A Teaching Moment?

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

We’re all here to learn, so they say. Learn about ourselves, about one another, about the ‘whole’ in holistic, the ‘commune’ in community. About how to perfect the human condition by experiencing life together, burnishing our souls by rubbing up against one another. If that’s true, we’re surely gemstones in the tumbler today, our intellect grinding away at one another’s sharp points, our emotions tossed hither and yon and our physical reality teetering on the kind of change most of us are afraid to imagine.

Day by day, we move a little closer to that existential crisis point I mentioned last week. There’s a storm brewing named Karen moving in from the Atlantic and thanks to the clown car that is Congress, we have no disaster relief personnel on alert should the worst befall us. The cops that are protecting these shortsighted zealots in our nation’s capital from people with pitchforks and fast moving cars are not being paid, thanks to their stubborn refusal to fund anything without a ransom payout. Since Obama has declared he won’t negotiate with terrorists, there is little or no movement toward ending the stalemate.

Terrorists? you gasp. Terrorists? Yes, quite. We often talk about a third party — a Green party candidate or the melded Democratic Socialism that Bernie Sanders embraces — as if there are two actual political parties enshrined in Washington D.C., but one is not an actual political party so much as a sociopolitical movement to kill off the republic.

It cannot come as a shock to us that there isn’t a Republican alive who is not dedicated to the end of government as we know it, certainly federal government that legislates on behalf of the whole of us. They have been willingly swayed for the last twenty and more years by one Grover Nordquist, de facto leader of the conservative party who has sworn to whittle government down to a size convenient enough to drown in a tub. That is not someone you can negotiate with, and Barack Obama seems, finally, to get that.

Still, political beasts until the end, vigilant Republican lawmakers seem cognizant of this emergency they’ve manufactured as providing them an opportunity to look outraged in front of FOX viewers. Ever opportunistic, one Texas Rep rushed to protect members of the Greatest Generation from insensitive and negligent park rangers. Here’s yet another example of Pubs not caring if they make an utter ass of themselves in front of the camera so long as they get attention (and if you’d like to see him apologize for being a douche, you’ll find a petition here. Pass it around, you never know what a politician will do under pressure.)

And profit-seeking until the end, CNN has solicited a nauseous array of opinion from every spare Bagger they can find, including the newest of them from my own state, a young man representing the eleventh-poorest of America’s 435 congressional districts. He voted to defund SNAP despite the fact that some 20% of his constituents receive food stamps. I know this was a voice I didn’t want to miss this week, assuring the public that the (entirety of the) American people were counting on him to defund the hated and hurtful socialist healthcare before terrible things happened to unsuspecting citizens. His obvious naïveté was, I hope, instructive to those who haven’t glutted themselves on Bagger Kool Aid.

Well, hell — it’s just health we’re talking about, some would say, although with flu season beginning and vaccine just made available, the National Institute of Health is turning patients away, some of them children dying of cancer, dependent on experimental treatment. Let’s hope the pandemic that creates the Zombie Apocalypse waits until the Pubs are done with their tantrum (or maybe the Pubs ARE the Zombie Apocalypse we can’t seem to kill off, and it’s too late — adios, mi amigo!).

No big whoop. It’s only food programs shutting down, after all. And meanwhile, the farm bill has quietly expired along with government subsidies to dairy farmers, so in the coming weeks a gallon of milk could double in price, along with butter and cheese. And don’t count on those food stamps to save you, you freeloader! The Grand Old Party’s got yer number and you’re not getting another co-dependent dime out of the nanny state if they have their way!

And it’s just international relations, not a worry. Training for security personnel at embassies across the world has ceased, even as FOX News continues to cite Benghazi as the flagship of Obama’s foreign affairs incompetence. Meanwhile, the President has had to cancel his participation in the Asian summit, absenting himself from a crucial meeting with major leaders from the Pacific Rim, including China. Loss of face, you say? Loss of sanity, whisper internationals, who can’t figure out how this could happen in America, especially over something as obviously necessary as healthcare for its citizens.

