editorial.
Welcome to the vampire issue. With this edition, we begin our tenth year in this slightly insane business. It’s been a great time and we appreciate your support more than we can say. We briefly considered doing a retrospective on our various triumphs and accomplishments over the past nine years but we know you’ve saved all your back issues, had them leather bound and can look all that up for yourself. We’re more concerned with what is happening right now and that is pretty damn scary.
The political and cultural polarization of the U.S. has progressed to a level of irreconcilable hatred and insanity we have not seen since the period just before the Civil War. In 1919, William Butler Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” How well that describes America today! We have a brilliant and humane president who appears to lack the forcefulness needed to overcome the rampant obstructionism of a Republican Party now dominated by religious fanatics and politicians manifestly bought and paid for by the fabulously wealthy. On the other hand, we have a party of Democrats that is supine before the onslaught of the Know-Nothings, the haters, the paid agents of the evil Koch brothers and the corporate super-rich.
These Republicans, led in New Jersey by Governor Christie, are indeed vampires worse than those of legend. Count Dracula took his victims merely one at a time and only as many as he needed to survive. The interests represented by the Republican Party thrive by sucking the life blood of entire classes of citizens—the union members, working people, the middle class all fall victim.
In November’s elections, it is more vital than ever to prevent the Republicans from gaining control of the legislature. Those who have any concern at all with preserving collective bargaining, decent health care, a living wage and equality for our LGBT community will vote. Those who do not can blame none but themselves if the Republican hegemony succeeds in making us all the serfs of Wall Street and the subjects of the sort of “Christian” taliban enthusiastically advocated by the loonier members of the Tea Party.
editorial.
Welcome to the vampire issue. With this edition, we begin our tenth year in this slightly insane business. It’s been a great time and we appreciate your support more than we can say. We briefly considered doing a retrospective on our various triumphs and accomplishments over the past nine years but we know you’ve saved all your back issues, had them leather bound and can look all that up for yourself. We’re more concerned with what is happening right now and that is pretty damn scary.
