By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
Fewer than 15% of the American people approve of Congress today. After years of frustration over filibuster and obstruction, after long weeks of stonewalling, threats and name-calling over the debt ceiling, I’m surprised that we still view ANY of the nation’s lawmakers as worthy of their pay. Congressional approval hasn’t dipped this low since Newt Gingrich raised his crusader’s flag over the House of Representatives in the ’90s, leading his madcap band of religious zealots in assault against all things progressive. I take our collective disapproval as a modest sign of sanity, hopeful but not a sure thing. Clearly, our understanding of what ails us is still too small and confused, too polarized.
Being angry at Congress is akin to having a gangrenous leg spreading its deadly infection dangerously close to our vital organs, and being pissed at our pinky-toe for turning black. The whole thing’s rotten, dearhearts. If we want to walk again we have to factor in the executive and judicial branches, the think-tanks, lobbyists and big money boys, the corporate sponsors, para-religious movements, and most important of all, the pundits and media that play on public fear and ignorance to keep us dancing to corporate tunes. Congress is theatre, and power resides in the corporate checkbook. It’s important to get the bigger picture into public awareness if we want to launch a precision strike against whatever meme threatens to capture the national imagination next, whether true or not, and more often not.
Just look at what happened when the public accepted the Tea Party premise about a debt crisis. While there were certainly concerns about excess spending, especially with Bush’s big wars still simmering in the Mideast, Republican rhetoric about a spending crisis was a lie that skewed the details, omitted the revenue loss of Bush’s tax cuts, and minimized corporate welfare for big businesses that paid nothing into the nation’s coffers. Still able to borrow money for pennies on the dollar, and badly in need of stimulus spending to kick-start an economy on life support, the last thing the American economy needed was a fear campaign. Yet last summer, the absurd political debate gathered enough emotional debris around debt and taxation issues to expand a calculated political challenge into a national lie. Next thing you know, we had a homegrown and deliberately created political meme.
Those on the left who saw this coming on like a freight train did our best to defend against it, but to no avail. Once the public had heard the lie often enough, it became THE most critical thing on our national plate, occulting even the growing poverty and joblessness that is bleeding our society like a hungry parasite. The Pubs’ only justification for holding the nation hostage to budget cuts was a vitriolic PR campaign that so confused the facts and staggered the imagination that the rubes were finally suckered. The lies that infected the public consciousness were cause enough for Republican celebration, crowing over Obama’s approval of funds slashed from dearly-won Dem programs while demanding no increase in taxes on the wealthy. The Dems just aren’t into going toe to toe with people who want government dead, and the real progressives were being held on choker chains down the street and around the corner where their growls could not be heard.
Still, the entitlements remain untouched as yet, and many of the cuts are back-loaded into 2013 when it is hoped the economy will be more robust, but on that front we should not, as they say, count our ducks. And that’s the only good news for the time being. The Republicans continue to carry the goal posts farther to the right, and the President trots behind, trying to plant his feet in a shifting middle.
Now that we have negotiated with terrorists, the next loathsome meme is that the so-called “entitlements” must be streamlined lest our suddenly fragile nation crumble under their massive fiscal weight. Never mind that Social Security is 22 TRILLION dollars to the good, never mind that Medicare costs a mere three percent off the top to deliver, while private insurers average thirty percent and often exceed that. Medicare for those who don’t need it is too expensive to keep lavishing on old folks, short-timers that they are, and Medicare for all is obviously a socialist plot. Never mind that little kids and elders, powerless to care for themselves, will suffer most if Medicaid is diminished.
Newly pragmatic, we’re told we can’t spend on everything the public wants — like roads and schools, social protections such as cops and inspectors, assistance programs like food for the hungry or heat for the freezing. In fact, House Minority Leader Eric Cantor has pretty much promised that entitlement promises are a thing of the past if he and his band of merry Baggers continue to be in charge. The new meme insists that we must do more with much less, and if the public begins to believe that, it will become acceptable to mainstream thought. The only hedge we have against such a fate is the truth and an engaged press.
Ahhhhh. There’s the rub.
Last week, CNN invited the public to weigh in on the budget ceiling issue. All day long they read e-mails from folks giving their opinion. The one that stopped me in my tracks was a message from an obviously confused woman who went after the president for “holding the country hostage.” When these things occur — and they do more and more often — I tend to yell at my television. I believe I said something like, “I beg yer fuckin’ pardon? The PRESIDENT is doing that? That would be the same president who was willing to raise the age limits on both Social Security and Medicare in order to secure a grudging YES vote from rogue Republicans? The same president who has lost his OWN credibility not only with his progressive base but with independents that admire toughness, not conciliation? The very same president who has been exposing the limits of his power in feeble attempts to negotiate some kind of bipartisan agreement with the puffed and bloated reptile-brains of this nation? THAT PRESIDENT is holding us hostage?”