And it’s only money. According to A.J. Eskow, extrapolating the costs past the initial projections, it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of “forty million dollars an hour. A third of a billion every day. $1.6 billion every week. That’s a conservative estimate of the money Republicans are wasting by keeping the federal government closed down.” And may I simply add, Holy Shit!

Huffington posted some 46 links to shutdowns as their ledeline yesterday, including the demise of scientific research that simply can’t be interrupted without harm and meals for at-risk children who seem too fragile to suffer the blow. And that was only Day #3. Talk about politics being personal! I’m hoping that’s the pony in the horseshit, too obvious to miss. Nobody can fail to notice all this as the consequences hit home, and they will. Even here in the Pea Patch, our lake and camping areas are overseen by the Corps of Engineers. We’re locked down tight, the locals having to climb over chained park entrances in the dead of night to check their trot lines.

And if the Pubs succeed in stalling until the debt ceiling talks raise the ante past the critical mark, even Social Security payments will be on the block, causing FOX News viewers (the best insured people in the nation) to leap to their feet in shock and awe, outraged at Obama for — ummm, well– mostly for being black and ‘arrogant’ (think ‘uppity’). God/dess forbid that the stonewall spins out to meet the treasury deadline, as the Pubs plan to add a whole Christmas list of demands to raise the debt ceiling, including quick approval of the XL Pipeline.

Now let’s be clear: the Republicans know this isn’t their most glorious moment, they know they’ve boxed themselves into a corner and they’ll get most of the blame for the suffering that’s escalating around them. Their zealots don’t care, and are, in fact, celebrating the demise of government, but that’s a small faction within the House, despite their overriding influence. The rest of the Pubs want to pull out of this shitstorm quickly, but they have to come out of this smelling better than they do now, so Boehner still refuses to call a vote until they get something to assert their power over the Executive branch. Obama cannot afford to give them any. They know they’ll take a hit, but I don’t think they realize just how much this is going to backfire when it all shakes out.

It appears now that Boehner may climb off the Obamacare precipice as too steep a climb, and look to earlier demands, like chained CPI in Social Security or other ‘entitlement’ cuts, which also scares the bejesus out of seniors and liberals in general. They’re doing everything in their power to convince the public that this is Obama’s fault for drawing a line beyond which he will not negotiate. They don’t mention that the Dems have been trying to negotiate this issue since April, their numerous calls for conference filibustered in the Senate by McConnell and Rubio, true to the Republican playbook in which it was agreed that all negotiations with this president would meet systemic boycott.

As the House obstructed negotiations all year, they were slamming the president every chance they got for not passing a budget. We can thank Republican Party consultant and pollster, Frank Luntz, for this kind of echo chamber maneuver — extraordinarily effective during the Bush years — prompting Pubs to use the same buzzwords over and over as if they all got the memo (they did.)

Luntz makes no bones about teaching conservatives how to turn public opinion based on choice of words. “When we are in love, we are not rational; we are emotional.” said Luntz, “…my job is to look for the words that trigger the emotion.” Which explains a lot about the irrationality of our times, don’t you think?

If you want verification of that, watch this clip of a revealing hot mic incident this week, a candid conversation caught between Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul (and kudos to Anderson Cooper for playing it to loop on CNN’s 24/7 format.) Mitch and Rand got the memo too. And while Democrats occasionally rely on shared language to sell an idea, the art form belongs to the Pubs as an echo from Orwell (whom Luntz considers a positive role model for clear and precise communication, go figure!). Jon Stewart’s talent at spotting and culling these repetitious sound bites into an amusing montage has earned him ten Emmys.

But this avalanche of disingenuousness over negotiation is nothing compared to the very premise itself, which was simplified by Judd Legum of Think Progress (hat tip to Fe) who tweeted an illustration of what the Pubs are actually asking for, fleshing out the false equivalency of compromise:

Can I burn down your house?

No.

Just the 2nd floor?

No

Garage?

No

Let’s talk about what I can burn down.

No.

YOU AREN’T COMPROMISING!

