WHO STOLE THE SHEET MUSIC TO OUR DEMOCRACY?

I have a good friend who says "the best cure for democracy's current problems is more democracy." At first it sounds good, but listen closer and you can pick out the discordant notes in his melody. A discordance that is killing us in 4/4/ time...!

What my friend, an experienced lawyer, means is that our democracy operates as as a great bawdy orchestra of ideas and power. Clashing voter ideas and competing vested-interest power get a little messy, sure, but in the long run the performance comes out for the best. Something like the verdicts from an arguing jury. Well, at least that's how lawyers and the Founding Fathers want to hear our constitutional composition.

In reality, our 18th C democratic composition isn't playing all that well given our 21st C cacophony of off-key rival players. Democrats vs Republicans...rich vs poor...labor vs management...white vs others...warriors vs peaceniks ...big business vs anything in the way of big profits. When our democracy was smaller, these discordant notes eventually came together in a kind of successful coda. We survived our civil war, we conquered our continent, and we beat the bad guys in two world wars, didn't we?

However, the melody line of our democracy has grown ever more fractured. In each of those contentious times, we eventually found a conductor who could somehow help orchestrate the disparate parts into a smashingly successful conclusion. There was Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson and FDR at the podium wielding the baton. In our times -- just when the issues at home and abroad have grown exponentially more complex and dangerous -- the players are less willing to watch any baton!

Reagan, Clinton, Bush and now Obama -- each stands at the podium trying to conduct an orchestra in which the strings don't play with the horns, and the percussion section totally ignores the bass section.The explanation...? Well, after all this is a democracy in which solos are what count...!

With so many soloists insisting on their own sheet music -- each backed up with hundreds of millions of media and lobby and blogger support -- it sounds like there will never again be another maestro. My lawyer friend sniffs that would mean "repressing" the players' rights, and "stifling" the free flow of notes which constitute the essence of a democracy.

Look -- I applaud the principles of democracy with as much grateful self-interest as the next player. But it's the performance that frightens me lately. When every lobbyist or international corporation or powerful privateer can marshal hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate public opinion, stage calculated protests, and scream lie in the halls of Congress -- well, we have a problem Houston! And simply saying more democracy is the answer to the crisis is something like saying to a drowning man: "More water!"