Sorry for the uninspired title but I just have a lot of half-formed, loosely-connected thoughts floating through my head about what seems to be unfolding in my country today. I have to say "my country" because it is my country too, regardless of what the placards continuously read about certain pea-brained, psychopathic protesters' conception of America being only for right-wingers. I served this country, worked, paid taxes, bought property, debate people in this country too and I go to church in America as well, though mine doesn't expound on the merits of killing police officers at funerals. I previously hypothosized that we are seeing an anti-democratic, anti-liberal faction forming in America composed of the economic elite waging class war on the majority and the working class, bewildered herd that buys the business message and marches boldly to the beat of their own emiseration.
Who are these people in the trenches? One poster on Huffpo described the teabaggers as the squares from the sixties who had nothing to march for and nothing to believe in finally getting their chance to emulate the social movements of that era. Angry, racist, selfish, ignorant people who see this as an opportunity to "take back" the country for their kind through whatever means neccessary. Could this be the breakdown of law and order seen by the "silent majority" of Nixon in reverse? My nightmare is seeing gray-haired, pot-bellied and gun-wielding 'wingers outside the polling places intimidating the new "silent majority" into staying home and thus, electing more business class-warriors to further wreck my country.
In other words, a bully coup. Reducing America to tyranny in the name of "freedom", this hypocricy does not even seem to register in tea-baggers' heads. The same goes for accusations of racism, no matter how blatent, the indignation is always at the accuser. These are the same people who denounced anyone critical of Bush administration policies as a traitor but seem to have no problem criticising any aspect of the Obama administration. Unhinged, armed, and angry at everything but that which is really causing them harm, I fear these extremists will be conducting random acts of domestic terrorism for years to come.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
What goes around
The latest round of violence, vandalism and intimidation coming out of the right-wing anti-everything coalition is alarming. Are we witnessing an irreversible trend against the rule of law and republican tradition in America? Or is this merely the continuation of juvenile but sometimes deadly foot-stamping by the ever-present reactionary minority?
Now Cantor's dumb-ass attempt at projection has doubled down the "so what?" response of republican official glee over sending their minions to physically intimidate the governing majority of Democrats. I guess it's not actually lying when you interpret events in the most paranoid and delusional way possible. So as usual, "lone wolves" har har get to send faxed pictures of nooses to black congressmen, windows busted at Democratic offices, and threats conveyed by voicemail (really? are the tea-baggers so old they don't understand how caller ID works?) and the beneficiaries of bullying get to stand there and cutely explain how "you filthy libs brought it on yourselves" without even a hint of fear about what goes around...
You can even look historically to know that political violence by right-wingers is rarely punished. Looking back really far, Constantine is remembered as this wonderful guy who unified the Roman Empire and legalized Christianity while his hagiographers gloss over the rotten, bullying tactics he used. He essentially destroyed the tetrarchic system established by Diocletian which stabilized the empire after 50 years of bully boys ripping it apart. In our own past, you have the Know-Nothings beating the pants off of immigrants with almost no retribution.
Abraham Lincoln was also legally elected by a majority and the South initiated the most brazen act of bully boy antics the country has ever seen (the parallels between Lincoln and Obama run far deeper than the "team of rivals" thesis). Then after the civilized and progressive North finally manned up to oppose the confederate foot-stampers, which regrettably took much longer than it should have and laid the foundations of corporate power rotting the republic to this day, the South was so intransigent that they resisted even admitting the idea that they lost. It took almost a century for the "redemption" thesis to finally fall into the dustbin of academic history but Gone with the Wind and thousands of "the South will rise again" bumper stickers attest to the idea that white Southerners do whatever they feel like with no apologies.
Everyone knows that the Nazi Brownshirts ran amok in Weimar Germany, cracking skulls of anyone who got in the way of the Machtergreifung or fascist seizure of power, but how many people today know that the other side, the Social Democrats, had a paramilitary force of their own called the Stahlhelm? And there were more SD paramilitaries than SAs? It was not an insignificant factor in Hitler's rise that the Social Democrats tried to take the high road and not resist. History would be very different if the Left had the balls to fight back, both in 1860s-70s America or 1930's Germany. Lesson being that Democrats today ignore right-wing, reactionary violence and threats thereof at their own peril.
