The Aerie
It's tempting to ask, "How much longer can this go on?"
I spoke tonight with a friend in my writing group, and he described a recent meeting he had with the leader of a local facility that offers job training to released felons. The leader is apparently a devoted Bush Republican who voiced the opinion that, given the vibrant, robust economy, it was impossible for someone who wanted a job to fail to get one.
A bit later it became clear that Republicanism isn't his only religion, but that part of the job training that HE was carrying out involved bringing participants into his faith.
BLIND IDEOLOGY
It's blind ideology, to me. It's no different than Stalinist Communism or the Chinese Cultural Revolution of German National Socialism. Rather than facing reality and finding actual but complex solutions, people seem to like to come up with a simple idea which they believe OUGHT to work, and then simply insist that it DOES work without regard for reality or evidence. Anyone who questions the ideology is actively working against the ideology and must be rejected: evidence that counters the ideology must be rejected.
As idealogues have always done, they believe personal morality is intrinsically bound to the ideology, to success, and even to one's humanity. If you fail, you must be immoral and therefore not part of the idealogy: if you are part of the idealogy you are moral, and therefore you must succeed. If you believe that the economy is robust, you will therefore get a job: if you fail to get a job, it is evidence that you are morally bankrupt, not fully human, and therefore deserve your failure and your suffering. Compassion is not necessary for those who are not part of the ideology.
CULTISM
I had a friend once who got involved with a cult - it was a weird cult that centered around selling knock-off perfumes. They practiced the same things: anyone who questioned her 24-hour-a-day devotion to the program was jealously trying to sabotage her success. She was told protect herself by cutting off communications with anyone who questioned her involvement. After being exploited for about a year she finally came to her senses and left, and described to me how fear and shame were used to control her.
And so you have our federal government, which as far as I can tell seems to be involved in the same kind of cultism. For this administration, doubt is disloyalty, and loyalty is certainty.
The other day when FEMA director Mike Brown stepped down, President Bush was caught by surprise by his move. I think I know why. And it's not merely because he's a willing figurehead president, only told what is necessary for his role. It's because while Brown was criminally incompetent, he remained loyal. As long as you remain loyal to this administration, you can remain in it no matter how incompetent the evidence shows you to be: look at Rumsfeld.
So when something - a shred of conscience maybe - compelled "Brownie" to resign, it of course struck Bush as absurd. Sure the guy screwed up - hey, who doesn't lose a city now and then? - but there was no reason for him to leave. He was still loyal!
Amidst all this cultish groupthink it's hard not to wonder, when will they break out the grape Kool-Aid? And who will drink it?
GOVERNMENT BY IDIOTS, THUGS, MADMEN AND THIEVES
I mean, the way I see it, here's what we have so far:
1) Our president is clearly a fool and a figurehead. He's canny enough to do what he's told, and not much more. History is littered with regimes run into the ground by idiot princes, and this is just another one.
2) Dick Cheney - a crude, foul-mouthed man with the singular focus of stealing as much money from this nation as possible through Halliburton and the oil companies, and hence back into his own pockets.
3) Karl Rove - a brilliant propagandist entirely devoid of conscience, whose only interest is in the maintenance of power... and who considers this a strength.
4) Rumsfeld - a mediocre tactician whose only military gift seems to be an unflappable persistence, also entirely without a conscience.
5) Tom DeLay - a classical example of a purely crooked politician.
These and others work for and with a whole raft of organizations such the Heritage Foundation (paid for by Scaife) and the wealthy corporatists including Big Oil and the Military-Industrial Establishment. All any of them wish to do is to simply steal this nation blind.
They already control the military. They control the executive and legislative branches of government. And with two openings on the Supreme Court, they soon will have control of the judiciary as well. And they have seized control of the major media in order to keep their theft as quiet as possible.
MOTIVATIONS OF THE MAD
None of them care about anything except their own greed. They aren't even idealistic enough to pretend to be revolutionaries. They are simply sucking every penny out of this nation and into their own pockets, without regard for the future at all. They don't appear to be able to imagine the welfare of their own children or grandchildren, except as a kind of vague future defined by their own success.
Maybe some are naive enough to take for granted the planet's ecology or the institution of the United States. Maybe some are cynical enough to not care if either or both of these things fail, assuming that they will be above such crises within their private enclaves. Maybe some are actually so ideologically narrow that they believe that by holding to their ideology everything must work out fine, at least for them. And maybe some are just plain insane and are simply whooping it up while waiting for The Rapture.
Drink helps create drunks. Gambling helps create addicted gamblers. I think it's about time that we recognize that vast wealth helps create people who are addicted to accumulating wealth. Some crazy people hoard trash - other crazy people hoard money. Not all who are wealthy are mad, but enough of them are mad that it's about time the problem is treated rather than celebrated.
WHERE IS IT HEADED?
I think the fable of the Emperor's new clothes is wrong - I think that after the boy pointed out that the Emperor had no clothes, he was stoned to death by an angry mob led by his parents, who feared guilt by association.
I wonder how long our national facade of normalcy can be maintained. How long it can go on before enough of Bush's supporters are forced to recognize that their Emperor has no clothes?
