For a very long time,I have felt extremely depressed and dispirited by the state of American politics and society. My disillusionment goes back decades, in fact, all the way to the 1980 presidential campaign, when President Carter battled in vain against the rising tide of American conservatism which would deliver Ronald Reagan, with his promises of tax cuts, smaller government, and more "freedom" to the White House. Carter warned that the election of his opponent would result in a tearing apart of American society with an increasing division of rich from poor, black from white, and so forth. Boy, was Carter ever right, and was America ever wrong to follow the siren-song of Reagan's smiling, flag-draped conservatism, with its grim undertones of racism, greed and militarism.
In the three decades since President Raygun took office, the conservative vision of America has dominated our political life and determined some very important social trends. Accomplishments of this era including an ever-increasing prison population, with a disproportionately high number of African-American males incarcerated, with devastating social consequences for African-American communities; an ever-increasing gap between rich and poor, which has now become better and more widely understood thanks to the "Occupy" movement; stagnation in wages for most Americans who live through paychecks rather than stock portfolios and investment dividends; an ever-expanding and ever-more expensive military domination of the world, from Reagan's Star Wars fantasies to Bush's invasions to Obama's love affair with remote control political assassination by drone; and a triumph of anti-tax, anti-government, anti-regulation, tax-cutting-solves-everything rhetoric, typified by Grover Norquist's "No New Taxes Ever For All Eternity" pledge, now followed religiously by nearly all Republican Presidential candidates, the intention of which Norquist explained as "shrinking the federal government so that it can be strangled in a bathtub," with the result that apart from blank-check military spending, our government is constrained from engaging in any kind of large government programs that might actually improves the lives of average people, from infrastructure repair to mass transit development to more support for public schools to lower cost higher education to the development of green technologies. This is Reagan's "Morning in America," and it has had a good long run of 30 plus years in ruling the mindset of the vast majority of Americans and setting the parameters of American public life...UNTIL NOW.
Occupy Wall Street has blown this tired old set of ideas and assumptions out of the water, and opened up a whole new menu of questions and possibilities for Americans to ponder. FINALLY people are realizing that government is not to blame for stagnant wages, a crashed economy, and immense suffering grounded in extreme social and economic inequality: it is the financial and corporate elite who are most responsible, as they are the ones who have been reaping great benefits while raping the rest of us. They are the ones who have made great profits with every increase in oil prices, every rise in penalties and fees on credit cards and bank accounts, every ingeniously misrepresented mortgage, every foreclosure on the poor, every lay off of workers, every pay cut to employees, every movement of factories to China and other low-wage, low-regulation havens, every reprehensible trick in the book to evade taxes, deceive investors and reward their tight little incestuous circle of crony capitalists. We have all been told this was the only way it can be, that we must simply accept and obey that we are all doomed to sinking wages, rising debt,disappearing pensions and diminishing futures...but now there is an alternative.
Let the great struggle begin! Now is the time to make a new economy and a new society that serves human needs over corporate profits! OCCUPY wherever you are!
I have been waiting thirty years for this, through the initially promising but ultimately disappointing presidencies of Bill "The Triangulator" Clinton and Barrack "The Compromiser" Obama. I really hope that this time, some change is actually going to happen.
Keep the pressure on and the questions and conversations going!
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Why Conservatives Love Guns So Very, Very, VERY Much
For many years, I have pondered the question of why so many conservative Americans have such a strong attachment to guns and make such a huge issue out of gun rights and the Second Amendment, which sometimes seems like the only part of the U.S. Constitution that they care about. Today, I want to share my own theories about this.
I think the root causes for conservatives' intense gun-love are (1) overwhelming fear of the changing world of increasing cultural and ethnic diversity that we live in, and in response to this fear, (2) a desire to cling to an idealized past version of America that they find more reassuring. That is to say, conservatives are both very very scared and very very nostalgic.
