I was truly on a blogroll and then...
...I had to drill four borings in Wilsonville.
I've been up every morning since Monday at four and working long past dark. It's been effing cold, and today it's supposed to get worse - driving rain and temperatures in the low forties. I'm whacked, and so posting's been light.
And in all honesty the recent destruction of the Occupy sites in Portland, Oakland, and NYC has me truly, viciously depressed. Sucking-the-muzzle depressed. What-the-fuck-are-you-people-thinking depressed.
Here are people, committed people, concerned people, trying to tell you politicians and plutocrats that returning this country to the political and economic land of the Gilded Age might...just might...ALSO return us to anarchist bombings, labor riots, and the Upton Sinclair jungle of violent urban poor and rural squalor...and your reaction is to flex-cuff 'em and and ignore 'em?
Yes, they're annoying. Yes, they're all over your nice little parks. Yes, you'd rather not think about what they're talking about just bybeing there. But...instead of reflecting on the past fifty years of relative peace and prosperity they'rer trying to talk about returning to, you're doubling down on the Boss Tweed plutocratic fucking crazy?
Are you fucking insane?
You WANT to hand your country over to the sort of malefactors of great wealth that created and then destroyed the Mortgage Bubble Economy that landed us in the Lesser Depression?
And yet you can STILL find the time and money to chase some raggedy-assed muj around the hills of West Buttfuckistan?
As they say on Mandalore: Kaysh mirsh solus. Your fucking brain cell is lonely.
And speaking of Mandos, right now I'm feeling kinda all kinds of Mando about my "leaders" - in Portland, fucking Bloomberg in NYC, inside the Beltway...and not in a good way. Specifically, "Ib'tuur jatne tuur ash'ad kyr'amur"
It's a good day for someone else to die. and I can think of a number right off the top of my head.
And now I have to go out in the wind and rain and make a living.
Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Blind Spot
I deleted a post today.
That's something I don't know if I've ever done in the history of this blog, and it bugged me enough to make me want to write about it.
Yesterday I wrote two posts about "Veteran's Day", one of which is still up, the Sassoon quote, and unexceptional as such. Just the usual sort of thing I think about on these "God and the soldier we adore..." sorts of "holidays".
But the other was a rumination on the lot of women in war, and made particular mention of the horrors visited on the women of Germany in 1945. And the very first and only comment took me to task, implicitly, for being a traitorous Hun-lover and explicitly for not mentioning all the nasty things that the Nazis did in Poland and Russia and the fascist Japanese did in China, the Philippines, Honolulu and Wake (Wake?) (and, rather ridiculously in my opinion, that the Al Qaeda thugs did in New York City - and the Pentagon, which is like giving the 8th Air Force shit for bombing Luftwaffe HQ - as if the murderous individual acts of nasty criminals were the equivalent of international war) along with the bad stuff that happened to "enemy" women.
Well, that set me back on my heels.
And I re-read that post. And, sure enough, I did mention lots of places that the U.S. Army had fought in WW2, Vietnam, and the modern Middle East. Well, along with Brazzaville in the Congo and Coventry. And Hue, where the atrocities were visited upon the women of Hue by the communist invaders during Tet). But the bulk of the places I talked about were where the women of the enemies of our country had been subjected to atrocity.
And no question that while the hurricane of rape visited on Germany in 1945 was and is unequalled in modern history (the Germans themselves butchered their way through western Russia and the Ukraine but there is and never has been any suggestion of the sort of universal raping that was unleashed by the Soviet support troops in eastern Germany in the last year of WW2) overall the savagery visited on women in China and the other southeast Asian conquests by the Japanese Army, and in places like Poland and Russia by the German is orders of magnitude more bestial than anything the U.S. has visited on our enemies.
Was I, then, being overly harsh on my own nation for our conduct in war?
And, as I re-read that post, I think I was.
And rather than try and revise it or repair it I simply killed it.
Because what I would have ended up doing was trying to one-up the dead and maimed, trying to compare and contrast one atrocity against another, and that's beyond vile.
That's just despicable.
If any one thing has sickened me about war it is the unquenchable human need to trump the "enemy" suffering with one's own. You see it at it's worst in the eastern Levant, where the mutual atrocities visited on one anothers' innocents by Israelis on the one hand and the congeries of Arab states and entities on the other is endlessly paraded about to try and top the other side's grievances. So the dead of Deir Yassin or Gaza are used to try and justify the dead in a bus station bombing in Jerusalem or the kibbutz kids killed by Syrian shells or Hezbollah rockets.
All that is very human, and I am no less tempted than any other human, though I try to fight down the caveman instinct to simply assume that "Him hurt me because him bad". Some enemies ARE "bad" - the Nazis were as "bad" as any human ideal ever was. But many are just that - enemies because we want something they have, or because they want something we have, or just because we BOTH want something and can't agree to share it.
But I wondered...do I have a blind spot to "enemy" atrocities? In all my attempts to "see both sides" do I come down harder on the evil done in my name, in my country's name, than TO my country and my countrymen? Am I a secret traitor, a Hun-lover, a terrorist-hugger?
And I had to sit and think about that for a long, long time.
And here's what I think.
I think I AM harder on my own country, on my fellow soldiers, than on our enemies. I think I do stress the shame we do more than the shame done to us.
And if that makes me a treacherous enemy-embracer, then I'm OK with that.
And here's why.
Because here's the thing; our enemies often ARE our enemies because they believe and do some pretty vile and despicable things. Our history is as blotted as any nation's - we pretty much screwed the natives, and the Mexicans in the 1840's, and the Hawaiians and Filipinos in the 1890's, and the folks in Latin America pretty much all the time.
But we've also fought on the side of the angels, and more often than many nations. The fascist Japanese, the Nazi Germans, the communist Soviets or North Koreans or Chinese, the takifiri Islamists - those groups and the people who belong to them explicitly reject the notions that all men are created equal. That there should be liberty and justice for all. That people should be free from religious tyranny, from organized oppression. All the things that MY country stands or says it stands for, and I take my country at its word. And in fighting them we ARE doing a good thing in the larger sense.
Their acts, and those of their armed forces, are consistent with their beliefs; they did, and do, vile and inhumane things to weak people, women, and children, that they could have spared had they chosen to do so. That they did not disgusts and angers me, but neither surprises nor enrages me because it betrays my beliefs. I believe that those systems are vile and by their actions those who do their work confirm my beliefs.
At the same time I am proud of the promise of my own country, so when I, or others of my own breeding, do things that don't live up to that pride I am ashamed. And that shame brings with it rage at myself, for not standing up against those acts, or at those who committed them.
That is unfair, in that I am holding my own to higher standards than I hold my enemies. But I believe that in this sense our Constitution and our announced values ARE a suicide pact; if we fail to uphold them, if we judge ourselves not by our own professed values but by our merits relative to the worst beliefs we can think of, then we have indeed committed suicide. We have killed the best and the most hopeful within ourselves and our nation. I hold my nation to a higher standard as I would hold myself to a higher standard, or my own children. I would be more merciless to myself or my son for cheating, or lying, or stealing, or killing, than I would a stranger.
So if we, my country and I, kill innocents, even in error; if we torture our helpless chattels; if we seize and hold even the guilty without trial or, worse, without any sort of accountability or law whatsoever; if we do worse than we could because others have done even worse then we are guilty of not just crime but mistakes. We have made the fundamental error of losing our and our nation's ideals.
And that matters.
Because the United States is nothing if NOT an ideal. We are not Germany or France or Cambodia, a nation because of the language we speak or the way we look or the place we live in or the God we worship. We come from many places, speak many tongues, think and worship and believe many different things.
What ties us into one nation, indivisible, is the beliefs in the great words written into our national birth certificate; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
And if we forget that and become the sort of people we have chosen for our enemies and visit among them the sorts of cruelty they would visit upon us, then we are, indeed, in danger of perishing from the Earth. And while I live, I will resist that to the extent I can. And therefore I see no value in judging my acts, and those of my fellow veterans, by the worst mankind has to offer.
So rather than argue who was "worse" I deleted the first Veterans Day post. The issue of that post was the suffering of innocents, and I see no value in judging the suffering that my nation has wrought in my name by contrast to the suffering that despotisms and degraded fanatics have wrought in the name of their beliefs. The only standard I accept is the standard my nation has set for itself. If you choose another, that's your business. Start your own blog and advocate for it, or join the gang over at Powerline or Little Green Footballs; they seem to love the "more rubble, less trouble" ideal of foreign relations.
I will continue to use this space to insist that we hold ourselves to the standards I believe we stand for; that ALL men - and women - are endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even those whose leaders would attack us and deprive us of those rights. Even our enemies. And to criticize myself and my country if we choose to take the low, dirty road because it's easier. That if we are to be defeated, let it be by the enemy's arms and not by the self-murder of our own ideals and the promise that has the potential to make our nation a truly pridesome thing among the nations.
And if this be treason, I will make the most of it.
That's something I don't know if I've ever done in the history of this blog, and it bugged me enough to make me want to write about it.
Yesterday I wrote two posts about "Veteran's Day", one of which is still up, the Sassoon quote, and unexceptional as such. Just the usual sort of thing I think about on these "God and the soldier we adore..." sorts of "holidays".