Okay, sometimes I get carried away.
The point remains, somewhere out there is a dazed and confused Kool Aid drinker who repeats propaganda she’s been told, fogging up the mirror with talking points she hasn’t investigated nor seriously thought about. While experience tells me she’s probably a nice enough lady at heart, here’s my advice: do NOT let her babysit your kids or buy her cookies at the bake sale, because clearly her judgment is not to be trusted. But that’s NOTHING compared to the responsibility CNN bears for allowing that comment air time! They wouldn’t let someone bash gays or insult the Prophet or call Mitch McConnell a corporate stooge, but someone can accuse the president of betraying his country? This kind of rhetoric is not a surprise on FOX News, but from a credible news outlet? Infotainment wins the day.
Nevertheless, I’m seeing a sea-change in some newscasters, an attempt at baby-steps in truth-telling and ethics that surprises me when I see it. CNN’s Don Lemon has announced his gayness, while Anderson Cooper goes after those who won’t give a straight answer. A day after the Kool Aid lady expressed her ignorant concerns, one of CNN’s lady anchors screwed up her courage and went after Glenn Beck for calling Norway’s murdered children “Hitler Youth.” She was, she said, “calling him out” and, to her credit, discussed how many times in the last year Beck has used the word Hitler (hundreds) and made the comparison to Obama’s administration (continually.) Fine upstanding American patriot, that Glenn: silent as a tomb when George Bush took us down the primrose path of compromised legalities and shattered ethics, but full of vitriol for the black guy and his Muslim, socialist, commie, pinko plot.
What might our nation look like if that anchor had performed such a public service a year ago on CNN, when Beck was poisoning the airwaves with conspiracy and innuendo and flat-out lies? She might have dampened some fumes from the gas he was throwing on the flames the Baggers fanned. If she’d done her job then — and if media had done the same not only with Beck but with unvetted and irresponsible right-wing rhetoric as a whole — we’d still have a cantankerous and belligerent opposition party, but we wouldn’t be in national freefall, facing a black hole of ugly probabilities. If somebody had stepped in and asked Palin to prove the garbage she was spewing, if somebody had made Rush Limbaugh site an actual reference instead of paging through the Republican playbook, if someone had demanded that the Republicans on Meet The Press argue their point rather than simply ratchet up the heat under a boiling mass of zealotry, would things now look this dire?
This new meme about austerity is both dangerous and debilitating. A wrinkle in the pathology of oligarchy, it’s a policy destined to fail, and we on the left are destined to fight against it, as we’ve always done. It’s systemic corruption and cruelty, prejudice and economic enslavement but it’s nothing new. It’s the same old decades-old culture war, the same old class struggle, dressed in political trickery. Yet in those good old days that everyone agrees weren’t all that good, we at least had a press that worked for the people. Since that’s no longer the case, we will have to stand up for ourselves.
The kind of austerity planned by our corporate masters will not only rob us of a future but will drain us of our self-worth. If you think fighting it is a battle worth taking on, I encourage you to read economists like the New York Times’ Krugman and Robert Reich, Joseph Stiglitz and Simon Johnson for a bit of reality therapy. Share their articles with friends and acquaintances. There are too many Kool Aid drinkers out there, blaming Obama and the so-called liberal press for a thousand ills that we can’t even imagine, let alone name. The memes are growing, and you and I are all that stands between them and the nation’s sanity. Only the truth can set us free.
Everything hinges upon who controls (operates) the technology. So I guess the neutrality of the internet is going to be THE battleground with the law makers – but we must vigilant on this question of new laws as well.
The repeal of many new laws is an urgent priority – the law is being corrupted and such is the basis for the protracted shifting from democratic foundations of the social contract to the monstrous machinations of statecraft.
“this shock therapy we’re receiving is practice in no longer giving away our power to “niceness.” We’ve cared too much and for too many lifetimes what other people think…”
YES! I have been saying this for some time now; we have to stop being nice because we think to be otherwise makes us like “them.” Using their “language” is not being them, it is using the only language they understand. Being nice in the face of the barrage we are experiencing just hands them more rope to hang us with.
In one example: my friend is not a believer of any god. She lives her life spreading joy wherever she goes. Yet the Christian paradigm has such a grip on this nation that she cannot even go a day without hearing someone spout something Christian in some context or another. It is especially egregious because so much of what she deals with or hears is negative and vitriolic; they are constantly bemoaning Obama or abortion, or gay marriage. She says she feels a huge angry cry welling up within her that wants to scream “SHUT THE FUCK UP!! NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO BE CHRISTIAN OR HEAR ABOUT IT!!!”