For quite some time now, beginning with the defeat of the pro-slavery Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War, American conservatives have found society changing in ways they didn't like, and have had a keen sense of frustration that they were losing the battle of ideas in American culture. What exactly do they so object to about trends in modern American (and indeed world) society? I think the main issue is loss of white privilege in the movement toward a more open society that is more accepting of equality between various ethnic, racial and/or religious groups. Remember, it was fierce resistance to Reconstruction efforts to empower blacks that set off the ugly Jim Crow laws and the paramilitary terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan.
It was the mystical "power of the gun," as well as other forms of violence including bombs and lynchings, that made it possible for white southerners to terrorize blacks and keep African-Americans in a fearful, subordinate position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was also the power of the gun that subdued the Native American "savages" so that the West could be won for white settlement, a display of race-based violence to be long celebrated in games of cowboys vs. Indians and Western films. The current "Cowboys and Aliens" film shows how our society has, to some extent, moved away from this viewpoint with a narrative that requires white cowboys and "red" Indians to work together for mutual survival.
Anyway, let's go back into the conservative dream-world of beautiful, blood-white-and-blue patriotic violence, a harmonious, segregated world intoxicatingly scented with freedom-loving gunpowder. Thanks to his trusty gun, the White Man was indeed king of the country in the late nineteenth century. King of violence and racism, I would say, though I am sure conservatives would say that this use of violence in defense of the (white) "American Way" was something entirely noble and necessary. In the twentieth century, the KKK would form chapters all across the country, even in supposedly liberal strongholds like New York State and Connecticut, demonstrating that the violent defense of white privilege was not limited to the Southern states alone.
When the Civil Right movement emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, it was countered by massive violence in the South, and the cry of "State's Rights!", reaching back to Confederate slogans of the Civil War period to justify the right of states like Alabama to refuse equal rights to blacks and other non-white Americans. It would seem that they preferred returning to the Civil War rather than risk the unspeakable horror of granting Civil Rights to non-white Americans, and one must wonder if some such sentiment is among the motivations that have made Civil War reenactment so popular in recent decades. It certainly factors into the love for the Confederate flag in the South.
When the Democratic Party became the champion of civil rights for minorities, many white Southern former members quit the party to become Republicans. In every Presidential election since the 1960s, the majority of white voters, especially in the South, have gone Republican. Where Democrats have scored a victory, as with Carter in 1976, Clinton in 1992, and Obama in 2008, the Democrats' margin of victory came from African-American voters. The same demographic dynamic applies to the Tea Party, which is an almost exclusively white movement. The Tea Party desire to limit and dismantle government obviously appeals to those who see the national government and the Democratic party as overly concerned with the civil rights of minorities and allowing the country to sink into a sewer of mixed-race multiculturalism. (Note the endless sneering and sniping in the conservative media about "political correctness;" so many are nostalgic for the day when they could feel free to make jokes about niggers and Jews and faggots and whoever else they enjoyed insulting "back in the good old days.")
The gun issue has developed into a great vote-winner for the Republican Party, which has positioned itself as the protector of the seemingly sacred "right to bear arms," in opposition to the Democratic Party, which used to advocate for gun control and careful restriction of gun rights, though it no longer seems to possess the moral or political courage to stand up for this anymore. Many Democrats lost their seats in Congress the last time there was gun-control legislation, back in 1994, largely thanks to the efforts of the NRA. If one asks gun-loving conservatives, why do people need or want so many guns, the two pat answers are "hunting" and "self-defense." When one points out that no gun control effort has ever attempted to abolish all hunting in the USA, but only to place certain reasonable restrictions to prevent potential harm or abuse, just as we do with driving or alcohol, gun-minded conservatives will commonly express disbelief that gun control is anything other than an evil plot to eliminate ALL gun use and gun ownership in the USA, or they will pivot to the second issue of self-defense. This is something that conservatives are often quite passionate about.
It is particularly in the self-defense argument that you can see the latent, even unconscious racism, blended with FEAR, like an emotional accelerant: fear that the minute they let down their guard someone is going to break into their home, rob all their possessions, kill everyone in the family, fuck their dog, cook it on the backyard grill, and then eat it. Who exactly is it that they are thinking of in these fearful fantasies? The history of Republican political advertising,such as the Willie Horton advertisement from 1988, shows that the typical fear is of blacks, particularly black men. More recently, Hispanic men, increasingly mythologized as super-violent Mexican drug-runners, have been added into the paranoid mind-mix.