But the other was a rumination on the lot of women in war, and made particular mention of the horrors visited on the women of Germany in 1945. And the very first and only comment took me to task, implicitly, for being a traitorous Hun-lover and explicitly for not mentioning all the nasty things that the Nazis did in Poland and Russia and the fascist Japanese did in China, the Philippines, Honolulu and Wake (Wake?) (and, rather ridiculously in my opinion, that the Al Qaeda thugs did in New York City - and the Pentagon, which is like giving the 8th Air Force shit for bombing Luftwaffe HQ - as if the murderous individual acts of nasty criminals were the equivalent of international war) along with the bad stuff that happened to "enemy" women.
Well, that set me back on my heels.
And I re-read that post. And, sure enough, I did mention lots of places that the U.S. Army had fought in WW2, Vietnam, and the modern Middle East. Well, along with Brazzaville in the Congo and Coventry. And Hue, where the atrocities were visited upon the women of Hue by the communist invaders during Tet). But the bulk of the places I talked about were where the women of the enemies of our country had been subjected to atrocity.
And no question that while the hurricane of rape visited on Germany in 1945 was and is unequalled in modern history (the Germans themselves butchered their way through western Russia and the Ukraine but there is and never has been any suggestion of the sort of universal raping that was unleashed by the Soviet support troops in eastern Germany in the last year of WW2) overall the savagery visited on women in China and the other southeast Asian conquests by the Japanese Army, and in places like Poland and Russia by the German is orders of magnitude more bestial than anything the U.S. has visited on our enemies.
Was I, then, being overly harsh on my own nation for our conduct in war?
And, as I re-read that post, I think I was.
And rather than try and revise it or repair it I simply killed it.
Because what I would have ended up doing was trying to one-up the dead and maimed, trying to compare and contrast one atrocity against another, and that's beyond vile.
That's just despicable.
If any one thing has sickened me about war it is the unquenchable human need to trump the "enemy" suffering with one's own. You see it at it's worst in the eastern Levant, where the mutual atrocities visited on one anothers' innocents by Israelis on the one hand and the congeries of Arab states and entities on the other is endlessly paraded about to try and top the other side's grievances. So the dead of Deir Yassin or Gaza are used to try and justify the dead in a bus station bombing in Jerusalem or the kibbutz kids killed by Syrian shells or Hezbollah rockets.
All that is very human, and I am no less tempted than any other human, though I try to fight down the caveman instinct to simply assume that "Him hurt me because him bad". Some enemies ARE "bad" - the Nazis were as "bad" as any human ideal ever was. But many are just that - enemies because we want something they have, or because they want something we have, or just because we BOTH want something and can't agree to share it.
But I wondered...do I have a blind spot to "enemy" atrocities? In all my attempts to "see both sides" do I come down harder on the evil done in my name, in my country's name, than TO my country and my countrymen? Am I a secret traitor, a Hun-lover, a terrorist-hugger?
And I had to sit and think about that for a long, long time.
And here's what I think.
I think I AM harder on my own country, on my fellow soldiers, than on our enemies. I think I do stress the shame we do more than the shame done to us.
And if that makes me a treacherous enemy-embracer, then I'm OK with that.
And here's why.
Because here's the thing; our enemies often ARE our enemies because they believe and do some pretty vile and despicable things. Our history is as blotted as any nation's - we pretty much screwed the natives, and the Mexicans in the 1840's, and the Hawaiians and Filipinos in the 1890's, and the folks in Latin America pretty much all the time.
But we've also fought on the side of the angels, and more often than many nations. The fascist Japanese, the Nazi Germans, the communist Soviets or North Koreans or Chinese, the takifiri Islamists - those groups and the people who belong to them explicitly reject the notions that all men are created equal. That there should be liberty and justice for all. That people should be free from religious tyranny, from organized oppression. All the things that MY country stands or says it stands for, and I take my country at its word. And in fighting them we ARE doing a good thing in the larger sense.
Their acts, and those of their armed forces, are consistent with their beliefs; they did, and do, vile and inhumane things to weak people, women, and children, that they could have spared had they chosen to do so. That they did not disgusts and angers me, but neither surprises nor enrages me because it betrays my beliefs. I believe that those systems are vile and by their actions those who do their work confirm my beliefs.
At the same time I am proud of the promise of my own country, so when I, or others of my own breeding, do things that don't live up to that pride I am ashamed. And that shame brings with it rage at myself, for not standing up against those acts, or at those who committed them.
That is unfair, in that I am holding my own to higher standards than I hold my enemies. But I believe that in this sense our Constitution and our announced values ARE a suicide pact; if we fail to uphold them, if we judge ourselves not by our own professed values but by our merits relative to the worst beliefs we can think of, then we have indeed committed suicide. We have killed the best and the most hopeful within ourselves and our nation. I hold my nation to a higher standard as I would hold myself to a higher standard, or my own children. I would be more merciless to myself or my son for cheating, or lying, or stealing, or killing, than I would a stranger.
So if we, my country and I, kill innocents, even in error; if we torture our helpless chattels; if we seize and hold even the guilty without trial or, worse, without any sort of accountability or law whatsoever; if we do worse than we could because others have done even worse then we are guilty of not just crime but mistakes. We have made the fundamental error of losing our and our nation's ideals.
And that matters.
Because the United States is nothing if NOT an ideal. We are not Germany or France or Cambodia, a nation because of the language we speak or the way we look or the place we live in or the God we worship. We come from many places, speak many tongues, think and worship and believe many different things.
What ties us into one nation, indivisible, is the beliefs in the great words written into our national birth certificate; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
And if we forget that and become the sort of people we have chosen for our enemies and visit among them the sorts of cruelty they would visit upon us, then we are, indeed, in danger of perishing from the Earth. And while I live, I will resist that to the extent I can. And therefore I see no value in judging my acts, and those of my fellow veterans, by the worst mankind has to offer.
So rather than argue who was "worse" I deleted the first Veterans Day post. The issue of that post was the suffering of innocents, and I see no value in judging the suffering that my nation has wrought in my name by contrast to the suffering that despotisms and degraded fanatics have wrought in the name of their beliefs. The only standard I accept is the standard my nation has set for itself. If you choose another, that's your business. Start your own blog and advocate for it, or join the gang over at Powerline or Little Green Footballs; they seem to love the "more rubble, less trouble" ideal of foreign relations.
I will continue to use this space to insist that we hold ourselves to the standards I believe we stand for; that ALL men - and women - are endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even those whose leaders would attack us and deprive us of those rights. Even our enemies. And to criticize myself and my country if we choose to take the low, dirty road because it's easier. That if we are to be defeated, let it be by the enemy's arms and not by the self-murder of our own ideals and the promise that has the potential to make our nation a truly pridesome thing among the nations.
And if this be treason, I will make the most of it.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Punic War
Ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam.
Understand that, unlike Cato, I say this not in hate but in sorrow.
I WAS the GOP once. Like my father before me, I was a "social liberal and fiscal conservative", something that was later called an "Eisenhower" or "Rockefeller" Republican (and even later a "Republican In Name Only") but was then just called a "Republican".
Like my father, like those other "Republicans", I loved the myth of "traditional America", the fictional Rockwell America of front porches and small towns, of gritty cities and steel mills, of Boy Scouts marching on the Fourth, of the Four Freedoms, of the idea of a nation that offered itself not to a race, or a creed, or a language, or a "culture" but to an idea, the idea of "liberty and justice for all", of laws instead of men, of equality of opportunity for anyone who wanted it. An America whose strength was for protection, not conquest or intimidation. That looked at itself in terms of social and collective rights, and individual responsibilities.
An America that held onto the best of its past, but still looked forward in anticipation. That accepted its past, and all the wrongs and evils that it did, but still saw in itself the promise, the promise of a saner, more just, more rational, more united tomorrow. An America that didn't really yet exist, but lived in the hearts of those who wanted it to.
And I also loved the idea that this America let you alone to sit in the shade of your own fig tree. That allowed you to swing your fist each way free, so long as it didn't stray within arm's length of my nose. That let you love whom you pleased, work (or not) where and when you pleased (so long as you accepted the Grasshopper's Bargain and didn't whine if you froze that winter after lounging through the long summer days), that let - no, demanded - that you act the adult; gather your information, gain your wisdom, assess your options, make your choices, and live with the results. And that this America would either stand aside and let you make those choices, or actively support you in making them - against the meddling of those who would treat you like a fool or a child and try an either make them for you, or deny you even the choice.
Now, understand; I know that this America was a myth.
That the "real" America was often just a nation like any other, full of fools and knaves, founded on the extermination of the original residents of the continent with a healthy dose of chattel slavery. That the promises detailed above were as often ignored, and even willfully violated, as respected. That real American conservatism in it's Republican form was often no more than ignorance, prejudice, Know-Nothingism, small-town bigotry and Kiwanis insularity. That after its origins as the Party of Liberty just before the Civil War the Republican Party later became, and - especially after the Crash of 1929 - was often little more than, the Party of Privilege, demanding obedience to the notions of wealth, power, and the rule of the "rich, the well-born, and the able".
But like my father, I believed that there was these lies could be formed into a truth, and give virtue to the "conservative values"; caution, tradition, uncompromising honesty, civic virtue, personal integrity and responsibility. That compassion for others was founded on stern discipline for oneself. That being part of a social contract imposed duties, rather than rights. Indeed, that the rights sprang FROM the duties. That personal matters were personal and the business of the individual, but that every individual had the public duty, even the smallest and weakest of us were called upon to contribute our widow's mite. That to great power, and great wealth, came the greatest responsibilities.
This is what I thought were Republicans.
Once.
I can pinpoint almost to the year when I began to see this change; when the Southern Democrats, the old slavers, the race-baiters, the Jim Crow lovers of the Lost Cause became Republicans and brought their vile poison into the GOP.
