Saturday, December 10, 2005
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Sadly, A Top Ten List
Last week a coworker asked me why I’m always so cynical. (I had been making snide comments about the new expansion of Tysons Corner shopping mall – something like: nine more acres of the same twenty product brands…). The thing is, I don’t even begin to think of myself as cynical. Just disgusted. But it got me thinking, what am I so disgusted about? So I started listing the stuff that bothers me to see if I could find a pattern.
Here they are, in no particular order: Ten Things* that Indicate that We’ve Become a Nation of Flaccid, Water-Kneed, Cringing, Suburbanized Lambs Undeserving of the Rights and Radical Heritage of Which We Remain Unconscionably Unconscious, Who Would Eagerly Sell Our Mothers, Souls, Testicles (or Parallel Female Genital Metaphor), Children or Anything Else of Fundamental Consequence to Our Humanity for the Equivalent of a Discount Coupon for a Cafemoogabocharonichino** at Seattlebux.
• Incredibly bad and deteriorating service at every corporate chain and franchise. For instance, has anyone noticed that since Royal Ahold bought Giant Food, the staff has become incapable of answering such difficult customer inquiries as “Where can one find canned soup?” and “How much longer will I have to wait until you find out the price of this untagged bottle of olive oil?” Home Depot is another place where the staff seems either poorly trained, disgruntled, or both. The typical Home Depot “Associate” acts as if unable to understand why people keep asking questions about home improvement tools and products.
• Our cowardly bullying of fellow victims of #1 above who are unfortunate enough to be compelled to work at these corporate concerns. Ever thought of this? Next time you’re about to wet your pants because your latte is taking tooooo loooong to prepare, instead of bravely scolding the minimum wage “barista” how about you ask to speak to the manager – not to complain about said barista, but rather to advocate for pay, training, and sufficient staffing to give you the quality service you desire and thus justify the $4.00 price you paid for 31 cents worth of coffee and 9 cents of milk? How about you ask who the regional manager is and make your complaint there instead of giving yourself a sadistic little groin-tickle by beating up on someone whose position and economic need guarantee they’ll have to stand there and silently take your shit?
• That we elected not one but two members of the ultra-weenie Bush family to serve in the same office once held by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
• Our tolerance for police who wear terminator-type sunglasses. What the hell is this about? I’m completely out of patience for our uniformed public servants carrying on infantile intimidation tactics any time they have contact with the public. The whole power-posture, command-voice, theater of authority thing is getting way old and way over the top. The other day I was waved to a stop at a school crossing by a cop wearing a pair of sunglasses suitable for a WWF badguy-persona wrestler. Apparently, even while helping children safely cross a busy intersection on their way to the neighborhood middle school, this officer felt he needed to be prepared to intimidate some would-be criminal, traffic scofflaw, or sociopathic pre-teen unwilling to comply with public authority. Maybe the officer felt that wearing futuro-sadofascist eyewear would restore the testicles shrunken by getting crossing-guard duty while all his policeman pals were out doing real policeman work. Why can't our police do their routine work in a spirit of service to the community rather than as an occupation army? Take off those ridiculous roidrage nazigoggles you morons, you work for us
• John Stossel is on TV. Oh c'mon...
• Our daily acceptance of anti-human work environments for ourselves and our fellow human beings. Without even getting to the evil of how we support our bourgeois lifestyles on the backs of sweatshop (and worse) work done in "developing" countries, the stultifying nature of the daily working conditions most of us toil in at our workplaces is entirely unbefitting and unsupporting of fully-upright humanity. The wallpaper of the laboring existence of most of us is an unrelieved, monotonous repetition of indignities and humiliations so pervasive we don't even notice most of it most of the time. And even for those of us who are fortunate enough to have jobs that allow us to use our minds and judgment as part of our work, more and more we find ourselves putting our creativity and intelligence in service to questionable, dumb, or downright odious enterprises. And despite the corporate-speak of teamwork, workforce buy-in, human resource development, blah blah, most of this is just a scumfilm-thin 21st century gloss on what remains 19th century capitalist command and control and exploitation of workers. Workers of the
• The continued presence of republicans among us let alone in positions of power and influence.
• Ditto christian conservatives. Although they and especially their leading public figures are an almost constant source of morbid amusement.
• Our acceptance of cellphone toting toddlers. Does anyone actually think that giving cellphones to children who should be spending their time twirling in circles of delight and pretending to be animals and comets is a good idea? Stop it! Just stop it now, I say! I'm going to punch the next parent I see whining "could you put that down and listen to me" to a prepubescent sneer-monster at the mall. Why'd you buy them the friggin thing in the first place, bub?
