By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
I’d planned on tackling the budget this week, and the probability of a government shutdown at the hands of overeager congressional newbies. The Baggers are naively flexing their muscles to show ‘why they were sent’ and strike a blow against big government. Very simply, what’s going on — in the House of Representatives, in conservative PACs and think-tank planning sessions, in state capitols gone Republican and in the corporate boardrooms and press outlets they own — is a calculated frontal assault on the working class. This is plain old in-yer-face class war, a somewhat hysterical effort by the wealthy movers and shakers to regain control of the awakening public by PR campaigns and political influence rather than by force; force may come eventually, or at least we’ll smell it in the wind.
It seems obvious that we have come to an impasse that ‘politics as usual’ can’t even begin to address. With the nation’s belt already tightened to touch its backbone, a missed federal payday would cost penalties and defaults for millions of citizens. Seniors without their Social Security checks might not be able to buy food or meds. Public servants without their pay may not have personal resources to rely on,and these are the people who keep the world around us running. The possibility of government grinding to a halt is very serious.
Then why is it that so many of us miss the radical implications of this legislative collision? I think it’s for the same reason that, like the Georgia congressman at a recent town hall meeting, we tolerate without censure or repudiation a question like, “Who’s going to shoot President Obama?”
To plumb the depths of ‘why,’ we have to dial back a bit and look at history and the human condition. The GOP (in all its guises) has declared war on those who would deny them total freedom to exploit others. Examples? Easy and obvious: Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana. A classic case of overreach by a party that has sucked the nation into a vortex of confusion and emotional double-dealing. Now, while successfully bludgeoning the Obama administration for failing to create enough jobs to fill the black hole of unemployment, the GOP at the same time puts 800,000 jobs or more at risk with its slash ‘n burn proposals. The budget crisis gives them opportunity to pull the government down, defund existing policy, and recreate a conservative fiefdom.
Recreate, you murmur? Sure, though it’s impolite to talk about it. We once had a very profitable enterprise going in these United States, using the labor of people we kidnapped, held captive, and bred to do our heavy lifting. We set a national pattern of human trafficking and exploitation that we’ve yet to overcome. Even if we’ve put slavery behind us, the attitudes of exceptionalism and superiority that fed it remain. Slavery is a wound we’ve never healed, a piece of the American experience that we have refused to come to terms with, carved deeply into our national DNA. Our approval of slavery cannot fail to have karmic implications, considering the democratic values we promoted as our declaration to other nations and to ourselves. We’re born and bred hypocrites, aren’t we?
The idea of owning another person is almost too much for me to comprehend, but the kind of class distinctions it would create are easy to imagine. After an initial expenditure, one had a lifetime servant and employee, along with its progeny. Riches, indeed. Slavery’s morally reprehensible riches flew in the face of the founders’ intent to declare an unheard-of measure of equality in a new land. In order to soothe the moral hesitations that slave-holding prompted, our ancestors used the same process we use today to distance ourselves from our conscience: stereotyping, prejudice and demonization, along with levels of denial and rationalization that border on emotional illness.
In our first years as a republic, we were unable to reconcile our higher aspirations on this issue with our lower motivations, so for about 75 years we put it on the back burner, simmering quietly. Those of us reluctant to pursue slave-holding learned to do without, building a working class; those who embraced slavery quickly absorbed it into their lifestyle and culture. The immense prosperity of the Southern states was built entirely on the scarred backs of their captive workforce. The opening of the Western frontier in the mid-19th century brought matters to a head; laws fashioned around slave-holding were different from state to state, a complicated and unwieldy cause for concern. About that time, a young lawyer from Illinois threw his stove-pipe hat in the ring, campaigning for president with these words:
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
With those words, Abraham Lincoln held a match to the fuse of history. While president-elect, he was targeted in Maryland by Southern sympathizers who refused to accept his national leadership. Pinkerton detectives foiled a plot to blow up the train that would carry him to his inauguration. After the Emancipation Proclamation, the level of vitriol directed at the 16th president became palpable and rancorous, his leadership perceived as a danger to Southern principles. No American war was so bitter or so tragic as the ‘War of Northern Aggression.” I wonder, as well, if any subsequent president except Obama has been so instantly hated.