And this was after the Party of Lincoln had fought an exhausting war against the small-town bigots of Taft, the lovers of fascism, the isolationists, the Rotarians who wanted to discard everything BUT the Rockwellian myths. When Ike refused to throw out the New Deal, when those of us on the Right who accepted that that cunning old aristocrat FDR had made the best Deal for our country in trading the wealth of a few for the betterment of the many...in abandoning the Gilded Age John-D.-Rockefeller Republicanism of "the-public-be-damned"...we became what I saw as a genuine American conservative party.
But like all Americans, the Second Civil War - the Civil RIGHTS War - forced us to choose.
And we chose wrong.
We chose first the principled scoundrel Goldwater, who then gave way to the unprincipled scoundrel Nixon. The culmination was the idiot Reagan, whose utter cluelessness and preference for the myth over the truth helped knock down the doors that the New Deal had nailed shut; the doors that contained the malefactors of great wealth and the scum of inherited privilege. Reagan, whose intellectual heirs - if they may be dignified with the term - began frantically beavering away at returning the nation to October 23, 1929.
On the way the Party picked up even more loathsome baggage; the Christopathic bigots of the unreconstructed Great Awakening, the moral nannies looking for motes in others' eyes, the bullying morons demanding that everyone around them defer to their willful ignorance, the rapacious corporate remoras (who, admittedly, had always been ours but who went from gobbling up the scraps to directing the target of the shark's teeth), the hucksters and imperialist fools and grifters that remembered that you can fool some of the people all of the time.
And that's where we are today.
Look at the Republican presidential prospects for the coming year. Look at what the state of the Party has done to them, or, rather, what they have done to themselves to make themselves acceptable to the sort of people who are now considered "Republicans".
Consider this woman, who is now the ideal to which these "Republicans" are told to aspire, and the degree to which this requires adherents of the GOP to believe three incompatible things before breakfast.
Consider the unhinged rantings of the people who speak for the Party, people who treat lies like currency, to spend whenever they desire something; Limbaugh, the "Majority Maker" himself; Beck, Coulter, Malkin, Savage, McArdle, Brooks, Krauthammer...has there ever in history been such a licensed pack of meretricious and shortsighted meeching fools, charlatans, buffoons, and scoundrels?
And as yet there is no voice from the ranks to call these unprincipled liars to book. No one to insist that reason trumps conviction, and that sense should rule sensibility. No one, in short, who represents me.
But there is worse.
Simply by existing, this congeries of stuffed barneys forces the entire political discussion away from sensible accommodation in pursuit of the ridiculous phantasms that constitute the modern GOP's "agenda". The oligarchs that in fact largely provide that agenda may be excused; they are rapacious and honest about it. It is the honest idiots that comprise most of the Party that are inexcusable, and their ignorance and credulity are combining to prevent even the simplest and most compassable of solutions to the problems the United States faces, and will face, in the 21st Century. Their impenetrable conjunction of pride, greed, stupidity, anger, and foolery is making this nation ungovernable; they cannot govern when they are elected, and when rejected, conspire to prevent others from governing.
There is no other solution.
The GOP must be destroyed.
Understand that, unlike Cato, I say this not in hate but in sorrow.
I WAS the GOP once. Like my father before me, I was a "social liberal and fiscal conservative", something that was later called an "Eisenhower" or "Rockefeller" Republican (and even later a "Republican In Name Only") but was then just called a "Republican".
Like my father, like those other "Republicans", I loved the myth of "traditional America", the fictional Rockwell America of front porches and small towns, of gritty cities and steel mills, of Boy Scouts marching on the Fourth, of the Four Freedoms, of the idea of a nation that offered itself not to a race, or a creed, or a language, or a "culture" but to an idea, the idea of "liberty and justice for all", of laws instead of men, of equality of opportunity for anyone who wanted it. An America whose strength was for protection, not conquest or intimidation. That looked at itself in terms of social and collective rights, and individual responsibilities.
An America that held onto the best of its past, but still looked forward in anticipation. That accepted its past, and all the wrongs and evils that it did, but still saw in itself the promise, the promise of a saner, more just, more rational, more united tomorrow. An America that didn't really yet exist, but lived in the hearts of those who wanted it to.
And I also loved the idea that this America let you alone to sit in the shade of your own fig tree. That allowed you to swing your fist each way free, so long as it didn't stray within arm's length of my nose. That let you love whom you pleased, work (or not) where and when you pleased (so long as you accepted the Grasshopper's Bargain and didn't whine if you froze that winter after lounging through the long summer days), that let - no, demanded - that you act the adult; gather your information, gain your wisdom, assess your options, make your choices, and live with the results. And that this America would either stand aside and let you make those choices, or actively support you in making them - against the meddling of those who would treat you like a fool or a child and try an either make them for you, or deny you even the choice.
Now, understand; I know that this America was a myth.
That the "real" America was often just a nation like any other, full of fools and knaves, founded on the extermination of the original residents of the continent with a healthy dose of chattel slavery. That the promises detailed above were as often ignored, and even willfully violated, as respected. That real American conservatism in it's Republican form was often no more than ignorance, prejudice, Know-Nothingism, small-town bigotry and Kiwanis insularity. That after its origins as the Party of Liberty just before the Civil War the Republican Party later became, and - especially after the Crash of 1929 - was often little more than, the Party of Privilege, demanding obedience to the notions of wealth, power, and the rule of the "rich, the well-born, and the able".
But like my father, I believed that there was these lies could be formed into a truth, and give virtue to the "conservative values"; caution, tradition, uncompromising honesty, civic virtue, personal integrity and responsibility. That compassion for others was founded on stern discipline for oneself. That being part of a social contract imposed duties, rather than rights. Indeed, that the rights sprang FROM the duties. That personal matters were personal and the business of the individual, but that every individual had the public duty, even the smallest and weakest of us were called upon to contribute our widow's mite. That to great power, and great wealth, came the greatest responsibilities.
This is what I thought were Republicans.
Once.
I can pinpoint almost to the year when I began to see this change; when the Southern Democrats, the old slavers, the race-baiters, the Jim Crow lovers of the Lost Cause became Republicans and brought their vile poison into the GOP.
And this was after the Party of Lincoln had fought an exhausting war against the small-town bigots of Taft, the lovers of fascism, the isolationists, the Rotarians who wanted to discard everything BUT the Rockwellian myths. When Ike refused to throw out the New Deal, when those of us on the Right who accepted that that cunning old aristocrat FDR had made the best Deal for our country in trading the wealth of a few for the betterment of the many...in abandoning the Gilded Age John-D.-Rockefeller Republicanism of "the-public-be-damned"...we became what I saw as a genuine American conservative party.
But like all Americans, the Second Civil War - the Civil RIGHTS War - forced us to choose.
And we chose wrong.
We chose first the principled scoundrel Goldwater, who then gave way to the unprincipled scoundrel Nixon. The culmination was the idiot Reagan, whose utter cluelessness and preference for the myth over the truth helped knock down the doors that the New Deal had nailed shut; the doors that contained the malefactors of great wealth and the scum of inherited privilege. Reagan, whose intellectual heirs - if they may be dignified with the term - began frantically beavering away at returning the nation to October 23, 1929.
On the way the Party picked up even more loathsome baggage; the Christopathic bigots of the unreconstructed Great Awakening, the moral nannies looking for motes in others' eyes, the bullying morons demanding that everyone around them defer to their willful ignorance, the rapacious corporate remoras (who, admittedly, had always been ours but who went from gobbling up the scraps to directing the target of the shark's teeth), the hucksters and imperialist fools and grifters that remembered that you can fool some of the people all of the time.
And that's where we are today.
Look at the Republican presidential prospects for the coming year. Look at what the state of the Party has done to them, or, rather, what they have done to themselves to make themselves acceptable to the sort of people who are now considered "Republicans".
Consider this woman, who is now the ideal to which these "Republicans" are told to aspire, and the degree to which this requires adherents of the GOP to believe three incompatible things before breakfast.
Consider the unhinged rantings of the people who speak for the Party, people who treat lies like currency, to spend whenever they desire something; Limbaugh, the "Majority Maker" himself; Beck, Coulter, Malkin, Savage, McArdle, Brooks, Krauthammer...has there ever in history been such a licensed pack of meretricious and shortsighted meeching fools, charlatans, buffoons, and scoundrels?
And as yet there is no voice from the ranks to call these unprincipled liars to book. No one to insist that reason trumps conviction, and that sense should rule sensibility. No one, in short, who represents me.
But there is worse.
Simply by existing, this congeries of stuffed barneys forces the entire political discussion away from sensible accommodation in pursuit of the ridiculous phantasms that constitute the modern GOP's "agenda". The oligarchs that in fact largely provide that agenda may be excused; they are rapacious and honest about it. It is the honest idiots that comprise most of the Party that are inexcusable, and their ignorance and credulity are combining to prevent even the simplest and most compassable of solutions to the problems the United States faces, and will face, in the 21st Century. Their impenetrable conjunction of pride, greed, stupidity, anger, and foolery is making this nation ungovernable; they cannot govern when they are elected, and when rejected, conspire to prevent others from governing.
There is no other solution.
The GOP must be destroyed.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Wag of the Finger, Shake of the Head
What is it about this spring?
It seems to me like if you look around you see a tremendous amount of business; all sorts of alarms and excursions, wars, rumors of wars, lechery (of course, lechery - nothing else holds fashion), dirty deeds done...well, not cheaply, that's certain. And the wages of wealth seem to be exploding like the flowering spring, as in the stained glass of the megachurch a camel leaps effortlessly through the eye of a needle.