But then I look at the Soviet Union - as corrupt and mismanaged as any - which persisted even as its conscripted soldiers died in the Afghanistan debacle, and people queued for hours for basic necessities, and despair and hopelessness gripped the nation. Will Americans allow themselves to sink so low? We like to pretend we are better than that - that independent American spirit would prevail where Russia's supposed cultural acceptance of oppression allowed for years of exploitation. But I wonder if we have become such a comfortable nation that we will fool ourselves. "Yes, it's bad, and I'd work for change except, well, Survivor is on..."
CULTIVATING DISCONTENT
Coincidentally, even as one of my writing group colleagues was speaking with a pro-Bush felon-release trainer, another friend in my writing group is training felons as part of a separate program. In this case, she is helping former meth addicts work on job skills. Her comment illustrated another problem that this nation is developing: "Do you know how impossible it is for felons to get a job?"
The quarter-century old failure called the War on Drugs has created a broad class of people whose felony background is due to drug use or trade, rather than violent crime (that is, not violent drug users or violent drug dealers). This underclass is fixed: in many places felons cannot vote and/or hold public office, so they cannot change public policy. (This is to point out a fact, not challenge the general advisability of this policy). If felons are unemployable and cannot get work, they will likely become angry and lose hope. Rome was sacked by terrorists from outside her borders, but America may be felled by growing its own terrorists. By unnecessarily adding to the permanent, angry, hopeless underclass, the War on Drugs has set up a perfect petri dish for domestic and foreign terrorist recruitment. There will always be a criminal underclass, but the War on Drugs has swelled its ranks without reducing drug use or treating drug victims.
RACE VS CLASS
We've been distracted from this and other class issues in a number of ways. First, for many decades our class issues have been masked by race. Instead of speaking of the hardships of the poor, we've spoken of blacks, latinos, whoever. Divide and conquer: play the minority groups off against each other, and play the whites off against everyone else, and nobody will notice that it's really a war of the rich against the poor.
Second, "class" terminology has been expunged from our language in a very Orwellian manner. Try talking about class, and you're immediately discredited as a Socialist - a political philosophy that those controlling this nation have tried to brand as "dead." You're not only out of fashion, but your efforts are doomed if you use class terminology.
And of course, there's the cult of victimhood. The winner, the propagandists have learned, are the ones who cry "victim" first and loudest. So the right-wing media complains of the oppression by the mythical left-wing media.
The religious claim to be oppressed by the atheists and humanists. This despite the fact that there are a number of religous broadcast and cable television channels, but as far as I know absolutely no "humanist" channels. Playing the victim, the religous will claim that any non-religious channel is by definition an oppressive humanist channel. Billy Graham is regularly broadcast on prime time - when was the last time you saw an atheist broadcast during prime time? Do you even know of an living atheist as famous as Billy Graham? But the religious claim oppression.
So in the culture of victimhood, the wealthy are the first to cry "class warfare" or "class hatred" anytime class emerges in a discussion - even as the Federal Minimum Wage remains fixed at 1997 levels.
And since they ARE the rich, their voice is heard much more loudly than the voices of the poor.
It goes on and on. This country is controlled and exploited by the wealthy and powerful.
HOW LONG CAN THIS GO ON?
Will the USA go the way of the Soviet Union, and how long would that take? Will individual states decide that they are paying more federal taxes than they receive in benefits, and decide to opt out?
Or will nature catch up first? Will the next hurricane immerse Washington D.C.? Will the oceans rise to engulf lower Manhattan?
Will the people rise up spontaneously? Will a leader emerge who can voice some national vision of a better America?
Or will the madmen seize hold - the military take over, or some religious charismatic seize power?
Will George Bush be followed by Jeb, to be followed by George following the repeal of the Twenty-Second Amendment?
Or will the system work? Will we somehow emerge from this present Dark Age of ideology, propaganda, and corruption and find a means to repair the damage that we're doing to the nation and to the world?
DESPITE A RECORD OF FAILURE
Four years after 9/11 Osama bin Laden is still free. Nobody even remembers the Anthrax Mailer anymore - or the fact that all of his targets were Democrats. The economy is about to take a horrid nosedive, repeating the high-oil-price high-inflation days of the 1970's. Halliburton stole $8 billion dollars in Iraq and got off scot-free, and was just awarded the no-bid (read: was handed by Dick Cheney) the contract to rebuild New Orleans. Pat Robertson blames Ellen Degeneres for Hurricane Katrina and calls for the assassination of the President of Venezuela... but remains influential. And his "Operation Blessing" charity was promoted by FEMA as a charity recipient following Hurricane Katrina, even after his "Operation Second Blessing" charity was revealed to be funneling donations into Robertson's own diamond-mining company.
Despite records of failure and corruption, the powerful remain in power and the population does not seem terribly concerned about taking that power back.
NO ANSWERS
These things don't inspire hope. These things all seem symptomatic of a society in the grip of madness, on the verge of collapse.
Will it get better? Will it get worse? How long can this go on before it collapses?
I don't know.
Posted by Albatross at September 15, 2005 1:32 AM | TrackBack