Here is how I see the race-fear/gun-love matrix speaking: "See, if you got your gun, and those black or brown-skinned devils, those niggers, Mexicans, Muslims, whatever, come to your house, you can blow them all away and defend your sweet wife and angel-faced children against the inevitable evils that come from all this modern multi-culturalism and civil rights bullshit: the savage, violent blacks, browns, and others who don't know their place and need to be reminded of the one primary fact of life in these United States, that the White Man's got the gun."
In the nineteenth century so idealized by conservatives, the blessed age before horrible transgressions of the American spirit like Social Security and civil rights, the violence-enforced "proper" place for non-whites like African-Americans and Native Americans was either on plantations or reservations. Our twenty-first century equivalent is prison for the blacks, with an absolutely skyrocketing rate of incarceration for African American men, deportation for Latinos,which has actually increased under the not-really-so-liberal Obama, and the various wars against Muslim populations, another brown-hued people to be put in their place.
In recent decades, the conservatives have succeeded marvelously in their "law and order" agenda, with gun rights always available as a sure-fire way to fire up the conservative masses and distract them from thinking about anything else. Fear is now ruling the national soul, and guns and threats of violence are everywhere. Funding priorities have shifted from schools to prisons, education replaced by incarceration. National security has replaced human rights and civil rights and, it would seem, almost any kind of rights other than gun rights as the top national priority. Criminal justice is a booming major on college campuses, replacing the fading idea of social justice that was once a common phrase on the campuses of the past. Real law is CRIMINAL law, you see; real justice is PUNISHMENT and nothing else. Invading other countries and brutalizing other peoples has become commonplace, and with new technology evolving rapidly, we will soon be able to do this without risking harm to any human American soldiers. The twenty-first century Sinatra will just have to sing, "Send in the drones..." The drone is the ultimate wet-dream of irresponsible violence, sanctified by the cult of technology: the gun acting alone, as it were.
Make no mistake: The gun, and with it the conservatives, are winning the national debate, for now, anyway. Fear rules the country, and the gun is our national sweetheart; the big, hot, red-white-and-blue penis that everyone wants to stroke and suck. Why do you think there are so many cop shows on television, so many variations of CSI, Law and Order, on and on? What picture of society and human nature is reinforced by this repetition?
Public figures of all sorts from politicians to newscasters to comedians know they cannot advance any criticism of our gun-wielding enforcers, from police to soldiers. Watch for how such supposed liberal icons like Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert slobber and coo when they have military guests on their shows. Discussion of what these wars are doing to the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else we are invading this week? Maybe raise a question about the killer drones in Pakistan? Question whether the wars are morally defensible? Ask your guest how many people he has killed? Forget it; that kind of discussion doesn't happen in today's militaristic America. All must bow before The Gun and He Who Wields the Gun (or the missile, or the drone, or any other new form of the gun.)
Contrast this to critiques of police brutality and protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. Why was there no sustained outcry or movement for more restrictions on guns after the near-assassination of Gabrielle Giffords earlier in the year, or the Virginia Tech massacre a few years back, or any other such events in our sad history of national violence? Because the right has won; guns have become sacred.
This has its effect on American Paganism too. In some forms of Asatru or Heathenry, there is a great devotion to weapons. Where is that coming from, and where does it lead? These are two questions that have so disturbed me that I have taken my leave of American Asatru. Whatever spirituality is to be found through the barrel of a gun or the swing of an axe is not something that makes any sense to me.
Resist the gun.
Speak up for peace.
Fight the fear.
I believe that in the long run, the future belongs to diversity and pluralism. There really is no going back. Conservatives may want to retreat to some kind of racially, socially, and ethnically cleansed past, and may be dreaming, as Anders Behring Breivik did, of using violence to achieve or enforce that, but they will never succeed. Yes, the law-and-order, gun-obsessed, anti-diversity crowd is riding high right now, but I don't think the majority of Americans are really with them. Once the intentions of the most extreme conservatives become clear, America will reject this and return to the path it was traveling in the past that led us from the Constitution to Emancipation to Civil Rights.