George W. Bush seemed to echo this in some ways when ignoring the "failure" his Iraq occupation. There were other, profit-motivated, reasons for refusing to even attempt to scale back the violence but perhaps ole' W remembered who his adopted confederate homeland was able to outlast the "Northern, Federal occupation" by exhausting Republican efforts to reconstruct the South so Confederates could get back to the business of their feudalistic "tradition" of white supremacy and rule by aristocracy.
So, what goes around doesn't always come around. In fact, it rarely does. And civilization and democracy suffer for it. Freedom and liberty in the liberal sense guarantee that the rights of reactionary elements, who hate democracy and freedom for all, are protected in order to give plenty of room to those who would destroy that very system that protects them. The old saying is that evil wins when good does nothing. While the system of absolutism and tyranny that reactionaries often bring with it is good for those at the very top, Americans being led by those top 1%ers to oppose the blandly moderate program of Barack Obama and Democrats should remember that life gets far worse for the majority, of which most of them will remain in. Tea partiers and others righteously angry at the plundering of society by the top 1% would do well to consider John Rawls' philosophy of the veil of ignorance and not trust to the "benevolent" business interests they seem to place so much hope for the future in.
Now Cantor's dumb-ass attempt at projection has doubled down the "so what?" response of republican official glee over sending their minions to physically intimidate the governing majority of Democrats. I guess it's not actually lying when you interpret events in the most paranoid and delusional way possible. So as usual, "lone wolves" har har get to send faxed pictures of nooses to black congressmen, windows busted at Democratic offices, and threats conveyed by voicemail (really? are the tea-baggers so old they don't understand how caller ID works?) and the beneficiaries of bullying get to stand there and cutely explain how "you filthy libs brought it on yourselves" without even a hint of fear about what goes around...
You can even look historically to know that political violence by right-wingers is rarely punished. Looking back really far, Constantine is remembered as this wonderful guy who unified the Roman Empire and legalized Christianity while his hagiographers gloss over the rotten, bullying tactics he used. He essentially destroyed the tetrarchic system established by Diocletian which stabilized the empire after 50 years of bully boys ripping it apart. In our own past, you have the Know-Nothings beating the pants off of immigrants with almost no retribution.
Abraham Lincoln was also legally elected by a majority and the South initiated the most brazen act of bully boy antics the country has ever seen (the parallels between Lincoln and Obama run far deeper than the "team of rivals" thesis). Then after the civilized and progressive North finally manned up to oppose the confederate foot-stampers, which regrettably took much longer than it should have and laid the foundations of corporate power rotting the republic to this day, the South was so intransigent that they resisted even admitting the idea that they lost. It took almost a century for the "redemption" thesis to finally fall into the dustbin of academic history but Gone with the Wind and thousands of "the South will rise again" bumper stickers attest to the idea that white Southerners do whatever they feel like with no apologies.
Everyone knows that the Nazi Brownshirts ran amok in Weimar Germany, cracking skulls of anyone who got in the way of the Machtergreifung or fascist seizure of power, but how many people today know that the other side, the Social Democrats, had a paramilitary force of their own called the Stahlhelm? And there were more SD paramilitaries than SAs? It was not an insignificant factor in Hitler's rise that the Social Democrats tried to take the high road and not resist. History would be very different if the Left had the balls to fight back, both in 1860s-70s America or 1930's Germany. Lesson being that Democrats today ignore right-wing, reactionary violence and threats thereof at their own peril.
George W. Bush seemed to echo this in some ways when ignoring the "failure" his Iraq occupation. There were other, profit-motivated, reasons for refusing to even attempt to scale back the violence but perhaps ole' W remembered who his adopted confederate homeland was able to outlast the "Northern, Federal occupation" by exhausting Republican efforts to reconstruct the South so Confederates could get back to the business of their feudalistic "tradition" of white supremacy and rule by aristocracy.
