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ELECTION ISSUES A close encounter of the Grebner kind by Raymond Garcia
It was a sunny day when I ran into Mark Grebner walking down M.A.C. this past summer. I’ve known Grebner for about 18 years, ever since I came to the glorious land of East Lansing. At first it was through my work on the staff of U.S. Senator Don Riegle, when Grebner was a local Democratic Party operative, and I had bailed on the Senator, coming out to MSU for grad school. Later on, he was a guest on the political talk show "From Left Field" that I co-hosted with Bonnie Bucqueroux on local public access television about 13 years ago or so. He struck me as a politician with a sense of humor,
with his incisive wit and his “Buy one
politician, get one free” and “No worse than the rest” campaigns
for County Commissioner here in Ingham County. Little did I know a partisan
time bomb lurked within. So when I ran into Marky Mark
a few months ago I said, “How’s Mr. Lansing Bus System doing
today? It was a clear sign of respect, as his primary cause as a county
commissioner has been to maintain the (very) decent bus system we have
around Lansing today (if there’s any doubt, go ride the pathetic
system in the Detroit metro area…). He responded “why
there goes one of my babies right now,” as the number one bus
passed down Grand River at that moment. So far, so good. But soon thereafter,
things took an ugly turn. I asked Grebner if he’d seen Bonnie’s
latest triumph, the local webzine “SpartanEdge,” the
dynamite collaboration of MSU students jn creating a truly
new form of media in the East Lansing area that was all the rage (cool,
def, dope, phat, the shit, whatever the fuck might imply hot these days).
Rather than responding affirmatively, his hand went to his chin and
began to rub. “Hmm, Bonnie, Bonnie,” he
said in the manner of a hippie recalling a bad acid trip. “When
I think of Bonnie, I think of Mike Rogers,” he said, with a dispeptic
look on his face, which soon turned to hostility. At that moment he
connected me with Bonnie – yes, the former co-host of “From
Left Field,” but
most distressingly for Grebner, I was the campaign manager of Bonnie
Bucqueroux’ run for the U.S. Congress seat representing East Lansing
on the Green Party ticket in 2000. He went on: “Mike Rogers is
a right wing jer, and it’s Bonnie Bucqueroux’s fault he
got elected.” With that, he turned around in a huff and began
to walk away. He didn’t go far though,
because I said, “You
Democrats put up a loser like Diane Byrum and then blame Bonnie for
your failure? Byrum’s a Republican pretending to be a Democrat
to get elected.” Boy, did that set our local Democratic hero off!
He turned around and started walking back toward me, shaking his fist
in a sputtering rage. “Byrum might have been a
lousy candidate, but you’re an asshole,” Grebner screamed
at me, while squatting down and pointing up at me in an agitated fury. “It’s
your fault right wing nuts like Mike Rogers get elected.” At
this point I couldn’t help myself, I just had to say “Oh,
yeah, and it’s Ralph Nader’s fault that Bush got elected,
right? So how did he get re-elected? Where’s your Ralph now? Do
you Democrats ever take responsibility for being pathetic losers?” By now Grebner was shaking
with rage. “You’re an asshole, you’re an asshole!” he
screamed at me as he turned and once again headed north on M.A.C. I
yelled after him “I suppose we don’t have the right to vote
for third parties, eh? I suppose you don’t believe in democracy,
eh?” He stopped again, started to turn, thought better
of it and proceeded up M.A.C away from me. A man sitting outside at
a café on the street said to me, “I guess you pissed him
off!” I guess so. Ha! The reason Grebner and other like-minded Democratic Party hacks think Bonnie kept Democrat Byrum from winning the congressional seat, the 8th Michigan district was that Bonnie got 3,467 votes running on the Green Party ticket, while Byrum lost to Rogers by 111 votes. This presumes many fallacies believed true by said party hacks, including:
Grebner’s actions prove
many other things about local Democrats which are also true of the
party at large. They always blame others for their failures (Nader,
Bonnie, Ohio, you name it). They take their base supporters for granted
and rarely make an effort to mobilize them beyond stirring up fears
about abortion access. They don’t really believe in democracy.
And, perhaps most obviously, they don’t have a sense of humor
and are most vicious toward those they take for granted. Case in point:
does anybody think Grebner would call Mike Rogers an asshole in person
in public? Hardly. Consider candidate Byrum:
her economic policies were virtually indistinguishable from Rogers.
She was pro-“free
trade,” in favor of the policies that have destroyed our manufacturing
sector, especially here in Michigan. She opposed a living wage ordinance
to pay fair and livable wages to workers for their labor. She favored
corporate and other expensive tax cuts, the likes of which have expanded
the federal deficit to over $9 TRILLION. She wouldn’t commit to
any progressive economic policies at all. In fact, local commentators on
the radio on election night (right wing, of course) referred to Byrum
as a “Blue
Dog Democrat,” a caucus in Congress that’s conservative
on economic issues but liberal on social issues. She would vote in
favor of abortion rights, so we’d better vote for her, according
to Democrats. Forget anything else that matters. These radio commentators,
no Christian evangelicals they, stated flat out on election night 2000
that it really didn’t matter whether Rogers or Byrum won that
night. They knew their corporatist economic interests would be served
either way. And they were correct. I had always heard that Mark Grebner
has a temper and I found out in person that this is true. As
previously noted, he has done fine work in maintaining the Ingham County
bus system from his perpetual perch as a County Commissioner and he
runs funny political ads. But you’d better not stray from Democratic
Party conventional wisdom (aka Grebner’s opinion) or you’ll
be subject to belittlement at least, or a vicious tongue-lashing in
public, if he’s in the mood. This unhinged self-righteousness is characteristic of the Democratic Party whose members think of themselves as “the good people.” Of course, Republicans will lock you up in jail in a heartbeat and steal the food out of the grubby hands of your children. So who needs either party, aside from their corporate paymasters? The time has long since past for the need of a third (or fourth or fifth) party in U.S. politics. We have nothing to lose but the chains of corporate welfare. So go, Greens, smash state (the state of U.S. politics). |
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