And praise be to the people of Norway for not becoming fear-and-punishment obsessed in the light of their national tragedy, and for striving to maintain their very open, very supportive society. They are showing an emotional maturity and social wisdom that seems sadly lacking in the United States.
I think the root causes for conservatives' intense gun-love are (1) overwhelming fear of the changing world of increasing cultural and ethnic diversity that we live in, and in response to this fear, (2) a desire to cling to an idealized past version of America that they find more reassuring. That is to say, conservatives are both very very scared and very very nostalgic.
For quite some time now, beginning with the defeat of the pro-slavery Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War, American conservatives have found society changing in ways they didn't like, and have had a keen sense of frustration that they were losing the battle of ideas in American culture. What exactly do they so object to about trends in modern American (and indeed world) society? I think the main issue is loss of white privilege in the movement toward a more open society that is more accepting of equality between various ethnic, racial and/or religious groups. Remember, it was fierce resistance to Reconstruction efforts to empower blacks that set off the ugly Jim Crow laws and the paramilitary terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan.
It was the mystical "power of the gun," as well as other forms of violence including bombs and lynchings, that made it possible for white southerners to terrorize blacks and keep African-Americans in a fearful, subordinate position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was also the power of the gun that subdued the Native American "savages" so that the West could be won for white settlement, a display of race-based violence to be long celebrated in games of cowboys vs. Indians and Western films. The current "Cowboys and Aliens" film shows how our society has, to some extent, moved away from this viewpoint with a narrative that requires white cowboys and "red" Indians to work together for mutual survival.
Anyway, let's go back into the conservative dream-world of beautiful, blood-white-and-blue patriotic violence, a harmonious, segregated world intoxicatingly scented with freedom-loving gunpowder. Thanks to his trusty gun, the White Man was indeed king of the country in the late nineteenth century. King of violence and racism, I would say, though I am sure conservatives would say that this use of violence in defense of the (white) "American Way" was something entirely noble and necessary. In the twentieth century, the KKK would form chapters all across the country, even in supposedly liberal strongholds like New York State and Connecticut, demonstrating that the violent defense of white privilege was not limited to the Southern states alone.
When the Civil Right movement emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, it was countered by massive violence in the South, and the cry of "State's Rights!", reaching back to Confederate slogans of the Civil War period to justify the right of states like Alabama to refuse equal rights to blacks and other non-white Americans. It would seem that they preferred returning to the Civil War rather than risk the unspeakable horror of granting Civil Rights to non-white Americans, and one must wonder if some such sentiment is among the motivations that have made Civil War reenactment so popular in recent decades. It certainly factors into the love for the Confederate flag in the South.
When the Democratic Party became the champion of civil rights for minorities, many white Southern former members quit the party to become Republicans. In every Presidential election since the 1960s, the majority of white voters, especially in the South, have gone Republican. Where Democrats have scored a victory, as with Carter in 1976, Clinton in 1992, and Obama in 2008, the Democrats' margin of victory came from African-American voters. The same demographic dynamic applies to the Tea Party, which is an almost exclusively white movement. The Tea Party desire to limit and dismantle government obviously appeals to those who see the national government and the Democratic party as overly concerned with the civil rights of minorities and allowing the country to sink into a sewer of mixed-race multiculturalism. (Note the endless sneering and sniping in the conservative media about "political correctness;" so many are nostalgic for the day when they could feel free to make jokes about niggers and Jews and faggots and whoever else they enjoyed insulting "back in the good old days.")