When the cause had burned itself out, we were all ‘one thing,’ but half of the nation refused to give more than minimal lip service to the new laws governing it. If Lincoln had lived, perhaps the Reconstruction would not have been so harsh. Perhaps the South would not have recreated itself as permanently hostile to the Union and perpetually resentful of its involvement in their lives. Unfortunately, the die was cast on Good Friday of 1865.
Mere days after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln was assassinated by a white supremacist. John Wilkes Booth, upon hearing the president’s speech suggesting voting rights for surviving black soldiers, exclaimed, (in the version with objectionable words removed,) “Now, by God! I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.” In one of the final entries in his personal diary, Booth wrote, “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.” Booth was later shot by a soldier who insisted that he, too, was following God’s orders.
Do those words sound too fresh, too current to have been written almost 150 years ago? In the ‘fair and balanced’ FOX News echo-chamber where there is only nationalism, patriotism and exceptionalism, we hear words like that — and worse — every day. We live in a time of flash-point emergency, income disparity not seen since the days of the robber barons, and a citizenry that is uninformed to the point of sheer ignorance. We no longer have actual slave-holding in this nation, but the moneyed class still revels in superiority and entitlement, while its promotion of servitude, privatization, corporate coup and free market theory has created a virulent classism that has devoured the good of generations of citizens and their kids.
The nation is divided against itself, surely it is. It has been divided to one degree or another since its inception. Only the rule of federal law running like a thread through all 50 states has kept it knit together. Today, we’re witnessing an orchestrated assault by the radical right against federal authority, as well as an attempt to redraw the Constitution itself. We’re living with a palpable increase in racism and classism, but it isn’t just the split in demographics that we must heal. Our work must begin within ourselves.
The division that we need to heal, now that Chiron has settled itself in Pisces, is the internal schism between our ego and our altruism; between our self-interest and our moral aptitude. Many of the founders were slave-holders, reluctant but pragmatic; they were no less a ‘house divided against itself’ than we are, when we secure our position by undercutting some other worker or turn our heads away from injustice in order to protect ourselves.
Linguist George Lakoff recently wrote an excellent analysis of conservative goals entitled What Conservatives Really Want. What they want is a return of the old days, the old ways, devoid of social responsibility. They want to reaffirm the virtues of carrot/stick, reward/punishment, and enhance the ironclad authority of a patriarchy informed by a Christian Old Testament God. Paul Krugman accuses them of using the Shock Doctrine to privatize us back into another century.
As all of this becomes increasingly personal and obvious to us, we need to make decisions about who we will become in the 21st century. Like our 16th president, I believe that this is the time to become “all one thing or all the other,” yet I don’t believe it’s possible to go backwards. The evolution we seek will happen within us as we become the ‘best self’ that we wish we were, decision by decision. That is the only self we can live with if we are to make a new American declaration.
It is always exciting to read your articles Jude, and this one is a real heart-pounder. As well, the folks who have commented here are brilliant and I’m so grateful to to have access to all this.
As lovers of astrology, you will not mind if I point out that the U.S. has at least 1 birth chart that can explain a lot of why we the people have done what we have done, and as well, why other peoples see our country as they do.
Image being the 1st and usually the only criteria for making judgement, the USA’s reputation, according to the Sibly birth chart, is based on what we see on and around the midheaven or 10th house cusp. The 1+ degree of Libra is clueing us to a charming, pretty-is-as-pretty-does image for starters. That the 7th house Venus rules the Libra house and is conjunct Jupiter adds mightily to her attractiveness and generous spirit, and her desire for relationship.
What disappoints would-be Lovers of America is the nearby Neptune in the 9th house. This Neptune in Virgo often pretends to represent a non-prejudiced (Pisces) attitude, while in reality it has always been a (Virgo) discriminator.
To make matters worse, Mars in the 7th house of the U.S. Sibly chart squares that shape-shifting Neptune, telling any would-be suitors they should not always believe what they hear.
