power elite of financiers and New Class functionaries.

Citzenship is a burden, a hobby for bloggers, a distasteful and dispensable bore, an anachronism, an ineffective and meaningless parade of promises. Politicians are functions of a state apparatus whose hierarchical power structure necessitates that they play the game of positioning, prostrating appropriately and of course profusely promising, promising, promising. It is a top-down game that preserves an upside down mechanism of power and prosperity.

Thus the separation and structurally alienating divide between people and the politicians. Thus the justifiability of beginning to admit and discuss this chasm as the realized class structure that America refuses to admit exists. Call this virtual cabal of bureaucratic-technocratic elite of managers, administrators, specialists, professionals, professors and communicators the New Class. Call the rest of us, the politically disenfranchised and therefore disempowered mass of "individualsts," the Client Class. The latter is a mass alienatied class of consumers, cheap labor, exchangeable servants and easily mobilzable, readily expendable soldiers. The Clent Class becomes increasingly intellectually illiterate, historically ignorant and disengaged and spiritually impoverished. The New Class becomes more technically and linguistically alienated from the people and more politically unaccountable.

The dilemma that exists today, then, is one in which the local arena of possible issues and initiatives becomes the locus of the political, of real politics and action. The local politician can keep his/her ear permanently turned toward the state capitol and Washington. Or they can turn to the potential community of civic reconstitution if not revolution. The people can require that the local politican listen or they turn to themselves and reconfigure real relations of community, culture and humanly productive political power.