I know how she feels. I too, am tired of tip-toeing around the religious folks; why do WE have to constantly walk on eggshells so as not to offend or disturb their little sensibilities? They are the minority! Worst of all, they cry and whine that they are persecuted but we cannot even tell them to shut up about their god. I feel like I have to hide my unbelief; as though NOT being Christian is somehow a negative character flaw I must keep quiet about. When did it get like this? When I was a kid, people didn’t talk so openly about their church, their religion, their prayer, and all that stuff. Religion was a private affair. We were always taught that in polite company one should never talk about religion because religion is personal.
We cannot join the local homeschool group because though they say they are open to all homeschoolers no matter what they believe, they also say they are “Christian based” so they are prejudiced against anyone they think is not Christian. Their attitude is exclusive; the root of that word is “exclude” or “to leave out.” I am tired of being left out and even mistreated because I am not Christian.
I saw a great post on Facebook a week or so ago. It said something to the effect of “Religion is like a penis, we know you have it and we are glad you have it but we really don’t want you to wave it around and please don’t shove it down our children’s throats!”
I too am tired of hiding who and what I am. I am tired of these Religious Right folks taking over; I want an open minded, accepting country for my kids to live in.
Well, I’ll be yer huckleberry, GaryB — and excellent poem, darkmary; I’m one of those who enjoyed ALL the words.
Thanks Judith for the Excellent reply!
The skies have cleared and the 50% off sale is now happening at Congress. Please notify the 70% to show up and trample the hell out of them! “You tell ’em I’m coming! And Hell’s coming with me you hear! Hell’s coming with me!”
Judith, thank you for your article and your response to the comments, both incisive, sustaining, and inspiring. It is so easy, even when we can see past the smoke and mirrors, to let the debate, to let *reality* be framed by the loud mouths, by the media who, in the guise of “fairness”, give equal weight and air time to madness and sanity. We CAN change the herd mentality. We are part of the herd, we influence our families and neighbors, and we can choose not to let our reality, our lives, or our imagination be dictated or co-opted.
The poet Diane di Prima is 77 years old today. Her poem Rant is perhaps more timely than ever. If one doesn’t have patience or the taste for poetry, perhaps simply reading the refrain is enough for each of us to support each other to stand up against the madness: “The war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it.”
Rant
You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes
there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living
it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not “make” it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create
every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky
w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire
history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it, it is thus that you
“find out for yourself”
history is the dream of what can be, it is
the relation between things in a continuum
of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world
yet it is not lonely,
the ground of imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidimensional chess
which is divination
& strategy
the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.
the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination
it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else’s world
the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is “it all adds up”
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
There is no way out of a spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes
or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves
A woman’s life / a man’s life is an allegory
Dig it
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector
the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making
the taste in all our mouths is the taste of power
and it is bitter as death
bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you
The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant
intellectus means “light of the mind”
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun
the polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central
Thank you, Jude, for helping me to clear my own head, keeping those mean memes at bay.
From my perspective, GaryB, life is always about choice; this whole meme business is a reflection of cynical manipulation to make us believe it isn’t. Once the herd believes that Social Security is no longer viable, for instance, then changing the trajectory of the probable future is much harder. If we accept the unthinkable, it suddenly becomes inevitable. So can the herd mentality change? Yes and let me tell you why I think so.
First, this nation is not the bubbling cauldron of right-wing’ery it appears to be. It is a moderate country but it still leans left, and its younger citizens are much more tolerant than any of the generations prior. We will inevitably discard most questions of race and gender based on the younger’s comfort with one another. As the song goes, “You have to be carefully taught” to hate on that level, and I think we’re seeing a last gasp of race-hatred play itself out now, featuring Obama — a man who, astoundingly, is clinically half white and half black. Couldn’t get that more specific if his DNA had been mixed in a test tube.
Second, we hear the squeaky wheels so often that we do, indeed, feel like we’re on the other side of the glass door with hordes of squeakers pressing in on us but the numbers, gratefully, do not reflect this disparity. I don’t have exact figures handy but polls show that over 70% of Americans want the rich to pay their share, a similar number want Wall Street to be held accountable for their transgression and Bush’s wars ended. More than 80% want the ‘entitlements’ to remain sound and viable and think that’s possible. The huge percentage of citizens pissed at congress include a vast number of those who know we have a choice but it’s being denied us by a broken system and corrupt ideology.
I’m perturbed with Obama for lending credibility to the entitlement dialogue but years ago I warned that unless we threw our votes toward a truly progressive candidate, we would have to continue working within the corridors of the Establishment. Obama is doing exactly that. It’s you and I that have nursed that tiny bit of altruism that the nation exists as it was originally drawn, while the pragmatics have shown us to be as ruthless a colonizer as the big empires that came before us. Our Constitution is still the touch-stone that many of us return to when we want to review our options. I think it’s fair to say that most of those in power have no respect for the document except to find ways around it and the Baggers want to rewrite it completely.