• Our mindless, orwellian parroting of the stupid claims and idea-slogans of neo-lib capitalists and conservative cranks:
- creative destruction (With apologies to all the sweet, Shiva loving hippie types, real creation is never destructive -- disruptive maybe but destruction is never the outcome of anything we ought to call creativity. For the record, most of the corporate-capitalist apologist nitwits who throw this around in defense of what many would call breath-taking examples of profound market-failure and bottom-seeking competition are probably unaware that Joseph Schumpeter, who first coined the phrase, also predicted the ultimate triumph of socialism. For the record, Schumpeter was a half-crank who had lots of quaint ideas.)
- tragedy of the commons (The only tragedy here is that people accept a fantasy version of phenomena from a pastoral 17th century anglo past that never actually existed to justify present-day corporate-privative exploitative uses of the commonweal of humanity under the banner of "privatization".)
- privatization (Oh for the love of god. Click here if you want to get the most recent rant on this.)
- war is a continuation of politics by other means (Yeah. Just as blather is the continuation of philosophical thought by other means. This is one of the most stupid quotations in history. Clausewitz may have been a brilliant guy, but this slogan is inane. And the funniest part is, wannabe intellectuals throw this around like it shows off their sophisticated thought. Every time I hear some talking chimp "thinker" spew this line I want to project my lunch into their slackjawed face. Look how easy this philosophical dogtrick is: Outsourcing is a continuation of workforce employment by other means. Pollution is a continuation of environmental control by other means. Exploitation is a continuation of stewardship by other means. Genocide is a continuation of humanitarian aid by other means. Stupidity is a continuation of erudition... Why has anyone ever been taken in by this nonsense? For the record, war is the failure of politics.)
- capitalism is the real democracy because it allows people to vote with their dollars (OK, follow along carefully. Voting is democratic if and only if conducted under the conditions of one-person-one-vote. "Voting" with dollars is called purchasing. [Important Tip: When there are two different words or labels it's a good tip-off that they refer to different objects or concepts; that's why we have different names for them.] Now, in markets, because differnt persons possess differing amounts of dollars, different persons and entities have differing levels of purchasing power. In a democracy, different voters must have equal voting power. (Remember? One-person-one-vote.) If you argue that in our country it is not true that different persons have equal voting power, you've just stumbled across the fact the you do not live in a democracy. A system which distributes political power according to variations of purchasing power, giving the greatest political power to the most wealthy individuals and entities, is called a plutocracy not a democracy. Different words referring to different objects and concepts, Cletus.)
- ours is the best health care system in the world (This is simply a lie. By the way, to call what we have in the
- the liberal media (blah blah blah blah...)
Well, that's it.*** Some days I find myself hoping to wake up soon and it will still be 1971, I'll still be poised on the brink of adulthood and giddy with hope, and it will still be possible to avert the collapse of left politics into denialist apolitical lifestyle crafting, irrelevant micropolitical issue advocacy, and distracting and disintegrating identity politics. Ronald Reagan will still be a punch line about
But most of the time I think about my children and how wide awake they are and especially my daughter and her husband and how they are raising their wise and dazzlingly alive daughter with grace, humanity and awareness and realize that 1971 isn't so far in the past after all.
*For those who sneer at the ongoing fad of Top Ten Lists either because you credit or blame their creation on David Letterman: Ever heard of the Decalogue? Or how about the Bill of Rights (that would be Amendments one through ten of the Constitution). Perhaps if these lists of ten had been named, respectively, Top Ten Things That Piss Off God and Top Ten Principles We Really Hope Our New Federal Government Will Not Violate, folks would know that Letterman has merely borrowed a deeply rooted Western form. Had Letterman been of Asian heritage he would no doubt have “originated’ the top eight list, as in: The Eightfold Path to Ironic Mockery.
** In a future rant I will list the infantile product names that corporate Nazis in control of all our goods and services force us to say, the worst of which being “rooty-tooty-fresh-and-fruity”…
*** Yeah, I know I cheated on the last one and added a bunch of other items going way beyond a list of ten. If this bothers you, you must be some sort of poorly toilet-trained crypto-fascist thug.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Abort Bennett, Part 2: Let's Call a Cracker a Cracker
OK. I'd stop beating this dead horse's ass except he just won't stay still. Cracker Bill was out on the stump last weekend demonstrating that he is not only a racist, but also cynical and stupid too!
Last Saturday, Bill "Trust Me I'm a Serious Thinker" Bennett decided that he would clear his reputation by carefully elucidating his intellectually complex position on genocidal approaches to crime control and the heavy burden borne by public intellectuals in modern America before a cheering crowd of conservative businessmen in Bakersfield California (a well known center of culture and learning).
According to an unapologetic Bennett, the media distorted his radio comments and turned his denunciation of a hypothetical atrocity into an endorsement. "I was putting forward a bad argument in order to put it down," Bennett argued. "They reported and emphasized only the abhorrent argument, not my shooting it down."