So, what goes around doesn't always come around. In fact, it rarely does. And civilization and democracy suffer for it. Freedom and liberty in the liberal sense guarantee that the rights of reactionary elements, who hate democracy and freedom for all, are protected in order to give plenty of room to those who would destroy that very system that protects them. The old saying is that evil wins when good does nothing. While the system of absolutism and tyranny that reactionaries often bring with it is good for those at the very top, Americans being led by those top 1%ers to oppose the blandly moderate program of Barack Obama and Democrats should remember that life gets far worse for the majority, of which most of them will remain in. Tea partiers and others righteously angry at the plundering of society by the top 1% would do well to consider John Rawls' philosophy of the veil of ignorance and not trust to the "benevolent" business interests they seem to place so much hope for the future in.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
My Turn
I have been doing my best so far to keep abreast of developments on the health care front and so many things run through my mind on what has happened to this society, this state and the dream that was America. First and foremost, that kind of statement has been coming out of the other side so frequently as to make it meaningless. To try and peel back all the layers in order to see how we got to the present situation of debased, vulgar and utterly hopeless state of polarization is the subject of a multi-volume book, not a blog. It will suffice to repeat Noam Chomsky's statement that there has always been a significant portion of upper-class Americans waging a class war on the rest of us. There has also been a significant portion of working-class Americans that are really angry at the government and their fellow Americans regardless of who is in charge or what their relative power and status are.
Bringing those two elements together, as they are today, is part and parcel why elected officials of the governing party are being spat on and called all manner of nasty names by the angry people, directed by the class warriors. Neither one of these factions believe in democracy, or the rights of people they do not like; instead believing in their right to rule by force, propaganda and manipulation in whatever combination is most expedient.
At the core of the current state of the union: we face great crises in many areas, almost too many to count. You have to be an idiot to not believe the health insurance system is broken, or that this is one symptom of the nearly unprecedented income and wealth inequality in America. The trouble is that the villians benefit from this and do whatever they can to convince the angry peasants that not only is this situation not the villains' fault, but either it is the Democrats' fault or just the inevitable and natural evolution of American society. It does not matter what the little people believe as long as their rightly felt anger is directed away from the real cause.
Why they have been so successful is the subject of another day. I am proud that my party finally showed some backbone and used their majority to pass legislation that will make a difference in many people's lives. It is not perfect, I admit (which is not the same thing as outright rejecting the right of the governing party to pass legislation) but it is a start. More importantly, something was passed. The republicans and their angry mobs still defiantly act like they rule, when they were soundly defeated. Also, this is a crucial first step in reasserting the authority and sovereignity of the elected government over corporate interests, specifically the insurance companies who until now felt they ruled the country in partnership with other corporations.
Bringing those two elements together, as they are today, is part and parcel why elected officials of the governing party are being spat on and called all manner of nasty names by the angry people, directed by the class warriors. Neither one of these factions believe in democracy, or the rights of people they do not like; instead believing in their right to rule by force, propaganda and manipulation in whatever combination is most expedient.
At the core of the current state of the union: we face great crises in many areas, almost too many to count. You have to be an idiot to not believe the health insurance system is broken, or that this is one symptom of the nearly unprecedented income and wealth inequality in America. The trouble is that the villians benefit from this and do whatever they can to convince the angry peasants that not only is this situation not the villains' fault, but either it is the Democrats' fault or just the inevitable and natural evolution of American society. It does not matter what the little people believe as long as their rightly felt anger is directed away from the real cause.
Why they have been so successful is the subject of another day. I am proud that my party finally showed some backbone and used their majority to pass legislation that will make a difference in many people's lives. It is not perfect, I admit (which is not the same thing as outright rejecting the right of the governing party to pass legislation) but it is a start. More importantly, something was passed. The republicans and their angry mobs still defiantly act like they rule, when they were soundly defeated. Also, this is a crucial first step in reasserting the authority and sovereignity of the elected government over corporate interests, specifically the insurance companies who until now felt they ruled the country in partnership with other corporations.
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