We seem to be busier and more worried than ever. And yet...all of our busyness and worry doesn't seem to be really changing anything, or helping us in any way.
And - I ask this in the spirit of mildest reproof, I swear, - why the FUCK does fucking Blogger insist on inserting this FUCKING "http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif" little html code in my posts? Can you FUCKING tell me that, Blogger? Well?
Fuck me sideways.
Just yesterday the voters in Portland rejected a construction bond for our public schools while in Clackamas County they spurned a measure that would have helped pay to reconstruct the bridge that many residents of the County use to cross the Willamette.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
See? SEE? There the fucker is again! Rrrrrrrrr!
Sorry.
Anyway, pretty much everyone in the region agrees that many of our schools are old - not just old but old. I've taught in some of them; the boiler room at my son's elementary school looks like something out of "Titanic", while the school where I did my student teaching, Benson Polytech, is 95 years old and looks it. The entire district is housed in buildings no younger than the last round of major building in the Seventies, while many of the elementary schools date back to the 1920s and 1930s. These schools are OLD.
And so is the Sellwood Bridge.
This graybeard is only 86 years old, a slip of a bridge compared to the Hawthorne but in much worse condition. It was recently downrated to 10 tons maximum capacity, and is consistently among the worst of our Oregon bridges for physical inspection rating. Multnomah County, which owns it, has us residents kicking in about $19 a year to help fix it. Our southern neighbor, Clackamas, generates about 70% of the traffic, but because of another of these fucking "tax revolt" groundswells had to refer a $5-a-year car tag fee to the voters.
They rejected it.
The spokesgomer for these people is some poor unemployed bastard out of Molalla. He is quoted as saying:
All of this frustration was set off by a visit I paid recently to a periodic pullout on my internet highway, "Clueless in Carolina", where Lorrie, the mom who blogs there, had a post up about the final plunge of Osama entitled "Osama Is Dead And I’m Celebrating. Why Are You Shaking Your Finger At Me?" in which she not only says that Dead Osama = VJ-Day but roundly vituperates anyone who DOESN'T agree that Dead Osama = VJ-Day.
And I guess that sort of brought everything home for me.
Here is this woman, an attorney, a former professor, smart, well-informed, the sort of funny, cynical skeptic who could subtitle her blog "detachment parenting" and make you understand where she was coming from. And she's getting all skibbley about the World's Tallest Saudi getting his wet nap. Comparing it to VJ-Day. Rocket's Red Glare. That sort of thing, like she took an entire of bottle of diet pills and chugged a liter of Red Bull. Over one more fucking dead guy in Asia. I mean, are my brothers back home with their families? Are we through spending the rent money keeping the Karzai family in blow and hookers? Are we done trying to figure out why the Muslims we keep bombing don't thank us so much anymore? Anybody? Osama's dead - whoopie! - can we declare victory now? It's VJ-Day!
Right?
And I thought; if this bright, well-educated, fiercely independent woman, if she can go utterly completely gonzo over the 2011 equivalent of Operation Vengeance, then who the hell's to say what's black and what's white.
I just sort of ended up conflating her ecstasy over the latest release in the line of Franklin Mint SignatureTM Dead Guys In Central Asia Commemorative Plate Series like it was the end of WW2 with all the other the ridiculous crap this spring - the looney arabesques in DC over the debt ceiling, Donald Trump, the endless pointless wars in central Asia and the Middle East, the freaking Clackamas County voters cutting off their bridge to spite their face, and with the sorry reality of a nation where a working wage is ever harder to come by, where my Army brothers walk the high plateaus of Asia in pursuit of a policy that never comes, where every day more of us seem poorer, and smaller, and yet work harder and longer to get there.
And where is the wag of a finger for all of this?
Why the hell isn't someone wagging a finger at this nonsense?
Or is it just that useless? Is there nothing to do but the sad, slow, shake of the head that is the rueful acceptance of the endless, limitless, evergreen folly of humankind, the world's only truly free resource, as it propels us ass-first into a pitiless tomorrow?
It seems to me like if you look around you see a tremendous amount of business; all sorts of alarms and excursions, wars, rumors of wars, lechery (of course, lechery - nothing else holds fashion), dirty deeds done...well, not cheaply, that's certain. And the wages of wealth seem to be exploding like the flowering spring, as in the stained glass of the megachurch a camel leaps effortlessly through the eye of a needle.
We seem to be busier and more worried than ever. And yet...all of our busyness and worry doesn't seem to be really changing anything, or helping us in any way.
And - I ask this in the spirit of mildest reproof, I swear, - why the FUCK does fucking Blogger insist on inserting this FUCKING "http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif" little html code in my posts? Can you FUCKING tell me that, Blogger? Well?
Fuck me sideways.
Just yesterday the voters in Portland rejected a construction bond for our public schools while in Clackamas County they spurned a measure that would have helped pay to reconstruct the bridge that many residents of the County use to cross the Willamette.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
See? SEE? There the fucker is again! Rrrrrrrrr!
Sorry.
Anyway, pretty much everyone in the region agrees that many of our schools are old - not just old but old. I've taught in some of them; the boiler room at my son's elementary school looks like something out of "Titanic", while the school where I did my student teaching, Benson Polytech, is 95 years old and looks it. The entire district is housed in buildings no younger than the last round of major building in the Seventies, while many of the elementary schools date back to the 1920s and 1930s. These schools are OLD.
And so is the Sellwood Bridge.
This graybeard is only 86 years old, a slip of a bridge compared to the Hawthorne but in much worse condition. It was recently downrated to 10 tons maximum capacity, and is consistently among the worst of our Oregon bridges for physical inspection rating. Multnomah County, which owns it, has us residents kicking in about $19 a year to help fix it. Our southern neighbor, Clackamas, generates about 70% of the traffic, but because of another of these fucking "tax revolt" groundswells had to refer a $5-a-year car tag fee to the voters.
They rejected it.
The spokesgomer for these people is some poor unemployed bastard out of Molalla. He is quoted as saying:
“I want the bridge to be repaired, but I want to have a voice in choosing whether I pay this or not,” he said. “Clackamas County money should go to fix our own infrastructure. Are the Multnomah County voters going to pay to help us?”Well, we're ALL screwed now, dummy, because you won't see further than the wallet on your ass.
All of this frustration was set off by a visit I paid recently to a periodic pullout on my internet highway, "Clueless in Carolina", where Lorrie, the mom who blogs there, had a post up about the final plunge of Osama entitled "Osama Is Dead And I’m Celebrating. Why Are You Shaking Your Finger At Me?" in which she not only says that Dead Osama = VJ-Day but roundly vituperates anyone who DOESN'T agree that Dead Osama = VJ-Day.
And I guess that sort of brought everything home for me.
Here is this woman, an attorney, a former professor, smart, well-informed, the sort of funny, cynical skeptic who could subtitle her blog "detachment parenting" and make you understand where she was coming from. And she's getting all skibbley about the World's Tallest Saudi getting his wet nap. Comparing it to VJ-Day. Rocket's Red Glare. That sort of thing, like she took an entire of bottle of diet pills and chugged a liter of Red Bull. Over one more fucking dead guy in Asia. I mean, are my brothers back home with their families? Are we through spending the rent money keeping the Karzai family in blow and hookers? Are we done trying to figure out why the Muslims we keep bombing don't thank us so much anymore? Anybody? Osama's dead - whoopie! - can we declare victory now? It's VJ-Day!
Right?
And I thought; if this bright, well-educated, fiercely independent woman, if she can go utterly completely gonzo over the 2011 equivalent of Operation Vengeance, then who the hell's to say what's black and what's white.
I just sort of ended up conflating her ecstasy over the latest release in the line of Franklin Mint SignatureTM Dead Guys In Central Asia Commemorative Plate Series like it was the end of WW2 with all the other the ridiculous crap this spring - the looney arabesques in DC over the debt ceiling, Donald Trump, the endless pointless wars in central Asia and the Middle East, the freaking Clackamas County voters cutting off their bridge to spite their face, and with the sorry reality of a nation where a working wage is ever harder to come by, where my Army brothers walk the high plateaus of Asia in pursuit of a policy that never comes, where every day more of us seem poorer, and smaller, and yet work harder and longer to get there.
And where is the wag of a finger for all of this?
Why the hell isn't someone wagging a finger at this nonsense?
Or is it just that useless? Is there nothing to do but the sad, slow, shake of the head that is the rueful acceptance of the endless, limitless, evergreen folly of humankind, the world's only truly free resource, as it propels us ass-first into a pitiless tomorrow?
Thursday, April 28, 2011
μὴ μου τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε: The Inner Circle
This spring I have been slowly realizing that I am well on my way to losing my faith in the ability of my country as a nation, and my fellow Americans as citizens, to act intelligently, decently, with honesty, and with humanity.
I am developing the attitude that my government and the classes that run it are thoroughly mortgaged to the wealthy and powerful, that it cannot be relied upon to act in any interests but theirs. That they are addicted to the adrenaline of foreign wars. That they are blinded by their own hubris and self-love into willful blindness to their own cruelty, venality, and mendacity. That they are becoming baleful actors abroad, and a vile, moronic - wait! Did you hear that? Someone just praised Donald Fucking Trump as a potential Presidential candidate! Fuck me sideways! - pottage of scum and villany at home. That We the People, the putative rulers of this decrepit state, have become so inured to the toxic combination of elite malfeasance, public indifference, corporate greed, the idiocy of the Cheney Right, and the mewling, puking unwillingness of all and sundry to stand up and question where we're going and what we're doing in the handbasket that the chances of changing direction or destination at this point is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.