However, this Mars is in Gemini, known to be just as dupliciteous, and has spread stories exaggerating America’s foibles, if not becoming down right hostile. Fair is fair.
This Virgo Neptune is hampered in expressing itself because the sign he rules, Pisces, is intercepted in the 3rd house of the Sibly chart, making it difficult for Ceres and Nessus who reside there to directly express themselves too. Their closest contact is Uranus who squares them from the 6th house near the descendant, and who also resides in Gemini. Uranus is known for many interesting traits, agitation being one of them.
In mythology, Ceres and Nessus both turned vindictive when thwarted, so it’s not too surprising that Uranus would utilize his Gemini duality to spred Ceres’ rage and Nessus’ poison to the dual-dueling press, and not just locally.
As we yearn for the growth of consciousness, equality and most of all, love, let us remember the higher expressions of the gods and goddesses mentioned here and aim for true acceptance and freedom for all. When we work to overcome the ignorance, greed, hate and fear so prevalent now, we will make not just our country, but our planet a better place for all.
be
Wonderful and timely article. My husband and I watched a movie this weekend, “Collapse.” It is based on an interview with Michael Ruppert. It was scary but eye opening and sometimes a bit conspiracy-theory too but a lot of truth in it that seems to be saying (in a different way) what I see here on PW. It is worth a rent (or Netflix) to see it. Here’s his website: http://www.collapsenet.com/free-resources/collapsenet-public-access.
Ruppert said in the movie that (paraphrasing here) the rugged individualist won’t survive in the coming collapse; we have to band together, help one another, grow our own food, use alternative energy, rise up and speak out.
The Birth of a 21st century Democratic Socialist Republic.
It seems to me that we are reaching the point in the USA, somewhere between conception and birth, where the gestation begins to show signs of revolutionary consciousness. There are adequate models happening around the world right now that all shed light on the do’s and the don’ts.
Nobody has the right, any longer, to say that “I do not have the wherewithal to help and to contribute.” Nelson Mandela sat in a concrete cell with absolutely no resources whatsoever for 27 years, yet the strength of his vision and his character simply took over, and he emerged, mission accomplished, to begin a process in Africa that “just ain’t gonna stop.”
Colonel Gaddafi, as if to mirror this human achievement with the diametrically opposed view of how not to win friends and influence people, has had all of the resources known to man at his disposal, and has simply chosen to allow his character and vision to create his version of Mandela’s Pan-Africanism.
The people will always choose. That is why true democratic Socialism works. Therefore it is about you; your vision; your character and your patience when dealing with others who perhaps need encouragement. The psyche of a man such as Mandela differs greatly from that of Gaddafi. Mandela ploughed a furrough that left no doubt that there is no compromise, no deviating from the plan, and integrity and a conscious love of the human spirit at all times are the highest considerations at any political level. Gaddafi is simply a psychotic mess who, like many “men of power,” is propped up by his brutalised caucus of acolytes. It is said that Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe would have quit years ago, but that his executioners and state terrorist henchmen refuse to allow it, because it is they who will face war crimes long after he has cut a deal and then expired. Gaddafi seems to have raiseed a brood who are happy to commit mass suicide on Libyan soil, for that is the inevitable outcome of his son’s televised pronouncement on Plan s A, B and C. Exit strategies please!!
It is difficult, at the early stages of a conciousness-raising political experience, not to appear quite fascistic when suggesting that a way of thinking is at the heart of the road to success. But that in itself is a dichotomy. For Mandela has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that … that thinking has to embrace the highest levels of instinct, intuition and a genuinely heartfelt love for every single spirit that shares our planetary home. This is no mean feat, juxtaposed with the current results of a man who has interfered with many of Africa’s state politics, bank-rolled at least 12 mass genocides, including the works of Charles Taylor in Liberia, and has simply imitated his American masters by attempting to bring totalitarianism to the continent of Africa while enslaving its cultures that are actually the most uplifting that I have ever experienced!
This journey begins and ends at your kitchen table. Your commitment to the truth and the future, is simply a measure of Chiron’s current Mercurial and Martian hors d’oeuvres, before the real work begins when the Promethean family arrive later.