The gun issue has developed into a great vote-winner for the Republican Party, which has positioned itself as the protector of the seemingly sacred "right to bear arms," in opposition to the Democratic Party, which used to advocate for gun control and careful restriction of gun rights, though it no longer seems to possess the moral or political courage to stand up for this anymore. Many Democrats lost their seats in Congress the last time there was gun-control legislation, back in 1994, largely thanks to the efforts of the NRA. If one asks gun-loving conservatives, why do people need or want so many guns, the two pat answers are "hunting" and "self-defense." When one points out that no gun control effort has ever attempted to abolish all hunting in the USA, but only to place certain reasonable restrictions to prevent potential harm or abuse, just as we do with driving or alcohol, gun-minded conservatives will commonly express disbelief that gun control is anything other than an evil plot to eliminate ALL gun use and gun ownership in the USA, or they will pivot to the second issue of self-defense. This is something that conservatives are often quite passionate about.
It is particularly in the self-defense argument that you can see the latent, even unconscious racism, blended with FEAR, like an emotional accelerant: fear that the minute they let down their guard someone is going to break into their home, rob all their possessions, kill everyone in the family, fuck their dog, cook it on the backyard grill, and then eat it. Who exactly is it that they are thinking of in these fearful fantasies? The history of Republican political advertising,such as the Willie Horton advertisement from 1988, shows that the typical fear is of blacks, particularly black men. More recently, Hispanic men, increasingly mythologized as super-violent Mexican drug-runners, have been added into the paranoid mind-mix.
Here is how I see the race-fear/gun-love matrix speaking: "See, if you got your gun, and those black or brown-skinned devils, those niggers, Mexicans, Muslims, whatever, come to your house, you can blow them all away and defend your sweet wife and angel-faced children against the inevitable evils that come from all this modern multi-culturalism and civil rights bullshit: the savage, violent blacks, browns, and others who don't know their place and need to be reminded of the one primary fact of life in these United States, that the White Man's got the gun."
In the nineteenth century so idealized by conservatives, the blessed age before horrible transgressions of the American spirit like Social Security and civil rights, the violence-enforced "proper" place for non-whites like African-Americans and Native Americans was either on plantations or reservations. Our twenty-first century equivalent is prison for the blacks, with an absolutely skyrocketing rate of incarceration for African American men, deportation for Latinos,which has actually increased under the not-really-so-liberal Obama, and the various wars against Muslim populations, another brown-hued people to be put in their place.
In recent decades, the conservatives have succeeded marvelously in their "law and order" agenda, with gun rights always available as a sure-fire way to fire up the conservative masses and distract them from thinking about anything else. Fear is now ruling the national soul, and guns and threats of violence are everywhere. Funding priorities have shifted from schools to prisons, education replaced by incarceration. National security has replaced human rights and civil rights and, it would seem, almost any kind of rights other than gun rights as the top national priority. Criminal justice is a booming major on college campuses, replacing the fading idea of social justice that was once a common phrase on the campuses of the past. Real law is CRIMINAL law, you see; real justice is PUNISHMENT and nothing else. Invading other countries and brutalizing other peoples has become commonplace, and with new technology evolving rapidly, we will soon be able to do this without risking harm to any human American soldiers. The twenty-first century Sinatra will just have to sing, "Send in the drones..." The drone is the ultimate wet-dream of irresponsible violence, sanctified by the cult of technology: the gun acting alone, as it were.
Make no mistake: The gun, and with it the conservatives, are winning the national debate, for now, anyway. Fear rules the country, and the gun is our national sweetheart; the big, hot, red-white-and-blue penis that everyone wants to stroke and suck. Why do you think there are so many cop shows on television, so many variations of CSI, Law and Order, on and on? What picture of society and human nature is reinforced by this repetition?
Public figures of all sorts from politicians to newscasters to comedians know they cannot advance any criticism of our gun-wielding enforcers, from police to soldiers. Watch for how such supposed liberal icons like Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert slobber and coo when they have military guests on their shows. Discussion of what these wars are doing to the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else we are invading this week? Maybe raise a question about the killer drones in Pakistan? Question whether the wars are morally defensible? Ask your guest how many people he has killed? Forget it; that kind of discussion doesn't happen in today's militaristic America. All must bow before The Gun and He Who Wields the Gun (or the missile, or the drone, or any other new form of the gun.)