In other words, we're well and truly fucked.
But...here's the thing. I don't think we here in the U.S. are actively worse than any other nation in the world. And better than some; we're certainly no North Korea or Zimbabwe. And we are certainly better off than the two other Great Powers, kleptocratic Russia and gerontocratic China. We're not actively evil; we don't intend to do wrong.
But if there is somewhere an Eternal Verity, a commandment lit up in baby spotlights and neon it is this; intentions don't matter. Acts, and results, do.
My country is and has been behaving foolishly, and oftimes badly. And it has made itself so oligarchic that a private citizen such as myself without access to wealth, influence, or power, without favors to give or bribes to bestow cannot budge the tiller of the ship of state so much as a millimeter. I thought that I had helped, two years ago this autumn, in electing a so-called Democrat.
But the system has clearly been so damaged that the most "liberal" person electable cannot change the heading of the ship of state from its heading towards increasing oligarchy and overstretch.
And this small loudspeaker of a blog...well, doesn't speak very loud. Because otherwise why do people like Krauthammer and Brooks and the loathsome Limbaugh continue to pollute the air years after I wrote:
We know the problems are out there.
We either don't want to hear about them. Or we don't want to deal with them. Or we lack the power to change them.
So I while don't think we're falling into some bottomless well of wrongdoing like Stalin's Soviet or Mao's China or Hitler's Germany and I don't fear that we will reap a whirlwind of revenge from other nations, I am less and less inclined to involve myself in or sacrifice myself and my own for them.
It seems to me that we're going the way of 18th Century Spain, or Great Britain in the last century; a slow, steady slide into desuetude. Inconsequence for our grandees, relative poverty for peasants like me and mine. Ever more encounters with the niggling irritants of decline; things that don't work, business undone, carelessness, problems that might be mistakes or that might be deliberate. The top and bottom will continue to drift apart; the top spume will float off in frivolous excess, the heavy bottom mass subside into whipped indifference.
All set to the blaring inanities of advertising jingles.
This is how our world ends; not with a bang, but with a Levitra commercial.
So, you ask; what now?
Well, as luck would have it, I currently live in a good part of the world. The Pacific Northwest has long been blessed by a mild climate and a spectacular coincidence of land and water. Our soils - when we stop paving them over - are marvelously fertile, our forests - when we can resist clearcutting them - wellsprings of life.
Oregon is a verdant mixture of city and farm, forest and desert, mountain and valley.
Although we have backcountry full of goobers, birthers, and inbreds, we have a surprisingly communal pack of freebooters and innovators here.
If there is anyplace in the U.S. I have hope for it is here. We need to club our Teatards, and yes, we have them, like the rabid weasels they are. We need to quit sucking up to our malefactors of great wealth. But here, at least, is a place I have hope that I can make a difference.
And within this circle are even smaller ones that I can hope to keep the good and effect to change the wrong; my community of St. Johns, my children's school, my city of Portland.
I don't pretend that I can shelter all of these inner circles from the storms that rage outside. We have more than our share of fools that are raptured by the foolery on the Big Stage; we cannot cut off the television or the radio and still the voices of the infotainment buffoonery that we've embraced as a nation.
But we can reply with our own brand of commonsense. We - I - can hope to make here some sort of sane alternative to the ignorance and fatuity of the nation at large. In my children I can hope to instill some degree of sense as well, enough, I hope, that they will see the world and its lunacies with the eyes of compassion...but of clarity, as well, and of unsparing honesty.
So while I have the wisdom to know what I cannot change, I hope I have the strength to change what I can, here, within the shadow of my own fir tree and the sun that shines down upon my home.
I am developing the attitude that my government and the classes that run it are thoroughly mortgaged to the wealthy and powerful, that it cannot be relied upon to act in any interests but theirs. That they are addicted to the adrenaline of foreign wars. That they are blinded by their own hubris and self-love into willful blindness to their own cruelty, venality, and mendacity. That they are becoming baleful actors abroad, and a vile, moronic - wait! Did you hear that? Someone just praised Donald Fucking Trump as a potential Presidential candidate! Fuck me sideways! - pottage of scum and villany at home. That We the People, the putative rulers of this decrepit state, have become so inured to the toxic combination of elite malfeasance, public indifference, corporate greed, the idiocy of the Cheney Right, and the mewling, puking unwillingness of all and sundry to stand up and question where we're going and what we're doing in the handbasket that the chances of changing direction or destination at this point is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.
In other words, we're well and truly fucked.
But...here's the thing. I don't think we here in the U.S. are actively worse than any other nation in the world. And better than some; we're certainly no North Korea or Zimbabwe. And we are certainly better off than the two other Great Powers, kleptocratic Russia and gerontocratic China. We're not actively evil; we don't intend to do wrong.
But if there is somewhere an Eternal Verity, a commandment lit up in baby spotlights and neon it is this; intentions don't matter. Acts, and results, do.
My country is and has been behaving foolishly, and oftimes badly. And it has made itself so oligarchic that a private citizen such as myself without access to wealth, influence, or power, without favors to give or bribes to bestow cannot budge the tiller of the ship of state so much as a millimeter. I thought that I had helped, two years ago this autumn, in electing a so-called Democrat.
But the system has clearly been so damaged that the most "liberal" person electable cannot change the heading of the ship of state from its heading towards increasing oligarchy and overstretch.
And this small loudspeaker of a blog...well, doesn't speak very loud. Because otherwise why do people like Krauthammer and Brooks and the loathsome Limbaugh continue to pollute the air years after I wrote:
"I get the feeling that we're all talked out here.That was written about Iraq. But it could have been written about the levees of New Orleans or the bridges over the Mississippi. Written about the S&L bubble or the dot-com bubble or the mortgage bubble. Written about the Deepwater Horizon or, hell, about any number of goddamn obviously fucked up incompetences that we've watched over the past twenty years or so.
We all know what’s happening: we can see the iceberg. It's huge, it's gouging its way deep into the hull, and we've spent the last two to three years pounding the helmsman on the back of the skull, shouting "Turn, you idiot! You're ramming a fucking iceberg!" only to have him slew around and stare at us with that skeevy grin and babble some inanity about "staying the course" and "no substitute for victory".
We know that the water is going to be cold, and the bottom is a freezing blackness that we will never feel at the end of that long, spiraling drop into the abyss.
And we know, because we can hear the clink of glasses and the bray of the band that on the saloon deck that many of our fellow passengers are still gobbling their meals and charging their glasses to the soothing sound of the stagefront crooner. Nothing we've said has touched them. No scolding, no pleading, no explaining will make them tear the lunatic helmsman from the wheel. The fear may be hidden in their hearts, but they won't stand up and act, won't admit that the damage is already done, that the black water is already pouring in, the ship is already doomed, and that whatever illusions of "victory" they have will end when the icy sea closes over our heads."
We know the problems are out there.
We either don't want to hear about them. Or we don't want to deal with them. Or we lack the power to change them.
So I while don't think we're falling into some bottomless well of wrongdoing like Stalin's Soviet or Mao's China or Hitler's Germany and I don't fear that we will reap a whirlwind of revenge from other nations, I am less and less inclined to involve myself in or sacrifice myself and my own for them.
It seems to me that we're going the way of 18th Century Spain, or Great Britain in the last century; a slow, steady slide into desuetude. Inconsequence for our grandees, relative poverty for peasants like me and mine. Ever more encounters with the niggling irritants of decline; things that don't work, business undone, carelessness, problems that might be mistakes or that might be deliberate. The top and bottom will continue to drift apart; the top spume will float off in frivolous excess, the heavy bottom mass subside into whipped indifference.
All set to the blaring inanities of advertising jingles.
This is how our world ends; not with a bang, but with a Levitra commercial.
So, you ask; what now?
Well, as luck would have it, I currently live in a good part of the world. The Pacific Northwest has long been blessed by a mild climate and a spectacular coincidence of land and water. Our soils - when we stop paving them over - are marvelously fertile, our forests - when we can resist clearcutting them - wellsprings of life.
Oregon is a verdant mixture of city and farm, forest and desert, mountain and valley.
Although we have backcountry full of goobers, birthers, and inbreds, we have a surprisingly communal pack of freebooters and innovators here.
If there is anyplace in the U.S. I have hope for it is here. We need to club our Teatards, and yes, we have them, like the rabid weasels they are. We need to quit sucking up to our malefactors of great wealth. But here, at least, is a place I have hope that I can make a difference.
And within this circle are even smaller ones that I can hope to keep the good and effect to change the wrong; my community of St. Johns, my children's school, my city of Portland.
I don't pretend that I can shelter all of these inner circles from the storms that rage outside. We have more than our share of fools that are raptured by the foolery on the Big Stage; we cannot cut off the television or the radio and still the voices of the infotainment buffoonery that we've embraced as a nation.
But we can reply with our own brand of commonsense. We - I - can hope to make here some sort of sane alternative to the ignorance and fatuity of the nation at large. In my children I can hope to instill some degree of sense as well, enough, I hope, that they will see the world and its lunacies with the eyes of compassion...but of clarity, as well, and of unsparing honesty.
So while I have the wisdom to know what I cannot change, I hope I have the strength to change what I can, here, within the shadow of my own fir tree and the sun that shines down upon my home.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Solstice
It seemed appropriate, on the longest night of the year, to ruminate a little on something that has been troubling me about my country.