Many of us are going to have to make room at the table for others who need to be fed. I hope that you will accommodate your neighbour with a new way of thinking, and a new way of loving. Thanks Jude!
Paul Hill
but yes, good to make the links to the past, in a real way
that article i linked to, while a good analysis of what’s being done presently – really falls down near the end when it starts to glorify ‘what this country was founded on’
hey don’t try and frame it like it’s divided between republicans/conservatives and democrats/liberals
the political parties are two shades of the same green – don’t forget that
(and not green as in the environment)
they both cater to the plutocracy, the ruling elite
the house divided is between that elite and their politicians who do their bidding, and the wishes of the vast majority of citizens, whether you want to call them tea-partiers, conservatives, liberals, anarchists, whatever – most people of whatever stripe do not want corporate rule with a ruling class that controls 9/10 of the wealth in the country … but whether it’s tea partiers voting for governors who try and break unions, or hope-filled liberals who vote in a president who keeps the tax breaks going for the rich/sells out health care promises/etc – they all want something other than what their vote gets them
what the people want is not what the politicians enact
see “The Plutocrat’s Coup d’Etat, Their Republican Allies and Their Democratic Enablers”
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/25-1
Well, this might be fun. Anonymous is calling out the Koch-roaches.
A warning shot across the bow:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/49513260/OpWisconsin
This says they are actively looking for vulnerabilities (I wonder why that tactic, instead of silence until they strike, but it does make good theater I guess). They are also calling for a boycott of Georgia Pacific products, and list brand names (these are Koch owned…..)
Great conversation going on, dearhearts, thanks for sharing. There’s lots of layers on this one and pulling them apart is like turning a kaleidoscope for another view.
Fe, you’re right, thanks for reminding us about the penal system, hijacked now by the privatizers not to mention the dreaded Christocrats. I’ll go over to Kos and find the mentioned material; these things make my heart hurt, but I’ll bite the bullet. And as for slavery at this very moment, most of us are indentured in some fashion to this broken system. Recognizing that it’s true is the first step; recognizing that it doesn’t have to be is the next. And GG, thanks for the good advice and the legwork. Very helpful list, I’ll print it.
digby wrote a good piece today on the conservatives need for an aristocracy and how that plays, here:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/keeping-them-in-their-place.html
I love dig — she’s always on top of it. Oh, and I read a post today that included the word “Koch-suckers.” Just thought I’d share … tee hee.
Thanks, everybody, for lucid, informed opinions and willing hearts.
As always Judith, a great article, spot on.
I really think you hit it out of the ballpark with,
“What they want is a return of the old days, the old ways, devoid of social responsibility. They want to reaffirm the virtues of carrot/stick, reward/punishment, and enhance the ironclad authority of a patriarchy informed by a Christian Old Testament God. Paul Krugman accuses them of using the Shock Doctrine to privatize us back into another century.”
THIS is the heart of the matter. They’re seeing that the times we live in now are their last chance to even try to take society back to a time that will never come again. Even if the upheaval tears what little we have left apart and leaves a vacuum to be filled by something as yet unknown. The “Kochroaches” and the top 2% in this country simply do not care; for them, this is winner-take-all. And they will stop at nothing to be that winner. They no longer have ANY loyalty whatsoever at being an American, if they ever did. The ability to make staggering amounts of money globally have left these parasites with no sense of being a functioning part of their country.
GraffitiGrammarian – Last night on PBS, (yeah, one of the things Congress is trying to defund) I saw a show called NEED TO KNOW. On it, they had a segment about how the consequenses of global warming can be seen right NOW in Norfolk, VA. A good piece of journalism that I wish had been longer and more widely available for people to see.
A nail square on the head, Jude. Thank you.
Very good piece, Judith.
Something along the way caught my attention: where you say our habit of denial borders on an emtional illness.
I could not agree more. I think it is a form of mental or emotional illness to give in to all this deluded thinking. The more we fail to come to grips with realityf, the more disconnected we get from reality.