Contrast this to critiques of police brutality and protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. Why was there no sustained outcry or movement for more restrictions on guns after the near-assassination of Gabrielle Giffords earlier in the year, or the Virginia Tech massacre a few years back, or any other such events in our sad history of national violence? Because the right has won; guns have become sacred.
This has its effect on American Paganism too. In some forms of Asatru or Heathenry, there is a great devotion to weapons. Where is that coming from, and where does it lead? These are two questions that have so disturbed me that I have taken my leave of American Asatru. Whatever spirituality is to be found through the barrel of a gun or the swing of an axe is not something that makes any sense to me.
Resist the gun.
Speak up for peace.
Fight the fear.
I believe that in the long run, the future belongs to diversity and pluralism. There really is no going back. Conservatives may want to retreat to some kind of racially, socially, and ethnically cleansed past, and may be dreaming, as Anders Behring Breivik did, of using violence to achieve or enforce that, but they will never succeed. Yes, the law-and-order, gun-obsessed, anti-diversity crowd is riding high right now, but I don't think the majority of Americans are really with them. Once the intentions of the most extreme conservatives become clear, America will reject this and return to the path it was traveling in the past that led us from the Constitution to Emancipation to Civil Rights.
And praise be to the people of Norway for not becoming fear-and-punishment obsessed in the light of their national tragedy, and for striving to maintain their very open, very supportive society. They are showing an emotional maturity and social wisdom that seems sadly lacking in the United States.
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ADS: American Depression Syndrome
Hello friends. I have not posted in this blog for some time as I have been feeling increasingly disillusioned with the gutless, corporate-favoring tendencies of the Obama administration and the rise to prominence of the wacky right-wing "tea party" movement, which seems determined to replace all elected officials in the USA with members of the John Birch Society. I have long faulted Obama, supposedly the greatest political communicator since Reagan, for failing to offer a convincing counter-narrative to replace the one implanted in our consciousness by Saint Ronnie: "big government = bad; big military = good; military invasion = good; social programs to help the poor = bad; all hail the entrepreneur and the sacred tax cut."
Obama, like Clinton before him, continues to govern as if there were no possible alternative to the Gospel of Ronnie. Remember Clinton kowtowing to the Republicans and helpfully declaring, "The Era of Big Government is over?" Obama is no better. As with Clinton, we are going to see lots of small, positive actions by the government, things like improved civil rights enforcement, tighter environmental and financial industry regulations, all of which are welcome in themselves, but which fail to be supported and protected by any kind of overarching ideological framework. And so when Republicans attack Obama for increasing the size or role of government, he is unable to make a clear case for why in certain areas of society, it is GOOD to have "big government," unable to cogently explain why leaving things to "big business" over the last thirty-odd years has not really worked out very well, as evidenced by the growing gap between rich and poor in this country, the failure of businesses to raise the average worker's wages even when companies realize enormous gains in productivity and profit; and finally, the coup de grace, the collapse of Wall Street followed by the government bail-out of Wall Street.
I want a leader who is actually PROUD of our government and the liberal tradition of successful government programs from Social Security to the minimum wage to civil rights legislation to environmental regulation to Medicare and Medicaid to student loans, all of which were opposed by anti-government Republicans. I don't want a leader who apologetically whimpers, "Well, people, we're going to have to expand government a little bit to help with the current situation, but DON'T WORRY, it is only a temporary measure, and we will turn management of most things over to the wise management of the corporate sphere as soon as possible." With the huge problems we are facing, such as massive unemployment and collapsing infrastructure, to name but two of the most pressing, we really need a major government response, not just little tax cuts, grants and financial incentives here and there as the Obama administration is providing.
The unemployment and infrastructure problems could be simultaneously addressed by a massive public works program to rebuild highways, bridges, train tracks, sewers and public schools, all of which are badly in need of repair and renovation, the lack of which will seriously hamper our future economic growth if they are not attended to quickly. But is the Obama administration boldly pushing in this direction? NO. They are making some small moves, but nothing near to commensurate with the actual scale of need. One third of last year's much-maligned $787 billion stimulus program was TAX CUTS, a nod to the Republicans, who as you will recall, loudly and cheerfully commended Obama for reaching out to them in this matter. (Note: sarcasm.)
