Ignorant Congress? Or Most Ignorant Congress Ever?

The actor Richard Dreyfuss went to England for two years to study Civics at Cambridge or Oxford, or one of those high-fallutin' British colleges. Then he appeared as a panelist on the fall season of Bill Maher's Real Time where he waxed poetic, almost lectured with Bill's tacit permission, on the subject of Civics in America. Or rather, the lack of Civics in America. Either way, he was correct. Too bad this Congress wasn't watching.

This Congress is not getting it. They have substituted civic duty for a glaring example of political and personal expediency. One now has to leave the country to study Civics while they self-centeredly dance around the one issue that Americans hired them to put to bed for good and all. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to the country in the face of the world. It's embarrassing and maddening to those citizens that last November sent a loud and clear message that enough was enough with Bush-Cheney-Iraq already.

Is this new Congress even aware that Americans already view them as impotent political hacks--puppies chasing their tails and pulling the fur of toothless old dogs to show they're tough? If Civics can be defined as the rights and moral and ethical duties of a society's citizenry, then the civility of this Congress resembles Frankenstein's monster. Many more children will return home in many more coffins while Congress hops haplessly around on one foot trying to decide which course of action will get them re-elected.

If this now passes for American civics in action, then all hope is lost. Americans, their Congresses and presidents, have engaged in some stupid antics in the past. But because of the way America was, because she knew her Civics, she always produced at least a small posse of Congressional heroes who, at risk to personal gain, were willing to stand up and call out the Emperor for showing up naked. The lesson here is that virtue is its own reward. And in a society starving for virtue, it could be fabulously re-electable were Congress not so involved in Congressional American Idol to see it.

Would it help to play an endless-loop tape of Richard Dreyfuss's talk on Civics in all government buildings in and around Washington? Or is the political hackery too ingrained in both the persons and the system to be deprogrammed now? As the youth say, it's looking like. And, ah, the poor youth of America. Doomed to live with the failures of their parents who can't pull it together long enough to set a wise course for America's future. Well, look at that--The "Me" generation has made it all about them. If nothing Congress is attempting to do is turning out right, maybe it's because none of it is being done for the right reasons.

There is no acceptable or believable excuse in the universe for Congress's failure to step up to the plate and do their civic duty to suck the poison out of a failed pre-emptive war and the failed leadership of the current administration, and to do it for the future of the nation and for their fellow Americans. It is no less than America's floundering citizens deserve after six years of neglect by Washington. It is no less than the practice of Civics.