The main worry I have now is our failure to acknowledge that climate change is happening, and that we have very little time left to start addressing it.
I choose to believe that we might still be able to make a difference, and save many species from extinction (including perhaps ourselves). But this means that we must begin RIGHT AWAY to use less energy and thereby lower our CO2 emissions.
I know no one wants to hear this, and that we’ve all signed some kind of social contract that says it’s perfectly ok to fiddle while Rome burns, but once you let this little piece of reality into your world view, you realize that it’s the most important story of all.
I am working on a little business venture — I hope to start a corporate newsletter about the efforts that businesses are making to reduce their CO2 emissions.
Yes, some businesses actually are making a serious effort to do this — above and beyond the “greenwashing” that we’re all familiar with. And more must begin to do it.
So anyhow, I”ve been learning a lot about the topic. To borrow from Auden Schendler’s book, “Getting Green Done,” imagine that we actually accomplished the following 8 things:
1) adopt efficiency building codes for all new homes and commercial buildings.
2) make power plants much more efficient
3) build 1 million new large wind turbines
4) sequester the CO2 coming out of most existing power plants (this means to compress the gas and store it underground)
5) build 700 new nuclear power plants and keep all existing nuke plants on line (I don’t support this, it’s just part of the formula here….)
6) increase average fuel efficiency of all cars and light trucks to 60 mpg
7) make all new personal vehicles as hybrids, and power them with wind-generated energy
8) stop all tropical deforestation.
Okay, are you with me? Those are 8 things that we could do — and even getting one of them done looks to be really difficult politically.
But even if by some miracle we managed to do ALL EIGHT of those things, the average world temperature is still going to go up by at least 1.5 degrees C, and Greenland is still going to melt.
BUT — if we could do those eight things, we could keep sea level rise to just an extra 20 feet, instead of the extra 80 feet that’s going to happen if we do nothing.
If we do nothing, it’s going to be worse than any of us want to imagine. There is going to be a lot less arable land, less potable water, lots of disruptions in agriculture and trade and all kinds of business. There is going to be massive unemployment and hardship, and so many of the earth’s beautiful plants and animals are going to be lost forever.
So you know, if you’re going to put your shoulder to the wheel and work for something, work to lessen climate change. There are a million ways to do it — invent your own. But do it.
peace, GG
Judith:
The slave state does exist in America. Its not a past tense. Its today. Therein the prison industrial complex. The sentence and welfare reforms that happened in the 1990s that basically guaranteed a fixed population of the poor in prisons to make everything from GAP jeans to portable classrooms and office space.
Prison labor is not just for licenses anymore. The good amount of cheap American made products come from prisons in the midwest, the west and the south.
There is a great diarist over at Daily Kos named Bob Sloan. His is the most detailed writing about how governors across the states are dismantling whatever protections prisoners have left to pay them literally nothing while they are under lockdown.
It used to be that the labor programs were for rehabilitation, but not anymore. Corporations are using them as a cheap labor force–like they have been doing to other countries around the world.
Thank you Judith for such an enlightening article.
Just the utterance: “Who’s going to kill Obama?” says it all – how truly sick/polluted our world is and how much healing/cleansing is needed. Looks like the cosmos is set to fix this and it “ain’t gonna” be pleasant.
Great article. You can really see this global drama played out vividly on the U.S. stage.
One of the biggest problems full stop is the role of multinational corporations who seek increasingly the valid status of personhood and who would wish to patent the human genome so that they might redefine the essence of a person in every way – but in reality as compliant (a.k.a. fodder).
Nation State boundaries and the rule of law don’t do well when those laws transcend the national boundary – same with economic modalities. When you create an international category that cannot be regulated nationally standards are entirely relativised – which, on the grand scale, means institutional psychopathy becomes viable with no accountability.
When corporations have the status of people, in law – watch out!
Although the stakes are unutterably high, it seems we must bring them to the table..
Thanks for putting this out there, Judith, and for linking it so thematically with Eric’s emphasis on Chiron in Pisces. The political wound is indeed a personal wound.
Let’s get treatment in the best possible places.