I don't think I'm feeling very Tao today.

Two arguments today so far with coworkers about matters political and spiritual. The first was in response to the New Jersey Supreme Court's decision to allow the Democratic Party to select an alternate candidate (the venerable former Senator Frank Lautenberg) for Robert Toricelli, whose scandal-plagued Senatorial re-election bid caused him to melt down and bow out with less than forty days to go. Since Jersey election law normally forbids any such substitution after the 51-day mark, the Dems had to take their case to court, and despite the fact that the State Supreme Court there had a majority of Reagan-Bush appointees, the justices voted 7-0 in favor of allowing Lautenberg to run in Toricelli's stead. Needless to say, the Republicans are hopping mad about this. This includes my coworker Richard, an otherwise sensible individual who happens to be gung-ho for Bush and the conservative cause in general, although at times I suspect his zeal for the Republican Party is more an attempt to go against the grain in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which makes no bones about being a proud liberal stronghold. When I came in this morning, he was raring to go. He knows full well that New Jersey is my home State, so he wasted no time in needling me about the Jersey Supremes' "outrageous" decision. Taking the bait, I pointed out that the court's ruling was consistent with precedent, as New Jersey election law allows for last-minute candidate substitution in case of emergency; he countered that switching because you know you're going to lose (and Toricelli was not doing well in the polls at all, thanks to his questionable ethics) is hardly an emergency, and that the Dems were only doing this for political reasons, pure and simple. Fine, I said, so what if that's the truth of the matter - wasn't Florida all about winning, too? If so, then why didn't he call out the Republicans when they shamefully made a federal case out of State sovereignty with regards to the 2000 Presidential election? Besides, there's little to stop the GOP from taking this beef to Rehnquist and Company as well, and we all know how that one will end, since the current members of the United States Supreme Court have decided that voting on personal ideology and party affiliation is more important than the spirit and intent of the law. Check and mate.

I will grant my coworker one point in his gripe, and unfortunately it's a big and troubling one. "It is in the public interest and the general interest of the election laws to preserve the two-party system and to submit to the electorate ballot bearing the names of candidates of both major political parties as well as of all qualifying parties and groups," the ruling reads (my italics). Regardless of the merits of the Dems' special pleading - and I think their case, however politically motivated, was grounded in enough precedent to be valid, and unlike my coworker, I believe that Toricelli truly had something akin to a nervous breakdown, since right up until this point he was all hell-bent on running against his record, right or wrong - I do not believe that preserving the tyranny of a two-party system should be the intended goal of any democracy. Our Founding Fathers' worst fear is that we would become a government of parties, not individuals, and despite their best efforts to avoid it, that's exactly what has happened. Only whereas before, when grassroots and third-party challenges could actually make a difference, the Democrats and Republicans are so well-entrenched that they are able to monopolize (or would it be duopolize?) the election process entirely, even locking alternate candidates out of debates with the help of the law, as was done with three gubernatorial contenders here in Massachusetts this week, and back in the 2000 Presidential election with the exclusion of Ralph Nader from any of the Bush-Gore debates. It disturbs me that upholding the sanctity of the two ruling political parties is an unwritten axiom that is now bending our written laws, especially since I'm of the growing opinion that the difference between DNP and GOP evaporates a little more every day - witness the Congress' huge cave-in on authorizing the President to launch his Sicilian Expedition against the nation of Iraq.

Okay, argument number two. We have working here at the library a born-again Buddhist, who brings to her newfound Eastern religion a decidedly Christian zeal, especially when she gets a chance to point out the spiritual shortcomings of her unenlightened peers. Normally I choose not to cross swords with her, having learned early on that she's like a force of nature, and that it's more fun to watch her exasperate other people with her senseless (and most un-Buddha-like) raging than it is to try to win an argument with her. But I think the political melee with my other coworker got my blood all angered up, so I decided not to play it safe. The conversation had something to do with nature and our tenuous relationship with it, and how recent meteorological events might suggest that Mother Nature was angry with us, so I said something crass about going after Mother Nature first, before she has a chance to finish us off. Tongue-in-cheek comments don't sit well with the BAB, so suddenly I found myself being berated for lacking a proper relationship with God, since we all know that Mother Nature is God - again, I'm not sure if that's the official Buddhist party line, but then again the BAB's personal theology is a remarkable collage of doctrines cut-and-pasted from myriad faiths, with Buddha and the whole karma thing sort of acting like the glue. Now don't get me wrong, I think I agreed with most of what the BAB had to say about Mankind's track record with the natural world, but I always get my back up when people tell me what I think God should or shouldn't be. Personally I veer between two concepts of divinity - a shiny happy Force-like interconnectedness, or an adversarial God with whom I have a bone to pick, a la the Ancient Greeks and their concept of theomachein (literally, to fight with the gods). Either the universe is unfolding exactly as it should - my Tao thing, which failed me so brilliantly this morning - or the cosmos is a hostile place by design or lack of design, and life itself a struggle. I'm not sure which theology I'll take with me when I get out of bed, or even if I won't suddenly flip from the one to the other during the course of my day, but even then I'd hardly call them cut-and dried. I hate dogma. Dogma got people like my great-great-great-great-great (to the Nth power) granduncle Giordano burned at the stake, so even if the spiritual goods being peddled are nice, clean, harmless Buddhist family values, I'm still not interested in buying.

And now I'm back to feeling Tao. Funny, how a little catharsis will do that for you.