As the old saying goes, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.” With the political season heating up and the airwaves filling with the usual overheated rhetoric and negative ads, I keep being reminded of the metaphor that the well of the public commons has been poisoned. This is nothing new in American culture, of course, but the damage is insidious, as it can lead people to believe that a safe space for reasoned discourse no longer exists. Until we reclaim and restore faith in the idea of a shared commons, enormous amounts of energy that might go towards constructive action will continue to be wasted in misunderstanding, pointless argument, and the resultant apathy.
Sometimes, though, when problems seem particularly complex, a clarity on possible paths forward and the things that truly matter can emerge from the murk. In recent years, both the blogosphere and plain, old-fashioned journalism have been increasingly engaged in analyzing and publicizing the factual basis of political claims. It’s like buckets continually lifting sludge out of the depths of the poisoned well: the need for it will never go away, but, at the same time, truth is never going to go out of fashion.
Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet needed most, I bring,
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
A book separate, not link’d with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
There’s an old saying that Republicans are like lemmings, in that they’ll follow their leader in lockstep even if he marches off the side of a cliff; whereas the Democrats are like a crowded station wagon where everyone is yelling contradictory directions at the driver. As with any stereotype, there’s a ring of truth here (they’re also referred to, respectively, as the “Daddy” Party and the “Mommy” Party). The S. F. Chronicle recently printed an op-ed piece by an engineer who compiled economic and social data going back to 1960 and presented it in the guise of a Consumer Reports-style rating of the Democratic and Republican parties. By any measurable standard, from responsible stewardship of the economy to reductions in violent crime rates to healthier families and communities, the country over the past 50 years has fared better under Democratic administrations. Meanwhile, Talking Points Memo has a blog post today about the phenomenon of what boils down to Democratic wimpiness. The Republicans are simply better at playing offense, facts be damned: when Daddy starts playing bully, Mommy is too often inclined to cave.
Until Mommy learns how to fight back effectively, things will most likely keep getting worse. It’s an object lesson in group psychology, playing out in countless stories across the land. I wish I felt more confidence than I do at the moment that the tide has begun to turn.
Last week’s tragic natural gas explosion, which destroyed a residential neighborhood in the vicinity of San Francisco Airport as people went about their ordinary dinnertime business, is redolent of myth. It lays bare the seamy underbelly of American power dynamics for all to see. We tend to thrive on fanciful rags-to-riches tales of the little guy who works hard, plays by the rules, and makes it to the top, but too often the reality is that the system is hopelessly rigged against honest, decent individuals in favor of entrenched money and power.
PG&E, the utility company that owns the gas line that exploded in San Bruno, spent millions of dollars in the lead up to the June primary election (unsuccessfully, as it turns out) on a proposition that would have made it exceptionally difficult for municipalities to opt out of the company’s near monopoly on gas and electricity connections. It’s now starting to emerge that there had been warnings about possible leaks on the San Bruno gas line prior to the explosion. In addition, the S. F. Chronicle reported this morning that lives and houses might have been saved if PG&E had had an automatic shut-off valve installed on the line, something it was warned about almost thirty years ago when there was a catastrophic gas line rupture at a construction site in downtown San Francisco.
PG&E is already bellyaching about needing to pass whatever costs are incurred in cleaning up this mess onto its paying customers in the form of higher rates (God forbid that its executives or shareholders should have to yield up any of their precious profits). This is a particularly ugly example of much-needed reform that is long overdue. Corporations and the individuals that run them should not be shielded from the logical consequences of their actions.
I miss the days when you could just hook up a set of speakers, plug in a new stereo system, and enjoy your music. Or – gasp!!! – plug in a TV set, fiddle with the rabbit ears, and instantly start watching programs (THOSE days are gone forever). I love my iPod, but the tradeoffs of all the technological bells & whistles vs. plain old enjoyment of artistic content just aren’t worth it.
I have a high degree of skill at reading and processing information, and the permutations of gobbledygook involved in trying to hook up a Samsung TV to a Sony home theater system to a Panasonic DVR to the various other paraphernalia required to get them all “communicating” with each other is crazy-making. And then when you do get it all hooked up, you have three or four *#&%!! remotes that need to be fiddled with in proper sequence in order to get anything to work. It’s enough to get my unreconstructed inner Confederate stirred up and snarling about the evils of industrialism.
The business world being what it is, when automobiles were first invented you could only run Ford cars on Ford gas, Edsels on Edsel gas, etc. Eventually it all shook down so that gas was gas, and the corporate world moved on to duke it out in other arenas. I think we’re at an equivalent point with all this information and entertainment technology. Goddess knows the vast majority of the swill being churned out of Hollywood and elsewhere doesn’t warrant all this hassle. But then there’s “Mad Men,” and the Lehrer News Hour, and my iPod, and my old LP recording of “The Magic Flute” with Georg Solti directing the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, with arias from the Queen of the Night that sound straight out of the celestial sphere…
I’ve thrown in the towel, and have a call in to the Geek Squad. This whole system is nuts, but the music makes it worth dealing with.
I am completely out of patience with the extent to which the Republican Party has been taken over by its most extreme, hate-mongering kooks. It’s akin to what the Democratic Party might have sounded like a generation ago if its prominent figureheads had spouted the philosophy of the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers. It’s not okay for normal human beings to act like nothing is wrong. Japanese Americans were sent off to internment camps during World War II because of ignorant fear-mongering and bigotry. Artists and intellectuals were persecuted during the McCarthy era for alleged ties to a mythical Communist monster. People lost their lives fighting for justice during the Civil Rights movement. In all of those instances, official apologies were rendered long after the damage had been done and real peoples’ lives had been destroyed. The anti-Muslim bigotry in the air these days, along with the claims by some that Barack Obama is a tainted-blood, evil alien out to undermine the American way of life, is every bit as despicable as those shameful travesties of yesteryear. It’s way past time for it to be called out as such.
In secret place where once I stood,
Close by the banks of lacrym flood,
I heard two sisters reason on
Things that are past and things to come.
One Flesh was called, who had her eye
On worldly wealth and vanity;
The other Spirit, who did rear
Her thoughts unto a higher sphere.
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)
In two of California’s most prominent races this election season, rich Republican candidates with little to no political experience are trying to self-fund their way into office on claims that their experience in the corporate world will somehow let them transcend the dysfunctional realities of business-as-usual governance and succeed where others have fallen short. The idea that the obscene wealth of individuals who profited off the deregulated, fox-guarding-the-henhouse gambling den that Wall Street has degenerated into over the last few decades correlates to good character and leadership skill would be a joke if so many people didn’t seem to be falling for it. Old-fashioned, Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches fantasies have no basis in reality when the system is rigged. But, as they say, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people.”
The truly galling thing is that, as the SF Chronicle reported this morning, the corporate elites trying to sell themselves as new Messiahs are trying to blame labor unions for waste and fraud in the system. I have no quarrel with opening up the subject of abuse of power by labor unions, but, as a matter of scale, for Wall Street goons to attempt to blame unions for the massive financial irregularities that have derailed the American economy is obscene.
Caveat Emptor. This will be a test case for whether or not Democrats can grow some spine and learn how to fight effectively. I’m not holding my breath.
American Muse > Archive by category 'Flotsam & Jetsam'