That would be an outrage... If it was true. Unfortunately for Bennett, this particular herring is way too red to mistake for the real target. Here's what Bennett said on his radio program:
"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could - if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."
Now, for the slower of uptake, let's set that out again, this time with emphasis added to the more troubling (slobberingly racist) part of this "thought experiment":
"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could - if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."
Did you spot the problem? In case a member of the Bennett family is reading this, I'll simplify the problem by taking out the confusing extra words. ""I do know that it's true that...abort...black...your crime rate would go down." See? In Bennett's big serious brain, the idea that high crime is caused by the existence of the black folks in America is a self-evident fact. Bennett says in effect: "If you get rid of blacks, crime goes down (but of course, that would be wrong!)." Then says the media is trying to make it seem like he was advocating genocide when he was saying exactly the opposite -- you know, the "that would be wrong" part. He doesn't get (or chooses to pretend he doesn't) that the assertion of what he "knows" about blacks and crime is both empirically false and rhetorically racist. On the Fox News Sunday program following Bennett's original broadcast, perpetually constipated commentator and national embarrassment Brit Hume defended Bennett's remarks as "factually unassailable." Brit Hume: racist.
Here's the thing (again for benefit of the ideologically impaired), the social correlation that counts is not race:crime, it is class:crime. In America, as everywhere else in the universe, poor people are more apt to both commit crimes and be victimized by crime as well as other social pathologies. That's one of those facts that make poverty unpleasant. One of the facts that make capitalism unpleasant is that it creates a poverty class. One of the unpleasant facts about America is that its history of racism (and racism's apparent continued existence) has placed a disproportionate number of black families in poverty. In any capitalist society, the spaces of poverty will be filled by the most vulnerable groups and individuals around -- typically racial and ethnic minorities, women, and children. The rate of crimes committed by middle class African Americans is no different than that of middle class whites, latinos, or asians. Same with the crime rates of wealthy whites, blacks, latinos, etc.: quite high, just not defined as crime. Big news: There is no racial tendency to commit crime. This would not need to be said except that conservative intellectuals need remedial training in the basics of modern knowledge. They've been busy studying 18th century economics and 19th century politcal theory, you see.
So to help the Bennetts and the Humes, it's not end blacks=end crime; it's end poverty=end crime. In the end, to follow out Bill's odious counterfantasy, if you rid America of its black population the crime rate would settle right back to where it is now, just with a different complexion as other vulnerable populations took up the spaces of poverty without relief or redress in post-reagan America. Moreover, if Bill wants to push this cheap thought gimmick further, if he aborted any sufficiently large category of people in America he'd be bound to kill off a number of potential criminals since any large population would likely include a significant number of people living without much hope in poverty; thus he would get his (temporary) decrease in the crime rate. And, by the way, this whole mode of discourse wherein one speaks about a whole race of people as if they were not actually part of the community is hideous on its face. Would Bill ever say something like, "if you were to abort every catholic male baby, your child molestation rate would go down (but that would be wrong!)"? I wonder why Bill's mind went immediately to black babies...
Last Saturday, Bill "Trust Me I'm a Serious Thinker" Bennett decided that he would clear his reputation by carefully elucidating his intellectually complex position on genocidal approaches to crime control and the heavy burden borne by public intellectuals in modern America before a cheering crowd of conservative businessmen in Bakersfield California (a well known center of culture and learning).
According to an unapologetic Bennett, the media distorted his radio comments and turned his denunciation of a hypothetical atrocity into an endorsement. "I was putting forward a bad argument in order to put it down," Bennett argued. "They reported and emphasized only the abhorrent argument, not my shooting it down."
That would be an outrage... If it was true. Unfortunately for Bennett, this particular herring is way too red to mistake for the real target. Here's what Bennett said on his radio program:
"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could - if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."
Now, for the slower of uptake, let's set that out again, this time with emphasis added to the more troubling (slobberingly racist) part of this "thought experiment":
"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could - if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."
Did you spot the problem? In case a member of the Bennett family is reading this, I'll simplify the problem by taking out the confusing extra words. ""I do know that it's true that...abort...black...your crime rate would go down." See? In Bennett's big serious brain, the idea that high crime is caused by the existence of the black folks in America is a self-evident fact. Bennett says in effect: "If you get rid of blacks, crime goes down (but of course, that would be wrong!)." Then says the media is trying to make it seem like he was advocating genocide when he was saying exactly the opposite -- you know, the "that would be wrong" part. He doesn't get (or chooses to pretend he doesn't) that the assertion of what he "knows" about blacks and crime is both empirically false and rhetorically racist. On the Fox News Sunday program following Bennett's original broadcast, perpetually constipated commentator and national embarrassment Brit Hume defended Bennett's remarks as "factually unassailable." Brit Hume: racist.