First, let me start by saying that I have no silly illusions about what a certain strain of Americans like to refer to as our "exceptionalism". We're often a nice big ol' country. We have our moments of greatness, but we have our moments of great shame, as well. And I can't imagine where anyone gets the ridiculous notion that the United States has EVER been about "liberty and justice for all".
Something like a fraction of one percent of the residents of the U.S. in 1790 could vote at all. And throughout our history our politics has been influenced, and occasionally overwhelmed, by the wealthy and powerful. That's not a bug; that's a feature. The Founders distrusted the rabble, and intended that men (and they WERE men; they'd sooner have given the franchise to an anthropoid ape as a woman) of stability and property were the best choice to guide the nation, and so it has been.
So most Americans were left to shift as best they could. And, for the most part, that best wasn't all that bad, provided you were white, and lacked some disabling handicap like Irishness (for much of the early 19th Century) or Catholicism (until the latter part of the 20th) or too much zeal for the "rights" of people like blacks or women or gays or workers or...
But the U.S. didn't suck compared to, say, the Belgian Congo. You were free to say what you liked (provided you didn't care whether you had a job) and free to go where you wished and do what you wanted. This also meant you were free to starve: the law, as Victor Hugo said, in its impartial majesty forbid rich and poor alike to steal bread and sleep under bridges. You had a certain limited social mobility, which was more than you had as a serf in Russia or a peasant in Japan, say.
But you were still pretty much at the mercy of the Great and the Powerful. If the banksters fucked up and crashed the economy - which they did with great regularity in the 19th Century, only they were called "panics" then, and nobody but the little people who lost their farms or shops thought they were anything but business as usual - well, that was too bad for you if you got hosed. It was a red-meat society, and the bloody end of the bone usually got shoved in your face if you were a farmer, or a laborer. Get old? No kids to take you in? Well, gee, there's always poverty and death. Get sick? No money for medicine? Well, gee, there's always the neighbors' soup. Oh, and death. Get broke? Well, gee...
That was life and that was all there was to it.
For a brief time in the late 19th and early 20th Century a group of people tried to do something about this. These "Progressives" and "Good Government" types were an oddly disparate bunch, ranging from social reformers like Jane Addams and Upton Sinclair, radical Reds, muckraking journalists, and some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the U.S., people like Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carmody. It looked like the strange concatenation of "reformers" might push the U.S. into some sort of less-oligarchic society - not some sort of communal kumbaya-singing egalitarian utopia, but at least a little less brutally devil-take-the-hindmost.
But first WW1 came along, and then the "return to normalcy" of the Twenties helped sort of push things sideways a bit.
Until in 1929 the wealthy and the banksters shit the bed.
A worldwide Depression, like love and a cough, can't be hid. Even the dimmest American prole pretty much knew they were hosed, and who hosed them. And worse, for the oligarchs, now there was the horrible example of Soviet Russia, where the rope and the lamppost loomed for those white-spatted gentlemen and their delicately scented ladies. FDR, that cunning aristocratic hegemon, rammed through enough reforms to make the country a little less harshly Darwinian, convinced that the elites had to give up a soupçon of their power in order to keep the rabble happily at work.
And y'know what?
It worked.
For twenty years the Republicans, the bought-and-paid-for party of the wealthy and the financiers, was driven into the hustings. For the first time there was a sort of national pension in the form of Social Security; getting old and sick didn't have to mean getting poor, too. And, mind you, in the Thirties and Forties, and even into the Fifties and Sixties, American poor really meant poor; Third World poor, hookworm-and-pellagra poor, living in a tarpaper shack poor. Don;t let the GOP tell you that the "antipoverty" programs failed. Until the Sixties about a quarter of Americans lived in this real shithole poverty. Since then the number has been about 12-13 percent. Food stamps, AFDC - that stuff worked.
Mid you, it ain't life at the country club. But it beats starving.
For forty-some years, from the late Forties into the late Eighties we managed to get as close to a real robust middle class as we've ever had. And a hell of a lot of that was done by raising working people, people who had been paid jack shit by the people who made millions from them, into that middle class. This was done through a whole combination of industrial and tax policy, by technical, commercial, and educational advances, by the realization on the part of smart companies that better-paid workers bought more stuff...
Of course, it didn't hurt that after WW2 we were the last man standing. And that we had a hell of a lot of spare cash and a hell of a lot of Third World places right in our own country that we could pave, electrify, Green-Revolution, and industrialize.
But you have to think that it couldn't last, and it didn't.
First the country split over whether black people should be people first or black first. A lot of the old racist genes burst out, North and South, and drove people who should have been thinking of their own well-being into the arms of people who had no interest in that well-being but were perfectly willing to use the hatred to shove the dumbass crackers back into the poverty hole - where they would be happy to go provided the nigras went there first.
Then we were told that Greed was Good, that we needed to let the people who could do card tricks with money, who could spin tales into gold, do that tricking and spinning and make piles of cash. Because a stray dollar or two would blow off those piles and hoo-baby, might land in your lap.
So for the past thirty years we've been walking back the Great Change. Back to where we started, the Gilded Age, where the Rich were Different than You and I. Back to a time when the big decisions were made for you by the people who Knew Better because their daddy had made pots of money. Back to a time when the Golden Rule was Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules.
Again; our country has always been that way. But for a bunch of decades we managed to paper it over, a little. We padded the sharp corners of the coffee tables and baby-gated the economy so the little people didn't tumble down the stairs and break their brains.
Well, that's done and dusted.
I've been watching my country change over that time. And it seems to me that we haven't gotten any smarter, or stupider. Any kinder or meaner. Any better, or worse. We're just people, same as we always were.
But for a moment, a couple of decades, it seemed like we had a chance to move ourselves to a place where wealth and power meant a little less than they had, where more people got to have a piece of the nation than before, where the oligarchy was a very small bit less...oligarchical. Not much, not a lot, but a little.
And that moment seems to me to have passed.
Just two years ago the same malefactors, the same spinners and tricksters, managed to do as much damage to our national welfare as anyone had since that day in 1929. But this time...where was the outcry? Where was the change? Where were the consequences. We thought we'd rearranged the "system" to prevent another President from fighting secret wars. We were wrong. We thought that we would never see Americans torturing helpless captives. We were wrong. We thought that you couldn't play lotto with bank's money and skate away from the wreckage when your little scheme crashed.
Boy howdy, were we fucking wrong.
So on this, the darkest day of the year, it seems to me that our country seems a little darker as well.
What do you think?
First, let me start by saying that I have no silly illusions about what a certain strain of Americans like to refer to as our "exceptionalism". We're often a nice big ol' country. We have our moments of greatness, but we have our moments of great shame, as well. And I can't imagine where anyone gets the ridiculous notion that the United States has EVER been about "liberty and justice for all".
Something like a fraction of one percent of the residents of the U.S. in 1790 could vote at all. And throughout our history our politics has been influenced, and occasionally overwhelmed, by the wealthy and powerful. That's not a bug; that's a feature. The Founders distrusted the rabble, and intended that men (and they WERE men; they'd sooner have given the franchise to an anthropoid ape as a woman) of stability and property were the best choice to guide the nation, and so it has been.
So most Americans were left to shift as best they could. And, for the most part, that best wasn't all that bad, provided you were white, and lacked some disabling handicap like Irishness (for much of the early 19th Century) or Catholicism (until the latter part of the 20th) or too much zeal for the "rights" of people like blacks or women or gays or workers or...
But the U.S. didn't suck compared to, say, the Belgian Congo. You were free to say what you liked (provided you didn't care whether you had a job) and free to go where you wished and do what you wanted. This also meant you were free to starve: the law, as Victor Hugo said, in its impartial majesty forbid rich and poor alike to steal bread and sleep under bridges. You had a certain limited social mobility, which was more than you had as a serf in Russia or a peasant in Japan, say.
But you were still pretty much at the mercy of the Great and the Powerful. If the banksters fucked up and crashed the economy - which they did with great regularity in the 19th Century, only they were called "panics" then, and nobody but the little people who lost their farms or shops thought they were anything but business as usual - well, that was too bad for you if you got hosed. It was a red-meat society, and the bloody end of the bone usually got shoved in your face if you were a farmer, or a laborer. Get old? No kids to take you in? Well, gee, there's always poverty and death. Get sick? No money for medicine? Well, gee, there's always the neighbors' soup. Oh, and death. Get broke? Well, gee...
That was life and that was all there was to it.
For a brief time in the late 19th and early 20th Century a group of people tried to do something about this. These "Progressives" and "Good Government" types were an oddly disparate bunch, ranging from social reformers like Jane Addams and Upton Sinclair, radical Reds, muckraking journalists, and some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the U.S., people like Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carmody. It looked like the strange concatenation of "reformers" might push the U.S. into some sort of less-oligarchic society - not some sort of communal kumbaya-singing egalitarian utopia, but at least a little less brutally devil-take-the-hindmost.
But first WW1 came along, and then the "return to normalcy" of the Twenties helped sort of push things sideways a bit.
Until in 1929 the wealthy and the banksters shit the bed.
A worldwide Depression, like love and a cough, can't be hid. Even the dimmest American prole pretty much knew they were hosed, and who hosed them. And worse, for the oligarchs, now there was the horrible example of Soviet Russia, where the rope and the lamppost loomed for those white-spatted gentlemen and their delicately scented ladies. FDR, that cunning aristocratic hegemon, rammed through enough reforms to make the country a little less harshly Darwinian, convinced that the elites had to give up a soupçon of their power in order to keep the rabble happily at work.
