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.
Friday, September 30, 2005
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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