Here's the thing (again for benefit of the ideologically impaired), the social correlation that counts is not race:crime, it is class:crime. In America, as everywhere else in the universe, poor people are more apt to both commit crimes and be victimized by crime as well as other social pathologies. That's one of those facts that make poverty unpleasant. One of the facts that make capitalism unpleasant is that it creates a poverty class. One of the unpleasant facts about America is that its history of racism (and racism's apparent continued existence) has placed a disproportionate number of black families in poverty. In any capitalist society, the spaces of poverty will be filled by the most vulnerable groups and individuals around -- typically racial and ethnic minorities, women, and children. The rate of crimes committed by middle class African Americans is no different than that of middle class whites, latinos, or asians. Same with the crime rates of wealthy whites, blacks, latinos, etc.: quite high, just not defined as crime. Big news: There is no racial tendency to commit crime. This would not need to be said except that conservative intellectuals need remedial training in the basics of modern knowledge. They've been busy studying 18th century economics and 19th century politcal theory, you see.
So to help the Bennetts and the Humes, it's not end blacks=end crime; it's end poverty=end crime. In the end, to follow out Bill's odious counterfantasy, if you rid America of its black population the crime rate would settle right back to where it is now, just with a different complexion as other vulnerable populations took up the spaces of poverty without relief or redress in post-reagan America. Moreover, if Bill wants to push this cheap thought gimmick further, if he aborted any sufficiently large category of people in America he'd be bound to kill off a number of potential criminals since any large population would likely include a significant number of people living without much hope in poverty; thus he would get his (temporary) decrease in the crime rate. And, by the way, this whole mode of discourse wherein one speaks about a whole race of people as if they were not actually part of the community is hideous on its face. Would Bill ever say something like, "if you were to abort every catholic male baby, your child molestation rate would go down (but that would be wrong!)"? I wonder why Bill's mind went immediately to black babies...
Bill Bennett: racist.
Bennett's supporters, however, have another card to play: White intellectual's burden. These folks want you to know that the real reason you misunderstand Bennett's comments is because you, untrained in the finer points of academic discourse, don't understand "thought experiments." According to fellow right-wing intellectual wannabe, Bill Kristol, Bennett's real mistake was "trying to conduct a thought experiment on the radio." Even softie liberals like Brad DeLong buy into this notion: "Never attempt a reductio ad absurdum argument on talk radio...somebody is bound to think you are endorsing the horrible absurdity that you are rejecting." OOOHHHH! A reductio ad absurdum! I see. Latin stuff. Must be all egghead like.
Says Bennett: "A thought experiment about public policy, on national radio, should not have received the condemnations it has." Oh. Sorry, Bill. Didn't mean to jump on you; didn't realize you were doing thought experiments on the radio. I'll just sit quietly in the corner over here and breathe through my mouth.
Are you kidding me? Thought experiment? You mean like Einstein and Bohr and Planck working out unobservable quantum phenomena through imagined subatomic scenarios? That kind of thougt experiment? I think I'll puke. Bennett's cracker ruminations are to thought experiments what farts are to Mozart's Oboe Concerto.
All right. I'm dropping the subject now.
Friday, September 30, 2005
Abort Bennett; Sterilize Everyone In His Family
OK. Not only is this right-wing intellectual dumb enough to utter racist stupidity on the radio, he actually goes on to defend himself with further slackjawed commentary.
Here's a thought: If you aborted every white right-wing baby in America you'd raise the national IQ average at least 30 points.
Here's a thought: If you aborted every white right-wing baby in America you'd raise the national IQ average at least 30 points.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Why isn't Bush more compassionate? WHO CARES?
We’re hearing a lot these days about Bush’s compassion. Where is it? Why did it fail to show up for Katrina's victims as it did after September 11? Is it back? I for one find this line of Bush-bashing to be completely off base. I think demanding that public officials show compassion is just dumb. Who cares?
I’m sick of liberals who expect public officials to weep over people’s hardships. I’m tired of listening to whining complaints that conservatives don’t have compassion for the downtrodden of the world. The truth is I know a lot of conservatives who go around weeping buckets over the poor and underprivileged. They pity and they pray and they volunteer and they send charitable contributions to worthy causes. So this line of criticism is just not justified. But more importantly, who cares?
I don’t care about Bush’s tears or, for that matter, Bill Clinton biting his lower lip and feeling my pain. Hey Bill, did you feel the pain of the men, women, and children who were cutoff from the welfare system under your “reform” plan? Did you weep for the plight of the working families and blue collar communities displaced and ravaged by your corporate-giveaway NAFTA bill? Frankly, I don’t want politicians feeling anything of mine. How about this: Why don’t the Clintons and their ilk quit feeling people’s pain and start using government to share their burden and advance their interests?