And y'know what?
It worked.
For twenty years the Republicans, the bought-and-paid-for party of the wealthy and the financiers, was driven into the hustings. For the first time there was a sort of national pension in the form of Social Security; getting old and sick didn't have to mean getting poor, too. And, mind you, in the Thirties and Forties, and even into the Fifties and Sixties, American poor really meant poor; Third World poor, hookworm-and-pellagra poor, living in a tarpaper shack poor. Don;t let the GOP tell you that the "antipoverty" programs failed. Until the Sixties about a quarter of Americans lived in this real shithole poverty. Since then the number has been about 12-13 percent. Food stamps, AFDC - that stuff worked.
Mid you, it ain't life at the country club. But it beats starving.
For forty-some years, from the late Forties into the late Eighties we managed to get as close to a real robust middle class as we've ever had. And a hell of a lot of that was done by raising working people, people who had been paid jack shit by the people who made millions from them, into that middle class. This was done through a whole combination of industrial and tax policy, by technical, commercial, and educational advances, by the realization on the part of smart companies that better-paid workers bought more stuff...
Of course, it didn't hurt that after WW2 we were the last man standing. And that we had a hell of a lot of spare cash and a hell of a lot of Third World places right in our own country that we could pave, electrify, Green-Revolution, and industrialize.
But you have to think that it couldn't last, and it didn't.
First the country split over whether black people should be people first or black first. A lot of the old racist genes burst out, North and South, and drove people who should have been thinking of their own well-being into the arms of people who had no interest in that well-being but were perfectly willing to use the hatred to shove the dumbass crackers back into the poverty hole - where they would be happy to go provided the nigras went there first.
Then we were told that Greed was Good, that we needed to let the people who could do card tricks with money, who could spin tales into gold, do that tricking and spinning and make piles of cash. Because a stray dollar or two would blow off those piles and hoo-baby, might land in your lap.
So for the past thirty years we've been walking back the Great Change. Back to where we started, the Gilded Age, where the Rich were Different than You and I. Back to a time when the big decisions were made for you by the people who Knew Better because their daddy had made pots of money. Back to a time when the Golden Rule was Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules.
Again; our country has always been that way. But for a bunch of decades we managed to paper it over, a little. We padded the sharp corners of the coffee tables and baby-gated the economy so the little people didn't tumble down the stairs and break their brains.
Well, that's done and dusted.
I've been watching my country change over that time. And it seems to me that we haven't gotten any smarter, or stupider. Any kinder or meaner. Any better, or worse. We're just people, same as we always were.
But for a moment, a couple of decades, it seemed like we had a chance to move ourselves to a place where wealth and power meant a little less than they had, where more people got to have a piece of the nation than before, where the oligarchy was a very small bit less...oligarchical. Not much, not a lot, but a little.
And that moment seems to me to have passed.
Just two years ago the same malefactors, the same spinners and tricksters, managed to do as much damage to our national welfare as anyone had since that day in 1929. But this time...where was the outcry? Where was the change? Where were the consequences. We thought we'd rearranged the "system" to prevent another President from fighting secret wars. We were wrong. We thought that we would never see Americans torturing helpless captives. We were wrong. We thought that you couldn't play lotto with bank's money and skate away from the wreckage when your little scheme crashed.
Boy howdy, were we fucking wrong.
So on this, the darkest day of the year, it seems to me that our country seems a little darker as well.
What do you think?
Friday, October 29, 2010
Teed Off
So here's what's so frustrating.
You all know we're coming up to the midterm elections.
And you also probably know that the overarching theme for this year is the Great GOP Resurgence.
And that the newest standard bearers for the elephants are the "Tea Party" candidates, from Sharron Angle in Nevada to Chris O'Donnell in Delaware (and that's just the women) the news outlets are relentlessly flogging the notion that in a week we will be introduced to the "new generation" of Republicans; just as intransigent on fighting brown furriners (whether of the Scary Islamic Variety or the Operating The Leaf Blower For Your Landscaper Illegal Beaner Variety) and handing out tax breaks to the two-yacht family, this crew is even more enthusiastic for stuff even the former conservative nutjobs considered whacko; deregulating everything in sight, eliminating entire federal agencies - the ones they don't like, of course, mostly the ones that help brown furriners and immigrants an' stuff like agreeing with Global Warming (never Good, Nice agencies like Defense and the NSA, of course).
Now, mind you, I have to say that most of this stuff sounds like the same crap we were being spoonfed back in the Gingrich Days (back when the ol' serial philanderer and moral savant was still considered a Power Broker) and were told then, as now, that it was a rich, chocolaty nutrient that would make us grow up bigger and stronger.
It didn't happen then, unless you were in the land of the stratospherically wealthy, and you'll excuse me if I don't believe it's going to happen now, either.
But let's give the devils their due, OK?
Let's assume that November 6th the nation wakes up with a new conservative majority in the Congress. Let's further assume that the rest of the government, and the nation as a whole, is so intimidated by the Tea Crackery Goodness of their new conservative masters that the incoming camorra manages to enact their entire agenda. Every bit of it. Every scrap, smidget, iota, jot, and tittle.
Then what?
Gone are the Departments of Interior, Education, Health and Human Services, the Public Health Service, National Public Radio, and the freaking Job Corps for all I know. The wealthy are unbound - the estate tax is gone, the entire nation pays a flat tax of, say, 10%. The poor and the old...well, they're on their own. You can choose to house your aged grannie in your basement or let the old harridan forage for food in the bins behind the Safeway with the rest of the old feebs.
Your library? Privatized. Your heat, power, water; you pay their "market" price for them or you get cold and dirty. Your internet? Hey, haven’t you heard – the Internet is for porn, Jack. So you sign up for Saucy Suzie’s Dirty DSL most quick smart or it's no more "Ranger Against War" for you. Get sick? Better be employed, Giocomo. You lost you job because you got sick?
Too fucking bad. Shouldn't have gotten sick, should you?
Oh, and the deficit?
Oh, yeah, that.
Well, you see, the problem is that there's one bit of government that's doin' just dandy. And that's the outfit across the Potomac over at the Five-Sided Funny Farm. Yep, there's terrarists about, bucko, lurking perhaps under your very bed, and we needs to hunt them. So there's guns for the Army, ships for the Navy, it's a regular American Patrol. Great big satellites for the spy agencies, teeny little torture cells for the interrogators...all those things cost money, you see.
And since we've cut our revenue intake with all those tax cuts, see...well, you can just imagine.
So here we are; in the Dream Time of the Tea Baggers. No federal control of stuff like education, so we can go back to the good old days...ummm...well, when...okay, let's move along. How about that interstate commerce, eh? With no Department of Commerce and no DOT, it's cool, the freeways - what's let of them now that most of the bridges have collapsed - are cool, like that scene from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome where Ike Turner's ol' lady chases Mel Gibson around the desert and shit blows up an' stuff? And everything is like the Home Shopping Channel, where you can sell your Pillow Pets and buy gold and everything absolutely without any worry about annoying things like child safety or fraud investigations...
I mean, do these daft fuckers ever really THINK this stuff through? Do they ever think about, for all the irritating aspects of the Nanny State like the "Caution; Do Not Eat!" warning labels on the little white packet inside the beef jerky bag and the tipping toddler on the 5-gallon buckets, how much of modern life is actually simplified, assisted, and detoxified by the sorts of things that the government does that they don't want to pay for?
Or the simple reality that the three biggest lumps of the spending they profess to hate are Defense, Social Security, and Medicare, and that they won't give up the first and the other two are, in a lot of cases, what has helped keep the U.S. from becoming a social basket case like fucking Zaire - they help keep your mom and dad out from under bridges and from living out of shopping carts, and if they are suddenly, drastically cut the flood of poor old people into the streets and fields will make the Depression look like a rural frolic in an old Swedish movie?
Do they think about this stuff? Do they really have a plan, other than a trip back to the U.S. of 1890? Or are they just saying the stuff they say because they know it appeals and have never had to govern and really make the hard choices?
This is frustrating, too, because the "grown-up" version of these nutballs spent eight years handing the U.S. to their crony capitalist buddies, raping and fucking over every piece of it not owned by somebody named Koch or Abramoff, and getting the nation involved in land wars in fucking Asia, forchrissakes. And those were the SMART ones, not the ones whose vita lists their greatest accomplishments as "not being a witch" and getting paid for handing out Rand Paul fliers.
I understand people's frustration. We handed the keys to a bunch of drunken frat boys and they pretty much slammed the national car all over the road for two terms. So we handed them back to the "reasonable" ones, the ones who said they were going to "Change" all that crap. And, mostly, it didn't change. And so now we're pissed off.
But so now our answer is to find the goofiest, most looney versions of the fucking gomers who kept bashing our national head into the concrete like a eight-year-long episode of "Jackass" and give the wheel to THEM?
What. The. Fuck?
Are we really that stupid?
Driftglass - whose sandals I am not fit to unloosen - says yes we are, and, what's more, said it all six fucking years ago.
THAT's the real frustration. It's not like this is a black swan. IT's not like we don't know that these people are "...people (who) never vote for good government; they don't even believe in government. They're spoiled little toddlers who freak out when they're expected to share. They don't think they have to pay for anything that they take. And they're right--they don't."
I'm not one of those who think that this is some sort of unforseen, unprecedented horror. The American electorate has been full of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision many times before this, and surely will be again.
