Lessons Learned?

What can be drawn from this recent election that speaks to America? To listen to the bombast, this election is all about money. Who has it, where it comes from, what it’s to be spent on, when to cut it off. An angry electorate looking at massive job loss and all that that implies tossed out the previous majority in Congress over money. This is not difficult to understand. People are frightened that they will no longer be able to pay their bills, keep their homes, send their children to college. Basic stuff. Two years into the current regime and foreclosures are still high, unemployment still high, fear level still high, and the only bright spot concerns people who are seemingly so far removed from such worries as to be on another plain of existence. The stock market has been steadily recovering over the last two years. Which means the economy is growing. Slowly. Economic forecasters talking on the radio go on and on about the speed of the recovery and what it means for jobs. Out of the other end of the media machine, concern over illegal immigrants and outsourcing are two halves of the same worry. Jobs are going overseas, and those that are left are being filled by people who don’t even belong here. The government has done nothing about either—except in Arizona, where a law just short of a kind of fascism has been passed, and everyone else has been ganging up on that state, telling them how awful they are. And of course seemingly offering nothing in place of a law that, for it’s monumental flaws, still is something. [More . . . ]

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Aftermath

I should probably wait a few days or weeks before writing my reaction to last night's national insanity exhibition. But I doubt I'll "level out" on what has happened. First off, what part of Mr. Obama's "fixing this will take a long time" did people not understand? Did anyone seriously expect all this mess to be cleaned up in two years? Or is it really just that people are only concerned about their own situation and everyone else can just---well, worry about their own situation? Let me say this slowly, so there can be no misunderstanding: we have been digging this hole for 30 years. It will take a bit longer than two years to climb out of it. Thirty years, that's right. Since Reagan. Dear Ronnie, so classically American in so many ways. Carter began the deregulation frenzy with oil, hoping the oil companies would plow their new profits into development of American resources in the aftermath of the first major OPEC embargo. Reagan was surrounded by the rest of the business community, who whispered into his ear, sweetly, oh so sweetly, "Take the restraints off, Ronnie, and we will build you that shining city on the hill all those Moral Majority types are going on about." So he did. And that started it. (Unlike others, I am inclined to believe that Reagan was naive about this. I think he was from that generation that actually trusted people of a certain stature, relied on native patriotism, and so was completely blindsided by the corporate vampires who talked him into deregulating damn near everything. I think he expected them to reinvest in America, not start the whole ugly off-shore account boom and the outsourcing of American jobs. Inclined, I say, but not willing to give him a complete pass. Because along with that, Reagan oversaw the foreign take over of hundreds of American businesses, many of which were involved in basic research and development and manufactured things vital to our national interest. Throughout the 80s, one company after another was bought by Japanese, British, German, French, and occasionally Korean interests and the result was a serious hemorrhage of expertise, know-how, and manufacturing capacity, not to mention the loss of good-paying, high-tech jobs as those businesses were all moved out of the United States and to their new host countries. Why did he do this? Because Reagan was a traditional conservative who believed government should have nothing to do with private sector business, either pro or con, and he refused to establish an "industrial policy" that would have protected these businesses. At the time there was a tremendous wave of sentiment opposed to protectionism, which smacked of a "liberal" or at least Democratic program, but in hind sight clearly was all about keeping international boundaries as open as possible for the multinationals that have presided over the disemboweling of our economy.) Deregulation has been the culture in Washington ever since. [More . . .]

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The Pundit’s Whine

I try to ignore Glenn Beck. I think he’s pathetic. All he can do is whine about things he quite often doesn’t understand. For instance, his latest peeve has to do with being bumped out of line by science fiction. Yeah, that’s right. Glenn Beck’s book Broke has been number 1 on Amazon for a while and it apparently got beat out finally by a science fiction anthology. His complaint that this is from “the left” is telling. First off he’s trying to make it sound like some profound philosophical issue, that a science fiction collection outsold his book on Amazon. (He also noted that the Keith Richards autobiography bumped him as well and please note the twist he gives that.) Why the Left? Is science fiction a left-wing thing? I know a lot of SF writers who style themselves right-wing, libertarian, conservative, etc. Some of them are very good, too, and I have read some of their work with pleasure. Unless they were writing from an overtly political stance, I found no reason to call them on their “rightishness” because they outsold another writer’s work that might have been a bit leftish. This is just a silly complaint and displays an obsession with partisan politics or just immaturity. This is, of course, Glenn Beck we’re talking about, who seems to find more reasons to evoke Nazi similes than any other pundit I know of and has occasionally shed tears over the abuse he sees our great country enduring from the left. But this is ridiculous. Because isn’t this…I mean, Glenn, isn’t this just the free market making itself heard? Your book can’t stay number one because that would belie the whole principle of competition you claim to believe in. Everybody who works hard and honestly should have their shot at being number one for a little while and this anthology is a poster-child for hard work and perseverance because, well, it’s self-published! It doesn’t even have a major (or minor) publishing house behind it! It got there all on its own, man! This is the flower of the free market! David whupping Goliath’s ass! This should make you proud! No, he berates it because it has to do with death or the culture of death, which he equates with left-wing politics somehow. And for good measure drags Keith Richards into the whole death equation. [More . . . ]