So what's this concern for Bush's compassion all about? For those who woke up late and missed the news, we're back to the ideology of Andrew Carnegie and Herbert Hoover. Government power is used to assist corporations and their investors in their ceaseless endeavor to remove regulatory barriers and concentrate wealth and then government leaders are supposed to show compassion and encourage the private sector to "do its share" to meet the needs of the suffering underclass through charity -- the very suffering their corporate welfare and feed-the-rich policies helped to create in the first place. This is the heart of Bush's so-called "compassionate conservatism."
Compassion as a political attribute makes me want to vomit. Compassion is something you get in a get well card. People in trouble and people struggling to cope with life with limited resources need support from those with means, materials, and power, not compassion from onlookers. Compassion from public officials is just repackaged noblesse oblige. First the noblesse class use every available means to appropriate all the wealth and resources of the community, then they feel the oblige to “give something back” out of a sense of compassion. This typically involves a lot of showy fundraising and little actual impact. (And I'm sorry, pop-culture stars from Bono to Nelly donating concert performances to raise money for "relief" isn't any better.)
This is the sorry state of affairs in America after 35 years of the ascendancy of renascent 19th century socioeconomics: Workers whose daily toil and incredible productivity produce all the profits reaped by corporations and their stockholders now have the pathetic additional burden of begging for relief from conditions created by laws which allow all the returns of productivity to go to capital rather than labor. Public officials at best end up running government as a kind of super-charity. Walmart’s workforce on Medicaid is just the most obvious example of this humiliation. In the final humiliation, workers rely on public officials to beg charity from the "private sector" on their behalf. And the rest of us are supposed to miss the obvious cynicism of this slight-of-hand by which democratic government -- the greatest tool ever invented for the use of the people to realize their collective genuine interest -- is turned into a vehicle for the accelerated gilding of the special interests of the plutocracy.
Every once in a while, however, the noblesse class forgets itself and lets its real ideology slip out in public: Nearly equaling Marie Antoinette's "let them eat" cake gaffe was the slip made by Barbara Bush -- poster matron for noblesse oblige -- while visiting evacuees huddled on emergency cots in a sports stadium. But are you really surprised by the vulgarity of the First Matriarch? What do you think dinner table conversation sounds like when Babs, Poppy, and the rest of the imperial family get together?
Some have said the term "compassionate conservative" is oxymoronic. Not so. It is entirely consistent. Compassion has always been the show that the privileged and powerful put on to distract the servants from a recognition of the servants' own power and rights. So, when used by members of the plutocracy the term is not oxymoronic at all. When used by ordinary working people it’s just moronic.
Anyway, compassion is generally useless in real life. Note the passive nature of the words that typically accompany the word compassion: it's something one just has or shows. When it really matters, what we need is care. Mothers and fathers who are worth spit do not "have compassion" for their children. Family members do not "show compassion" to one another. The word is care. Care is something you do, or a tangible good you provide. Compassion is just something for show -- a tear in the eye or a quiver of the chin will do just fine for compassion. But, unless you're a sociopath running a con, you care for a loved one, you provide care to a fellow human being in need, you don't worry about showing them compassion.
More to the point, if you’re an elected official of a democracy your job is to use the power given you by the people to serve their interests, to pursue justice, to empower the powerless, to use the leverage of government power to win comfort and dignity for those who cannot win it for themselves.
Skip the compassion, go directly to democracy.
I’m sick of liberals who expect public officials to weep over people’s hardships. I’m tired of listening to whining complaints that conservatives don’t have compassion for the downtrodden of the world. The truth is I know a lot of conservatives who go around weeping buckets over the poor and underprivileged. They pity and they pray and they volunteer and they send charitable contributions to worthy causes. So this line of criticism is just not justified. But more importantly, who cares?
I don’t care about Bush’s tears or, for that matter, Bill Clinton biting his lower lip and feeling my pain. Hey Bill, did you feel the pain of the men, women, and children who were cutoff from the welfare system under your “reform” plan? Did you weep for the plight of the working families and blue collar communities displaced and ravaged by your corporate-giveaway NAFTA bill? Frankly, I don’t want politicians feeling anything of mine. How about this: Why don’t the Clintons and their ilk quit feeling people’s pain and start using government to share their burden and advance their interests?
So what's this concern for Bush's compassion all about? For those who woke up late and missed the news, we're back to the ideology of Andrew Carnegie and Herbert Hoover. Government power is used to assist corporations and their investors in their ceaseless endeavor to remove regulatory barriers and concentrate wealth and then government leaders are supposed to show compassion and encourage the private sector to "do its share" to meet the needs of the suffering underclass through charity -- the very suffering their corporate welfare and feed-the-rich policies helped to create in the first place. This is the heart of Bush's so-called "compassionate conservatism."
