Hope, change, and togetherness.  All these words seem to embody the rhetoric of our politicians.  A hope that we can look past partisan politics and get our economy, in fact, our country, on track seems to be becoming a more and more remote proposition.  I know: let’s form another sub-committee on a sub-committee to try and understand why the Algerian Owl’s poop is brown, so that we can impress ourselves. Let’s attach a bill here or a rider there, so that we can push our own agendas.  

Of course, the first above example of the Algerian Owl is somewhat ridiculous, but so is our current state of affairs.  You begin to get the feeling that senators, house-members, and other political parcels of our system are radically disconnected from the people as a whole.  You begin to feel that they live in an alternative reality where up is down.  Where you achieve whatever you want simply based on believing hard enough.  Is this the way things are supposed to be?  Did our forefathers envision us to be this way?  I get the impression that our current politicians and political system would be an infuriating farce to them.

As much as Joe Six-pack was mentioned during the most current campaign, he was only an example of bipartisan rhetoric (the only thing people seemed to agree on).  It appears that Joe Six-pack was only the means to and end (for both parties).  

Now, this is a beer website, so where does the beer come in?  Did you know that the revolutionary fathers met in the pubs of the new world to pound out the meaning of our future country?  They debated, clawed, and fought over the most meaningful endeavor that they would ever encounter and achieved greatness by means of talking it over with a pint or two in hand.  They mingled with the common people in bars.  They fanned the flames of fortitude and rebellion among the people by meeting them in the most common of places, the pub.  They even got the common soldiers to show up to drills with the promise that kegs of beer would be present.  So, in many ways, beer was central to the establishment of this great country. 

What am I suggesting?  I am merely trying to drive home that our politicians should find ways to be more down to earth.  Haste the day that they return to the bars to flesh out what they should be doing.  All the while they will be seeing, meeting, and mingling with the common people and put them back to the fore in the political arena.  Our bar life, pub life, night-club life could be a very constructive time for all of us to settle our disagreements and reconcile us to one another (instead of it being a place of drunken stupidity). We could certainly afford to call our local politicians to account using the same medium that the greats of our past used: En Vino Veritas!  Maybe we can get passed the impasse.