But most of us have been comfortable, fat, and careless for so long. The extraction operation that the New Deal and the social liberalism ran on the robber barons and the oligarchs that revelled in the Dickensian poverty of the nation for generations until they ran the ol' S.S. StarsnStripes on the financial rocks in 1929 has lulled us into thinking that we can never go back to the Gilded Age of Victorian slums and plutocratic rule again.
But I will argue that the New Deal was a one-off, an unusual concatenation of massive elitist failure, autocratic liberalism (my pal Andy would tell you that FDR was a sort of kinder, gentler despot; I'd argue kinder, hell - the man was a fucking political piranha who used the idiocy and greed of his enemies [who were his social peers] to gut them and stuff them into a political hole for a generation) and transformative policy that was so effective in grinding the old American paradigm down to stone-hard bedrock that we have now forgotten what it was like for most Americans in 1928. That most of us lived at or near poverty and always had, that a short, filthy, brutal, hard working life was the lot of most people, and that nearly a quarter of all Americans were poor; really poor, dirt poor, hardscrabble poor all of their lives. People ate bad food, lived in hovels or slums that would embarass Sierra Leone today, worked in intolerably dangerous and backbreaking ways and died, usually early, of disease, malnutrition, or injury.
And the big difference between 1928 and today is that a lot of those poor Americans back in the day were rural poor. They had farms and knew how to farm. Even when times were bad they had some hope of growing or raising something to eat.
Today we farm our crops at the SuperFresh or the Piggly Wiggly. When we lose our jobs, or get sick, or hurt, and there is nothing there to help but the meager donations of some church ladies and a scattering of soup kitchens and county shelters? We're gonna starve, and quick.
But none of this seems to matter to the Tea Baggers. They want their Gilded Age back, and nothing, not even their own lives and the lives of their fellows, will get in their way.
You all know we're coming up to the midterm elections.
And you also probably know that the overarching theme for this year is the Great GOP Resurgence.
And that the newest standard bearers for the elephants are the "Tea Party" candidates, from Sharron Angle in Nevada to Chris O'Donnell in Delaware (and that's just the women) the news outlets are relentlessly flogging the notion that in a week we will be introduced to the "new generation" of Republicans; just as intransigent on fighting brown furriners (whether of the Scary Islamic Variety or the Operating The Leaf Blower For Your Landscaper Illegal Beaner Variety) and handing out tax breaks to the two-yacht family, this crew is even more enthusiastic for stuff even the former conservative nutjobs considered whacko; deregulating everything in sight, eliminating entire federal agencies - the ones they don't like, of course, mostly the ones that help brown furriners and immigrants an' stuff like agreeing with Global Warming (never Good, Nice agencies like Defense and the NSA, of course).
Now, mind you, I have to say that most of this stuff sounds like the same crap we were being spoonfed back in the Gingrich Days (back when the ol' serial philanderer and moral savant was still considered a Power Broker) and were told then, as now, that it was a rich, chocolaty nutrient that would make us grow up bigger and stronger.It didn't happen then, unless you were in the land of the stratospherically wealthy, and you'll excuse me if I don't believe it's going to happen now, either.
But let's give the devils their due, OK?
Let's assume that November 6th the nation wakes up with a new conservative majority in the Congress. Let's further assume that the rest of the government, and the nation as a whole, is so intimidated by the Tea Crackery Goodness of their new conservative masters that the incoming camorra manages to enact their entire agenda. Every bit of it. Every scrap, smidget, iota, jot, and tittle.
Then what?Gone are the Departments of Interior, Education, Health and Human Services, the Public Health Service, National Public Radio, and the freaking Job Corps for all I know. The wealthy are unbound - the estate tax is gone, the entire nation pays a flat tax of, say, 10%. The poor and the old...well, they're on their own. You can choose to house your aged grannie in your basement or let the old harridan forage for food in the bins behind the Safeway with the rest of the old feebs.
Your library? Privatized. Your heat, power, water; you pay their "market" price for them or you get cold and dirty. Your internet? Hey, haven’t you heard – the Internet is for porn, Jack. So you sign up for Saucy Suzie’s Dirty DSL most quick smart or it's no more "Ranger Against War" for you. Get sick? Better be employed, Giocomo. You lost you job because you got sick?Too fucking bad. Shouldn't have gotten sick, should you?
Oh, and the deficit?
Oh, yeah, that.
Well, you see, the problem is that there's one bit of government that's doin' just dandy. And that's the outfit across the Potomac over at the Five-Sided Funny Farm. Yep, there's terrarists about, bucko, lurking perhaps under your very bed, and we needs to hunt them. So there's guns for the Army, ships for the Navy, it's a regular American Patrol. Great big satellites for the spy agencies, teeny little torture cells for the interrogators...all those things cost money, you see.
And since we've cut our revenue intake with all those tax cuts, see...well, you can just imagine.So here we are; in the Dream Time of the Tea Baggers. No federal control of stuff like education, so we can go back to the good old days...ummm...well, when...okay, let's move along. How about that interstate commerce, eh? With no Department of Commerce and no DOT, it's cool, the freeways - what's let of them now that most of the bridges have collapsed - are cool, like that scene from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome where Ike Turner's ol' lady chases Mel Gibson around the desert and shit blows up an' stuff? And everything is like the Home Shopping Channel, where you can sell your Pillow Pets and buy gold and everything absolutely without any worry about annoying things like child safety or fraud investigations...
I mean, do these daft fuckers ever really THINK this stuff through? Do they ever think about, for all the irritating aspects of the Nanny State like the "Caution; Do Not Eat!" warning labels on the little white packet inside the beef jerky bag and the tipping toddler on the 5-gallon buckets, how much of modern life is actually simplified, assisted, and detoxified by the sorts of things that the government does that they don't want to pay for?
Or the simple reality that the three biggest lumps of the spending they profess to hate are Defense, Social Security, and Medicare, and that they won't give up the first and the other two are, in a lot of cases, what has helped keep the U.S. from becoming a social basket case like fucking Zaire - they help keep your mom and dad out from under bridges and from living out of shopping carts, and if they are suddenly, drastically cut the flood of poor old people into the streets and fields will make the Depression look like a rural frolic in an old Swedish movie?
Do they think about this stuff? Do they really have a plan, other than a trip back to the U.S. of 1890? Or are they just saying the stuff they say because they know it appeals and have never had to govern and really make the hard choices?
This is frustrating, too, because the "grown-up" version of these nutballs spent eight years handing the U.S. to their crony capitalist buddies, raping and fucking over every piece of it not owned by somebody named Koch or Abramoff, and getting the nation involved in land wars in fucking Asia, forchrissakes. And those were the SMART ones, not the ones whose vita lists their greatest accomplishments as "not being a witch" and getting paid for handing out Rand Paul fliers.
I understand people's frustration. We handed the keys to a bunch of drunken frat boys and they pretty much slammed the national car all over the road for two terms. So we handed them back to the "reasonable" ones, the ones who said they were going to "Change" all that crap. And, mostly, it didn't change. And so now we're pissed off.But so now our answer is to find the goofiest, most looney versions of the fucking gomers who kept bashing our national head into the concrete like a eight-year-long episode of "Jackass" and give the wheel to THEM?
What. The. Fuck?
Are we really that stupid?Driftglass - whose sandals I am not fit to unloosen - says yes we are, and, what's more, said it all six fucking years ago.
THAT's the real frustration. It's not like this is a black swan. IT's not like we don't know that these people are "...people (who) never vote for good government; they don't even believe in government. They're spoiled little toddlers who freak out when they're expected to share. They don't think they have to pay for anything that they take. And they're right--they don't."
I'm not one of those who think that this is some sort of unforseen, unprecedented horror. The American electorate has been full of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision many times before this, and surely will be again.
But most of us have been comfortable, fat, and careless for so long. The extraction operation that the New Deal and the social liberalism ran on the robber barons and the oligarchs that revelled in the Dickensian poverty of the nation for generations until they ran the ol' S.S. StarsnStripes on the financial rocks in 1929 has lulled us into thinking that we can never go back to the Gilded Age of Victorian slums and plutocratic rule again.
But I will argue that the New Deal was a one-off, an unusual concatenation of massive elitist failure, autocratic liberalism (my pal Andy would tell you that FDR was a sort of kinder, gentler despot; I'd argue kinder, hell - the man was a fucking political piranha who used the idiocy and greed of his enemies [who were his social peers] to gut them and stuff them into a political hole for a generation) and transformative policy that was so effective in grinding the old American paradigm down to stone-hard bedrock that we have now forgotten what it was like for most Americans in 1928. That most of us lived at or near poverty and always had, that a short, filthy, brutal, hard working life was the lot of most people, and that nearly a quarter of all Americans were poor; really poor, dirt poor, hardscrabble poor all of their lives. People ate bad food, lived in hovels or slums that would embarass Sierra Leone today, worked in intolerably dangerous and backbreaking ways and died, usually early, of disease, malnutrition, or injury.
And the big difference between 1928 and today is that a lot of those poor Americans back in the day were rural poor. They had farms and knew how to farm. Even when times were bad they had some hope of growing or raising something to eat. Today we farm our crops at the SuperFresh or the Piggly Wiggly. When we lose our jobs, or get sick, or hurt, and there is nothing there to help but the meager donations of some church ladies and a scattering of soup kitchens and county shelters? We're gonna starve, and quick.
But none of this seems to matter to the Tea Baggers. They want their Gilded Age back, and nothing, not even their own lives and the lives of their fellows, will get in their way.
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