Compassion as a political attribute makes me want to vomit. Compassion is something you get in a get well card. People in trouble and people struggling to cope with life with limited resources need support from those with means, materials, and power, not compassion from onlookers. Compassion from public officials is just repackaged noblesse oblige. First the noblesse class use every available means to appropriate all the wealth and resources of the community, then they feel the oblige to “give something back” out of a sense of compassion. This typically involves a lot of showy fundraising and little actual impact. (And I'm sorry, pop-culture stars from Bono to Nelly donating concert performances to raise money for "relief" isn't any better.)
This is the sorry state of affairs in America after 35 years of the ascendancy of renascent 19th century socioeconomics: Workers whose daily toil and incredible productivity produce all the profits reaped by corporations and their stockholders now have the pathetic additional burden of begging for relief from conditions created by laws which allow all the returns of productivity to go to capital rather than labor. Public officials at best end up running government as a kind of super-charity. Walmart’s workforce on Medicaid is just the most obvious example of this humiliation. In the final humiliation, workers rely on public officials to beg charity from the "private sector" on their behalf. And the rest of us are supposed to miss the obvious cynicism of this slight-of-hand by which democratic government -- the greatest tool ever invented for the use of the people to realize their collective genuine interest -- is turned into a vehicle for the accelerated gilding of the special interests of the plutocracy.
Every once in a while, however, the noblesse class forgets itself and lets its real ideology slip out in public: Nearly equaling Marie Antoinette's "let them eat" cake gaffe was the slip made by Barbara Bush -- poster matron for noblesse oblige -- while visiting evacuees huddled on emergency cots in a sports stadium. But are you really surprised by the vulgarity of the First Matriarch? What do you think dinner table conversation sounds like when Babs, Poppy, and the rest of the imperial family get together?
Some have said the term "compassionate conservative" is oxymoronic. Not so. It is entirely consistent. Compassion has always been the show that the privileged and powerful put on to distract the servants from a recognition of the servants' own power and rights. So, when used by members of the plutocracy the term is not oxymoronic at all. When used by ordinary working people it’s just moronic.
Anyway, compassion is generally useless in real life. Note the passive nature of the words that typically accompany the word compassion: it's something one just has or shows. When it really matters, what we need is care. Mothers and fathers who are worth spit do not "have compassion" for their children. Family members do not "show compassion" to one another. The word is care. Care is something you do, or a tangible good you provide. Compassion is just something for show -- a tear in the eye or a quiver of the chin will do just fine for compassion. But, unless you're a sociopath running a con, you care for a loved one, you provide care to a fellow human being in need, you don't worry about showing them compassion.
More to the point, if you’re an elected official of a democracy your job is to use the power given you by the people to serve their interests, to pursue justice, to empower the powerless, to use the leverage of government power to win comfort and dignity for those who cannot win it for themselves.
Skip the compassion, go directly to democracy.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Lost in thought
Iron straps of memory bind me now to the ferrous wheeling place I stood when first I beheld the future that awaited my futile attempts to resist its relentless pull toward an unknowing unseeing blank void of sodden folds of winding sheets impenetrable to the razorine shards of hot sulfurous light heliographing ambiguous messages furiously off the glazed and glistening surfaces of a dawn too fractured to bear the weight of further hermeneutic efforts to decode the meaning of texts overburdened by tropes inherited from dying cultures grown cold and moldy in the vapid context of social metastasis rebounding rapidly from remission amid the detritus of dreams careening madly toward ecstatic embrace and fulfillment of desperate desires inflated ballooning straining to rupture and release tensions carried high in the back yet low enough to know better than the last generation’s hopeless dance of hanging sentences of death do us part fantasies promulgated through the indifference of a lost people searching endlessly for the exit from which no human intention could emerge without scathing raging fury aimed at any and all who might dare to dare. As I recall, I walked home alone.
Friday, September 09, 2005
Saturday, September 03, 2005
New Orleans: Beaten by Katrina, Mishandled by Bush, Killed by Ideology
As the people of New Orleans watch their world revert to the conditions of barbarism while promises of such trappings of civil order as food, medicine, shelter, basic public provision, and basic human security are made and routinely broken, what we are seeing is less the incompetence of specific public officials, and more the final triumph of the discourse of privatism. While the drooling incompetence of the Bush “administration” is tragi-laughably on display, it is the now regnant Bush-Cheney-Reagan ideology that is killing people as they wait in vain for the agencies and stewards of modern government and public responsibility to arrive at last and perform their basic duties. The cavalry may be on its way, but unfortunately the cavalry no longer knows how to ride its horses or even what its basic functions are. The sheriff may ride in but can’t seem to do anything better than protect the property of businesses (most of which have been washed away with the rest of the antediluvian assumptions – but, oh well, we’ll just keep going through the same hollow motions of the same dead dance…), label struggling survivors “looters” and point guns at them as they try to drag sodden disposable diapers and canned goods out of the wreckage of doomed supermarkets. Remember, in the new conception, government power exists and may be legitimately exercised only to protect property rights of owners from the capering mobs of terrorists, extremists, populists, and lazy riffraff. In the new world order, to ask a public servant acting during a time of crisis (now known inanely as a “first-responder”), whose only known role is to protect stuff already privately possessed, to affirmatively care for human beings and provide for their human needs is as foolish as asking a pig to dance.