Since neither Obama nor the Democrats in Congress are boldly and expeditiously advancing programs to quickly put people to work and take care of other pressing needs like mortgage foreclosure, they are perceived, with some justification, as only caring about the financial elite on Wall Street, who did after all get very quick and thorough attention when they were in crisis, unlike the millions of Americans suffering unemployment and loss of their homes. This has given an opening to the right-wing Tea Party types, who may have no real answers to any of these problems, but do know how to articulate anger and frustration, play on fears of "big government," and throw in occasional racist allusions, to please the older white voters who were never entirely thrilled about electing a black president to begin with. Ugh! What a mess.
Why doesn't Obama step up and tell people the truth: that America needs to wake up and start catching up with the rest of the industrialized world, where government does provide universal health care, does maintain infrastructure, does support arts and culture, does provide a social safety net for the poor and unemployed such as we threw away in the last 30 years, and so on and so on. He won't do it because he is scared of the anti-government conservatives, who continue to rule the roost as far as the general American mindset regarding government's role in society is concerned. It would be a hard-fought battle to alter that mindset, to get back to a time when the American people trusted their government to do big things like send a man to the moon, instead of relying on the corporate world to provide space travel services, which is the latest news out of NASA under the Obama administration, incidentally.
It has been the dream of anti-government conservatives since the 1980s to so degrade and cripple the federal government that people would turn against it, and it seems they have succeeded. Coming into office on a platform of hope and change, Obama had a chance to re-write the narrative, to forcefully reject the anti-government mindset. At this time, it seems that not only has he has failed, but that he didn't even try very hard. His strange devotion to "bipartisanship" has been extremely regrettable, as it has played right into Republican desire for deadlock as "proof" of the evils of government.
I do despair. I fear we are headed for third-world status, to a society with mediocre schools and public services, where corporations rule what is left of the people's government, where the average person sits drooling in front of televisions and computer screens blasting sports shows, mindless "reality" programs, and endless variations on police and hospital dramas, and where the only areas in which America is truly #1 is in the number of people we keep in prison, and a bloated military endlessly invading and harassing other people around the world, predictably inciting vicious terrorist responses, justifying further U.S. invasions in the name of "protecting our freedoms" while in actuality only advancing the corporate interests of the military-industrial complex and swelling the ranks of those willing to take up arms against the American aggressor.
Welcome to the 21st Century. Remember, you (Americans) are living in the greatest country in the world. Everyone else envies you. Everyone around the world wishes they could come to America, shop in our shopping malls, experience learning in our fabulous schools, live in our ugly McMansions, which typify our famously high regard for architecture and aesthetics, enjoy the art and culture so generously promoted in every community, seek financial success in our wonderful casinos, and should they not find it, enjoy the full range of social services provided free of cost in our prisons. This is indeed paradise. Thank the Great White God that Big Government did not stand in the way of our attainment of perfection.
Obama, like Clinton before him, continues to govern as if there were no possible alternative to the Gospel of Ronnie. Remember Clinton kowtowing to the Republicans and helpfully declaring, "The Era of Big Government is over?" Obama is no better. As with Clinton, we are going to see lots of small, positive actions by the government, things like improved civil rights enforcement, tighter environmental and financial industry regulations, all of which are welcome in themselves, but which fail to be supported and protected by any kind of overarching ideological framework. And so when Republicans attack Obama for increasing the size or role of government, he is unable to make a clear case for why in certain areas of society, it is GOOD to have "big government," unable to cogently explain why leaving things to "big business" over the last thirty-odd years has not really worked out very well, as evidenced by the growing gap between rich and poor in this country, the failure of businesses to raise the average worker's wages even when companies realize enormous gains in productivity and profit; and finally, the coup de grace, the collapse of Wall Street followed by the government bail-out of Wall Street.