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Who’s Afraid of the Tea Party, or, What Are Those Silly People Talking About?

At a Rand Paul rally, a woman who intended to present Paul with an ironic award (Employee of the Month from RepubliCorps) was assaulted by Paul supporters, shoved to the ground, and then stepped on. Police had nothing to do with this, it was all the supporters of one of the Tea Party leading lights. What they thought she intended to do may never be known, but they kept their candidate safe from the possibility of enduring satire and questions not drawn from the current playbook of independent American politics. Another Tea Party candidate, Steve Broden of Texas, has allowed that armed rebellion is not “off the table” should the mid-term elections not go their way. Sharron Angle of Nevada alluded to “second amendment remedies” in a number of interviews in the past six months. “Our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason, and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government,” Angle told conservative talk show host Lars Larson in January. “In fact, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.” Next to this kind of rhetoric, the vapidity of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware is more or less harmless and amusing. In a recent debate with her opponent she appeared not to know that the much-debated Separation Clause is in the First Amendment. Of course, a close hearing of that exchange suggests that what she was looking for was the exact phrase “separation of Church and State” which is not in the First Amendment. She thought she had won that exchange, as, apparently, did her staff, and they expressed dismay later when they were portrayed as having lost. The best you could give her is points for trying to make a point through disingenuous literalism. Not understanding the case law that has been built on the phrase that is in the First Amendment does not argue well for her qualifications to even have an opinion on the matter. Leading this apparently unself-critical menagerie is Sarah Palin, who despite having a dismal record in office and a clear problem with stringing sentences together has become the head cheerleader for a movement that seems poised to upset elements of both parties in the midterms. It’s one thing to throw darts and poke fun at the candidates, many of whom sound as if they have drawn their history from the John Wayne school of Hollywood hagiography and propaganda. But the real question is why so many people seem to support them. A perusal of the Tea Party website shows a list of issues over which supposedly grass roots concern is fueling the angry election season. [More . . . ]

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On A Christian Nation

Polls recently indicate that more and more Americans link being an American with being a Christian. Yet the consensus on what this actually means is as nonexistent as ever. We hear a lot about how this country was founded on "Christian principles" and that the Founders wanted this to be a "Christian nation." Yet with a few exceptions, most folks would likely chafe horribly should be actually try to return to anything close what that meant in 1787. The question of what the Founders intended is an interesting one, since even cursory research produces conflicting statements on both sides. Many of the most prominent clearly felt that what they had wrought in the Constitution was a device for keeping religion from distorting government. They intended, it seems, that people as individuals should decide for themselves, within a private sphere, how to believe and subsequently how to worship. The government, they claimed, should not be permitted to interfere with that. The question, of course, is whether they intended this to be the case in the other direction. In a way, it's a ridiculous question. How do you prevent an individual's religious ideas from informing his or her political actions? You don't. However the individual believes, that is what will be taken to the polls. All such questions may be similarly addressed---what goes on within your skull is yours and the government cannot interfere with it. But public displays, judicial acts, and legislation ought to be free of overt religious sentiment. Passing laws should be based on common welfare---if an exhortation to god is necessary to make a law seem "right" then that law is not Constitutional. It has to make secular sense. But the issue is muddy, because the same Framers often talked about christian principles and the common bonds of christian community, at least in private, and often in speeches. Is this a contradiction? I believe not. The problem is, the idea as currently framed and debated is simply out of context, not broad enough. What did it mean to be part of a christian community in 1787? That everyone went to church, prayed the same way, believed in the same god or description of god? At that time, I suspect, "christian community" was a label for a total package of cultural markers. One didn't have to believe overtly in any specific christian doctrine in order to accept social ideas about what made a community. Being a christian was a political, social, and economic condition as much if not more than a religious conviction. While you might not pray in that church down the street, you would defend it and move easily in the externalized community around it. What would this have meant in practice? [More . . . ]

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