Oh, yes, everyone makes the right concessionary noises about meeting human needs, providing human service, and restoring public confidence, but pigs too can be dressed in tutus and trained to dance the Nutcracker on command. Watch the head of FEMA clumsily struggle to blame the media for “sensationalizing” the suffering of people who’ve been out of food and medicine and water for days on end, watch the president say words of concern that do not match his odd look of annoyance (at the bother of being forced to cut short his vacation?). The fact is, these folks really don’t understand what’s gone wrong, why things are falling apart. Why in the world is this happening, they wonder, why is everything falling apart just when we’ve finally completed all the hard work of pruning to the very verges the government that Ronald Reagan assured us was the problem at the heart of every public trouble? Why, they wonder, is everyone so angry at us when we’ve finally succeeded in convincing all the important thinkers and opinion leaders that what we need is an ownership society that relies on private efforts, private successes, private agency, and personal responsibility to meet individual or aggregated private needs? Why do they keep asking unintelligible (but vaguely embarrassing) questions about lapses of pubic responsibility and the incompetence of public efforts?
The chaos, panic, suffering, and humiliation of the poor, the fragile, and the marginalized we witness this week is the always-obvious and inevitable outcome of abandoning an ideology of public interest, public welfare, and shared responsibility. The corporate media struggles mightily but in futility to find any convincing stories of private provision; it’s not that there are not heroic stories of such acts of person-to-person kindness and basic human compassion carried out in the zone of private engagement, it’s just that it is painfully, achingly, glaringly apparent that the capacity of these private agents is vanishingly small compared to the scale of public human need. We see now, moment by moment, in sharp definition the irreplaceable value of public mobilization. And perhaps we faintly recall how, when they were -- once upon a time -- empowered and held accountable to carry out the people’s work, public agencies, public officials, and public servants using public spending, public utilities, and public programs, did, in fact, manifest actual public compassion. Can we recall now that public works can be the best manifestation of public values like kindness, care, and morality?
Can we now see that for a large, modern, plural, and populous people and nation it is by far wiser to put our collective reliance on law-and-democracy-based institutions rather than faith-based organizations and private corporations? The loss of public competence is the self-fulfilling prophecy of those who’ve barked at the moon for three decades and more in their fevered delirium of conservative ideology. In their ceaseless baying, drowning out rational discourse, they’ve succeeded in shaking our shared confidence in the capacity of public institutions, the potential competency of public agents and stewards to safeguard the public interest, protect the public weal, and provide for public needs. Their self-revealing ideology of self-interest and the alleged fallacy of altruism (tarted-up in the drag of pseudo-theories and shiny slogans having to do with nonsensical toy ideas like “tragedies of the commons” and “prisoner’s dilemma”, and blah and woof), broadcast night and day by a corporate lackey media, have so clouded the public mind that we can barely manage to think clear thoughts about public responsibility and collective action any longer. Thus benighted, our path back to sanity and a wholesome, hopeful, and human understanding of the public basis and nature of genuine democracy is only dimly perceptible, glimpsed fleetingly now in the flame of shared anger and frustration we feel at the images and realities coming to light in New Orleans.
Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 in the middle of, and in reaction to, a breakdown of our public competence. Our economy staggered under the combined bloat of crippling debt and deficit and the weight of rocketing gas prices, our national interest wandered about blindly , lost somewhere in the sands of middle-eastern hatred and reaction to American policy gone awry, and our sense of having failed ourselves and our shared history of the struggle for democracy. Government would not be the solution, Ronald Reagan scolded those of us who might be tempted to force it to reform and recommit to progress and justice; government, he sneered, was the problem. Isn’t thirty-five years of intimidated deference to this tired, cramped, and paranoia-fueled ideology enough? Isn’t it time to wake up and see who is empowered when government is turned to the protection of wealth already achieved, who is impoverished when public institutions are converted to private centers of profit, who is served when public service is turned over to the likes of Charles Colson and Pat Robertson, who is helped and who is harmed by an ideology of ownership and privatism as the basis of social life? Who is lifted up, who is left behind? What is cherished, who is protected, and who is neglected? Who is welcomed as a neighbor and who dismissed as a refugee, a vagrant, a beggar, a ravening terrorist, a clinging dependent? Who wins and who loses in the world according to Bush? The answers flicker now before us, the code becoming clarified. Just watch the images streaming out of the ravaged coastal South.