The problem with the drumbeat of delusional rhetoric is that it’s not just constituents who believe it. Some lawmakers simply can’t help but fall into the trap of consensus thinking, especially the ideologically “pure” Baggers who are, by and large, fledgling politicians from rural districts around the country. Despite Obama’s firm rejection of compromise, late in the week Majority Leader Eric Cantor wrote a strategy memo to the House assuring them that Democrats will eventually cave to their demands. Like McConnell and Paul, he has succumbed to the magical thinking that lost them the White House in 2012.

Indeed, the redundant barrage of Tea Party rhetoric on the ACA this week prompted a blogger response from a Huffy reader that I second: “I never hear anyone saying ‘I wish that Mitt Romney had won the election.’ I do not understand where Republicans get the idea that America stands behind them.” To which Frank Luntz would surely reply, “We don’t need facts. We believe!”

So here we are with the question of the day: is this a teachable moment? Can we step away from the loaded gun we’re shooting ourselves in the foot with long enough to notice that NONE of this had to happen? Is it possible to look at the things we’ve depended upon that are shutting down and get a reality check about the importance of government in our daily lives? Is it even possible to suggest we cut the crap and get on with saving an overheated planet?

The hit and miss violence to the social fabric we sustain with things like stringent budget compromise and sequester doesn’t affect us all, across the board, but shutting down Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon — or our public park, museum, library — does. Knowing our neighbor’s house is going back to the bank is a grief we try not to think about too long, but when our own paycheck stops cold, putting our mortgage in jeopardy, can we finally scan the neighborhood to see how many of us have lost out on the American Dream and realize that what is true for one is true for all? Is this a moment of emergence, rather than emergency?

Everything we see in the public domain is full of truth, not just factual but by implication. Every person we hear hold forth on these topics has a voice that either rings authentic or does not. Some of us regulate our lives on narrow notions of who deserves what and why. Others of us never consider the question of deservedness, knowing ourselves to be beloved children of the Great Mystery, brothers and sisters under the skin and connected at the heart. Some of us are interested in the well-being of some of us, while others are dedicated to the common good of all of us. The actual split between humankind is not political so much as philosophical, not American so much as human, not secular so much as spiritual. Our ability to resolve that will dictate our future as a species.

I know there are readers out there who don’t care about the divisions between political parties because they believe money has made their differences moot, that the American political system as it is drawn is too corrupt to longer stand, and only time will tell if this is that moment when it all falls apart and leaves so much unstructured that we must pick up the pieces ourselves. All that — you know, barring the Big One or the Zombie Apocalypse, which may or may not be here. I have my doubts that anything so calcified as the American system can quickly shift into the prototype for some dickish video game, but until that project comes together, in whatever way it does, there are two very polarized ways to look at the world, and their clash determines the life and livelihood of everyone I know.

Some of us will rail against the shutdowns that put gates across the lake access, here in the Patch, keeping people away from the fish they count on to feed their families, damning those who are tasked with preserving the well-being of the lake while perversely blaming Obama for not quickly capitulating to the demands made of him. Others would argue that the lake itself would not be here if the Fed hadn’t decided to create it for watershed and provide for its environmental safety and upkeep, the conservation of the wildlife that inhabits its surrounding campsites. Without that continuing effort, the lake itself might decline as a source of fishing and tourism, the economy suffering even more. Both have a point and the two must begin to hear one another if we’re to break our philosophical deadlock. One takes from nature, the other minds the system taken from; both sides of the same coin.

Clearly, we’re locked in the heart of a transformational process, some of us ready, some not. Some of us will remain faithful to the manipulation of Frank Luntz and his cohorts, refusing to acknowledge our own best interests and disinterested in anyone else’s, while others will not rest until everyone’s interests are provided for. At least in this moment we have all the information in front of us, ready for a closer look. The universe has provided for us in the last years, opening secret documents, illuminating the manner in which we are purposely kept stupid and powerless.

We are not surprised by much anymore. As we stand at the crux of this transformative energy, we are teachable if we choose to be. We’re powerful if we dare to be. And most of all, we must listen to the whisper of our Higher Selves if we’re to become what we came to be.