I want a leader who is actually PROUD of our government and the liberal tradition of successful government programs from Social Security to the minimum wage to civil rights legislation to environmental regulation to Medicare and Medicaid to student loans, all of which were opposed by anti-government Republicans. I don't want a leader who apologetically whimpers, "Well, people, we're going to have to expand government a little bit to help with the current situation, but DON'T WORRY, it is only a temporary measure, and we will turn management of most things over to the wise management of the corporate sphere as soon as possible." With the huge problems we are facing, such as massive unemployment and collapsing infrastructure, to name but two of the most pressing, we really need a major government response, not just little tax cuts, grants and financial incentives here and there as the Obama administration is providing.
The unemployment and infrastructure problems could be simultaneously addressed by a massive public works program to rebuild highways, bridges, train tracks, sewers and public schools, all of which are badly in need of repair and renovation, the lack of which will seriously hamper our future economic growth if they are not attended to quickly. But is the Obama administration boldly pushing in this direction? NO. They are making some small moves, but nothing near to commensurate with the actual scale of need. One third of last year's much-maligned $787 billion stimulus program was TAX CUTS, a nod to the Republicans, who as you will recall, loudly and cheerfully commended Obama for reaching out to them in this matter. (Note: sarcasm.)
Since neither Obama nor the Democrats in Congress are boldly and expeditiously advancing programs to quickly put people to work and take care of other pressing needs like mortgage foreclosure, they are perceived, with some justification, as only caring about the financial elite on Wall Street, who did after all get very quick and thorough attention when they were in crisis, unlike the millions of Americans suffering unemployment and loss of their homes. This has given an opening to the right-wing Tea Party types, who may have no real answers to any of these problems, but do know how to articulate anger and frustration, play on fears of "big government," and throw in occasional racist allusions, to please the older white voters who were never entirely thrilled about electing a black president to begin with. Ugh! What a mess.
Why doesn't Obama step up and tell people the truth: that America needs to wake up and start catching up with the rest of the industrialized world, where government does provide universal health care, does maintain infrastructure, does support arts and culture, does provide a social safety net for the poor and unemployed such as we threw away in the last 30 years, and so on and so on. He won't do it because he is scared of the anti-government conservatives, who continue to rule the roost as far as the general American mindset regarding government's role in society is concerned. It would be a hard-fought battle to alter that mindset, to get back to a time when the American people trusted their government to do big things like send a man to the moon, instead of relying on the corporate world to provide space travel services, which is the latest news out of NASA under the Obama administration, incidentally.
It has been the dream of anti-government conservatives since the 1980s to so degrade and cripple the federal government that people would turn against it, and it seems they have succeeded. Coming into office on a platform of hope and change, Obama had a chance to re-write the narrative, to forcefully reject the anti-government mindset. At this time, it seems that not only has he has failed, but that he didn't even try very hard. His strange devotion to "bipartisanship" has been extremely regrettable, as it has played right into Republican desire for deadlock as "proof" of the evils of government.
I do despair. I fear we are headed for third-world status, to a society with mediocre schools and public services, where corporations rule what is left of the people's government, where the average person sits drooling in front of televisions and computer screens blasting sports shows, mindless "reality" programs, and endless variations on police and hospital dramas, and where the only areas in which America is truly #1 is in the number of people we keep in prison, and a bloated military endlessly invading and harassing other people around the world, predictably inciting vicious terrorist responses, justifying further U.S. invasions in the name of "protecting our freedoms" while in actuality only advancing the corporate interests of the military-industrial complex and swelling the ranks of those willing to take up arms against the American aggressor.
Welcome to the 21st Century. Remember, you (Americans) are living in the greatest country in the world. Everyone else envies you. Everyone around the world wishes they could come to America, shop in our shopping malls, experience learning in our fabulous schools, live in our ugly McMansions, which typify our famously high regard for architecture and aesthetics, enjoy the art and culture so generously promoted in every community, seek financial success in our wonderful casinos, and should they not find it, enjoy the full range of social services provided free of cost in our prisons. This is indeed paradise. Thank the Great White God that Big Government did not stand in the way of our attainment of perfection.
Labels:
bipartisanship,
Clinton,
government,
infrastructure,
John Birch Society,
liberal,
Obama,
Reagan,
taxes,
Tea Party
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