Oh, yes, everyone makes the right concessionary noises about meeting human needs, providing human service, and restoring public confidence, but pigs too can be dressed in tutus and trained to dance the Nutcracker on command. Watch the head of FEMA clumsily struggle to blame the media for “sensationalizing” the suffering of people who’ve been out of food and medicine and water for days on end, watch the president say words of concern that do not match his odd look of annoyance (at the bother of being forced to cut short his vacation?). The fact is, these folks really don’t understand what’s gone wrong, why things are falling apart. Why in the world is this happening, they wonder, why is everything falling apart just when we’ve finally completed all the hard work of pruning to the very verges the government that Ronald Reagan assured us was the problem at the heart of every public trouble? Why, they wonder, is everyone so angry at us when we’ve finally succeeded in convincing all the important thinkers and opinion leaders that what we need is an ownership society that relies on private efforts, private successes, private agency, and personal responsibility to meet individual or aggregated private needs? Why do they keep asking unintelligible (but vaguely embarrassing) questions about lapses of pubic responsibility and the incompetence of public efforts?
The chaos, panic, suffering, and humiliation of the poor, the fragile, and the marginalized we witness this week is the always-obvious and inevitable outcome of abandoning an ideology of public interest, public welfare, and shared responsibility. The corporate media struggles mightily but in futility to find any convincing stories of private provision; it’s not that there are not heroic stories of such acts of person-to-person kindness and basic human compassion carried out in the zone of private engagement, it’s just that it is painfully, achingly, glaringly apparent that the capacity of these private agents is vanishingly small compared to the scale of public human need. We see now, moment by moment, in sharp definition the irreplaceable value of public mobilization. And perhaps we faintly recall how, when they were -- once upon a time -- empowered and held accountable to carry out the people’s work, public agencies, public officials, and public servants using public spending, public utilities, and public programs, did, in fact, manifest actual public compassion. Can we recall now that public works can be the best manifestation of public values like kindness, care, and morality?
Can we now see that for a large, modern, plural, and populous people and nation it is by far wiser to put our collective reliance on law-and-democracy-based institutions rather than faith-based organizations and private corporations? The loss of public competence is the self-fulfilling prophecy of those who’ve barked at the moon for three decades and more in their fevered delirium of conservative ideology. In their ceaseless baying, drowning out rational discourse, they’ve succeeded in shaking our shared confidence in the capacity of public institutions, the potential competency of public agents and stewards to safeguard the public interest, protect the public weal, and provide for public needs. Their self-revealing ideology of self-interest and the alleged fallacy of altruism (tarted-up in the drag of pseudo-theories and shiny slogans having to do with nonsensical toy ideas like “tragedies of the commons” and “prisoner’s dilemma”, and blah and woof), broadcast night and day by a corporate lackey media, have so clouded the public mind that we can barely manage to think clear thoughts about public responsibility and collective action any longer. Thus benighted, our path back to sanity and a wholesome, hopeful, and human understanding of the public basis and nature of genuine democracy is only dimly perceptible, glimpsed fleetingly now in the flame of shared anger and frustration we feel at the images and realities coming to light in New Orleans.
Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 in the middle of, and in reaction to, a breakdown of our public competence. Our economy staggered under the combined bloat of crippling debt and deficit and the weight of rocketing gas prices, our national interest wandered about blindly , lost somewhere in the sands of middle-eastern hatred and reaction to American policy gone awry, and our sense of having failed ourselves and our shared history of the struggle for democracy. Government would not be the solution, Ronald Reagan scolded those of us who might be tempted to force it to reform and recommit to progress and justice; government, he sneered, was the problem. Isn’t thirty-five years of intimidated deference to this tired, cramped, and paranoia-fueled ideology enough? Isn’t it time to wake up and see who is empowered when government is turned to the protection of wealth already achieved, who is impoverished when public institutions are converted to private centers of profit, who is served when public service is turned over to the likes of Charles Colson and Pat Robertson, who is helped and who is harmed by an ideology of ownership and privatism as the basis of social life? Who is lifted up, who is left behind? What is cherished, who is protected, and who is neglected? Who is welcomed as a neighbor and who dismissed as a refugee, a vagrant, a beggar, a ravening terrorist, a clinging dependent? Who wins and who loses in the world according to Bush? The answers flicker now before us, the code becoming clarified. Just watch the images streaming out of the ravaged coastal South.
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