"Summer time done come and gone, my oh my!"

That phrase, repeated many times to tumultuous applause from the audience in Tampa Stadium on 7 April 1995 was the last live sound we heard from the Grateful Dead.

13 Sept 2009, after a strangely cool summer in the mountains of Tennessee, it seems as if summer is gone. Lows are now reaching the high 50's at night and stopping short of 85 most days. Color is starting to appear on some hill sides. Hopefully we'll have a beautiful fall season.

Summer also seems to be gone due to the immense animosity unfolding in the campaign for national health care reform. The Obama admin has rightfully claimed that they were elected to effect such a change. But they have failed to take the lead on any means of reform. In sad fact, they have allowed the petulant non-cooperation of the GOP and open hatred of the tea party malcontents to steal a march from them and derail actual hope and progress toward reform. The mandate they could honestly claim when they took office is being nibbled away by bits and pieces.

The Republicans, pissed off at losing the election, have adopted a policy of refusal to cooperate with the majority Democrats in any manner whild funding, through the party and through their wealthiest lobbyists, a campaign of disinformation, fear mongering, and frank lies to infuriate their fundamentalist Christian base, confuse many of the elderly and the poorly educated. They also fling the word "socialist" about whenever possible to further scare the uninformed and unlearned.

The mob of semi-illiterates, 2nd ammendment maniacs, anti-intellectuals, and racists calling their selves tea party activists share space with the less well informed Libertarians in displaying the building anger and frank hatred of Obama.
The mob is composed of people who are furious at losing their jobs, their benefits, their future incomes, their lifestyle, and all the other things being lost in this recession. But they seem, as ever, unable to realize that the blame lies with the years in which government under Reagan, Bush I and Bush II sold out to business while encouraging the outsourcing and offshoring of jobs, of waging war for political or personal reasons, while encouraging greed and removing regulation of the financial industry, while dropping taxes on the wealthy and cutting benefits from the social safety net. The mob has been all to easily convinced by demagogues on talk radio and Fox news that the fault belongs to the Obama administration. And the mob is all to eager to blame Obama, who inherited two un-winnable wars, a looted treasury, staggering debt piled up by Bush II, and a economy that is not in depression only because the press hasn't labeled it as such.

It is frightening when one looks at the posters at the tea party rallies. The mob is fond of posters portraying Obama as Hitler, as a comic and movie villain, as Stalin. They fling the terms "Nazi," "Socialist," and "communist," at Obama and at the progressives and liberals who oppose them, as if the mob actually understands what the words mean. They seem unable to distinguish between the facism of the Third Reich, the tyrannical communism of Stalin, and the socialism of Scandinavia and Western Europe. They have lost their connection with history, with political science, and with truth as they are led around by their noses and manipulated by talk show demagogues who grow ever more wealthy feeding the misery of the mob.

The hatred evident at their rallies is frightening. They don't want "socialized medicine" but are often medicare recipients. They are terrified of the demographic shift happening in America - part because the GOP under Reagan and Bush I & II looked the other way while business encourage illegal immigration to provide cheap agricultural and manufacturing labor pools. The mob is easily manipulated and unaware that they are being used by the demagogues who drive them.
Add in the political fools like Sarah Palin, who raise cries of treason, of abortion, and death panels to fuel the flames and the mob is nearing an explosive stage. The gun nuts among them are far too likely to try to change the results of the election with bullets. Fanatical preachers are praying for Obama's death, publically.

I am more concerned for the fate of my nation than I have ever been. I no longer see a two party government in which both parties could work together in the best interests of the nation. Now we have one badly fractured party in power opposed by a party practicing a scorched earth response to being voted out of power. We have little to fear from the Democrats except a fatal failure to unify as a party when they need to accomplish something. From the Republicans, we have to worry that they will sell out to the Christian right, which wants a theocracy ruled by white protestants. We'd need to worry about business and the Republicans if they weren't already owned by business.

What the mob wants is to "take back our America." In short they want a white man in the Presidency, no taxes, freedom to carry guns as if they were at risk of attack by a foreign army every day. They want their jobs and lives back to 1960 standards and it is never going to happen. Our manufacturing base no longer exist here. And it is never coming back. Our lower class whites and some of our middle class are learning what our minorities have know for a long time. But they refuse to admit it to their selves.

Our schools pump out less and less literate and prepared students who find no jobs other than scarce minimum wage service jobs. The students who did learn in school and who proceed to universities often wind up competing for the same jobs with a much greater debt load after paying for their education.

The right wingers keep screaming about entreprenurealism as the salvation of the nation. But honestly, how many kiosks and home businesses selling t-shirts or the newest window cleaning tool are going to create a living wage for anyone but the television pitch crew?

In dark, unvarnished honesty, as the base jobs for the working class and middle class vanish, so does the number of people with sufficient extra cash reserves to by from the kiosks and home businesses. When no one is left to buy the product, who will the local entrepreneur sell to? That remains the basic flaw in the "up by my boot straps" myth. One only needs a limited number of what ever latest and greatest gimmick is being sold at the street corner. When it comes down to groceries, medicines, or supporting the entrepreneurial populace, I have no difficulty saying no to someone hawking products.