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    Why Politics Sucks: With Just a Few Modest Proposals that Might Make it All Suck a Little Less
    Why Politics Sucks: With Just a Few Modest Proposals that Might Make it All Suck a Little Less
    Why Politics Sucks: With Just a Few Modest Proposals that Might Make it All Suck a Little Less
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    Why Politics Sucks: With Just a Few Modest Proposals that Might Make it All Suck a Little Less

    By Steven Womack

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    About this ebook

    "We’re Americans. We have the best government money can buy." 

    With these words, Edgar and Shamus Award-winning mystery writer Steven Womack begins his investigation of one of the greatest crimes ever committed against the American people: the American political system. 

    The first in a series of eight "broadsides" examining issues in contemporary American life, WHY POLITICS SUCKS is a hard look at our dysfunctional, thoroughly corrupt, inefficient and broken, political system. Contemporary politics has descended into a cesspool of influence buying, lobbying, and pandering to the worst instincts in our national psyche. Our political life has never seemed more toxic, angry, bitter, and out-of-touch with the realities of American life. Our infrastructure decays, our children fall behind the rest of the world in education, the middle class disappears, while the poor, sick, and elderly are abandoned to survive as best they can. Meanwhile, the corporations, the connected, the powerful and the wealthy have literally raced to outbid each other for control of what should be our government. 

    As Womack reveals, politics has never been a pretty business. From the earliest days of the republic, politicians, legal scholars, and ordinary citizens have struggled to even figure out what corruption is. How does a democracy exist when it is for sale to the highest bidder? 

    All is not lost, though. Womack offers, as the subtitle suggests, a few modest proposals that might just turn things around and make politics suck just a little less. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSpearhead Press
    Release dateJul 4, 2016
    ISBN9781533779083
    Why Politics Sucks: With Just a Few Modest Proposals that Might Make it All Suck a Little Less

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      Book preview

      Why Politics Sucks - Steven Womack

      A Brief Foreword

      All I know is first you got to get mad. You’ve got to say: I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!

      From Network, by Paddy Chayefsky (1976)

      Let’s just say the 21st Century has not been kind to many of us. And one cold, stressed day in November, 2014, this still-fresh new century had been especially unkind to me.

      I teach in a small college. Doesn’t really matter which one—small colleges everywhere are pretty tough places to be these days. Student enrollment, budgets, and resources have all been falling, with wages stagnant and the cost of employee benefits (to use the term loosely) skyrocketing for ages. Sometime in the previous year, the cost of health insurance and medical care surpassed our mortgage and my child support to become the largest single expense in my family’s life. Since it’s been about a decade since we got raises, and the cost of employee health insurance rises every year, we start each new academic year watching our take-home pay actually go down.

      Like a lot of us, I’d worked hard all my life, earned a couple of college degrees, and tried to play by the rules. Now as I approached late middle age, I realized all the work had gotten me nowhere. In fact, I was falling behind. For years, it’s felt like every day that I get out of bed, head to work, and try to get something done, I get a little bit poorer.

      I can’t remember all the details, but that particular day in November was a bad one. I came home, poured a glass of wine—the first of several—and sat down to dinner with my wife and stepdaughter. By the time dinner was over, I’d had a couple more glasses of wine and was, to put it mildly, on a roll.

      I went down my list of complaints: the economy, health care, wealth inequality and the rich, our broken government (ah, politics, don’t get me started on politics...). I was venting at this point, my frustration boiling over.

      You know, damn it, I snapped. "One of these days I’m going to write a book called Why Everything Sucks!"

      It was as if someone had hit me in the face with a cast-iron skillet. I stopped and stared out into the empty air over the dining table. My hand went to my mouth and my jaw dropped in the classic movie pose of someone stunned by epiphany.

      That’s not a bad idea, I thought.

      The next day, I started researching the economy, health care, politics, war, the rise of the rich and the fall of the middle class, the overall state of the world... Could things possibly be as bad as they felt?

      A few months later, I’d read a stack of books and printed off hundreds of articles, making notes and annotations, storing them in huge three-ring binders. Everywhere I turned, other writers, economists, historians, social and political scientists revealed to me that things were not as bad as I thought they were.

      They were, in fact, much worse...

      I began writing a nonfiction book proposal and months later, got it to my literary agent. I’m a mystery writer and a screenwriter, but I haven’t written much nonfiction since my days almost forty years ago as a newspaper reporter and writer for United Press International. My agent told me that in this competitive market, a nonfiction rant about the economy, politics, and health care wasn’t my brand.

      She declined to represent the book.

      So out of frustration, and unwilling to let the project go, I decided to take the book to market myself. The publishing industry is fundamentally different now than it was even a few years ago. Publishing hasn’t changed this much since that fellow Gutenberg invented the printing press back in the mid-15th century, during the time of the Holy Roman Empire.

      Agents and publisher are no longer the gatekeepers. Publishing is no longer a chic, exclusive Studio 54 that stops you at the door if you don’t look the look or know the right people. If an agent or a publisher doesn’t like a project, fine (or as I’m more apt to phrase it, screw ‘em!). Writers have more freedom than ever before to write passion projects and get them out directly to readers. I also decided that rather than wait until the whole book was finished, I would publish it a section at a time.

      And that’s what you’ve got now: the first in a series of broadsides that will attempt to shed some light on the major problems facing our society. Broadsides, historically, were large political posters, usually printed on one side, that blatantly took positions that were firm, passionate, and loud.

      But a broadside is something else as well. In nautical terms, a broadside is when a warship fires all its guns at once.

      That’s what I want to do here. So here we go...

      Introduction

      Sadly, the American dream is dead...

      Billionaire Donald

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