But that paragraph above isn’t about this nation’s people; it’s about the bureaucrats and the corporatists. The people still believe in the ACTUAL exceptionalism America can boast, which is an adherence to democratic principals and an embrace of diversity — it’s encoded within us by our very American experience. That’s powerful astringent against chronic elitism, deliberate ignorance and dark maneuvering.
And last, I’m going to have to become very airy-fairy and tell you that I absolutely see herd mentality giving way to renewed consciousness. I believe we are seeing so MUCH darkness because it can no longer remain hidden under the influx of Light flooding this plane of consciousness. With everything shifting so quickly, so much being unearthed and examined, not a single one of us will remain unchanged; those who do not wish to lighten up will continue in misery but will become less and less capable of foisting it upon others.
It’s best to remember that we’re engaged in a power-struggle, not a power-grab. It often looks like the other guys have the upper hand but they represent both desperation and a philosophy that humankind is quickly outgrowing; they have no hope of turning back the clock. Poll numbers reflect a love of equality and decency. The American people voted in hope a few years ago and they’re not done hoping, no matter how dark it appears to be.
We owe it to one another to put our fear and weariness aside and continue to stand firm in our belief about who we are and what our country reflects. Who we are is the question we’re all pondering and our country will be a reflection of what we find, which is why the inner work is so critical. And although I’ve been accused of sounding like Stephen King’s Mother Abigail, we need to stand in our truth, stand in our peace, reflecting the assurance that our highest values will continue to shine out of our lives. I can’t think of any other way to proceed.
Hey 7Towers, reading through your notes it occurred to me that part of this shock therapy we’re receiving is practice in no longer giving away our power to “niceness.” We’ve cared too much and for too many lifetimes what other people think and that’s because we haven’t cultivated an understanding of our own thought process and fragmented belief system. The more we do that, the less we care what others think about what WE think; and anything else is a straightjacket.
That’s an important piece of what we need to understand about this process we’re in. I think of it as in the biblical verse, “All things work to good to those who love God.” All that we’re going through, no matter how dark, offers us windows to throw open that let in light and air. The world has decided to learn hard lessons, and learn them hard — but learn them we will. There’s no going back now.
Hey Judith I love reading your ariticles .. Here something that I wrote to help with my process in what I was experiencing of this nightmare that seems to be just getting worse.. But I believe this is going to spark the people of this country to respond suprising themselves and one another at the beauty , strength and spiritual growth that live within the majority far exceeding the tyrannical few. Inspiration gaining momentum at the rightness to protect life and our rights for all collective encouragement moving foward unstoppable.
Please forgive the spelling and typos..
In our not so distant History the ruling power used religion to commit countless atrocities based in superstitious beliefs, silencing any attempt to refute said beliefs despite proof of factual evidence even calling such evil.
So in typical fashion we seem to have swung wildly in the other direction throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Knowledge , reason and logic became the holy grail distrusting the intuitive language of the heart defining it to hold little or no value.
Ascribing to the ineffable a definitive of being a source of unrealistic imaginings,archaic myths,whimsical dreams and
the content of fairytale books. We are taught to dismiss these as the superstitions of our primitive ancestors, having no relevance to mans reality and were forced to leave these behind on the bookshelves of youth unknowingly with a premium
aspect of “Self” master keys of profound truths which lay hidden collecting dust.
The ability to be in the moment fully present to the wonder of “now” an aspect we are innately born with is sabotaged by the fragmenting of life and in turn indoctrinating us in each area with messages that inform us that we need to “make something of ourselves” with other messages that discount and are counter-intuitive to the “Being” that we already are, which we think is “nothing” if we don’t become something ever endeavouring to objectify the self destroying life.
Logic and reason were the answer for human social progress the supreme vehicle being education. Expanding the intellect to eradicate irrationality, the bastard child of an ignorance that in past centuries became so vile born from the insidious marriage of religious superstitions and politics. A Corruption of power so complete its sole aim becomes the protection of its reign sacrificing integrity to such a degree that life becomes unsustainable and in the ensuing state of insanity is nearly incapable of recognizing this.
What we have gained was a great advancement but only in the materialistic sense with better health care extending longer life , numerous modern appliances and lots of entertaining gadgets to fill our day.
What is most disturbing is despite the information explosion humanity seems to have evolved little with awareness actually decreasing in crucial areas allowing insanity to keep a strong foothold.
We believe current human advancement bears proof to the valid negation of our predecessors mindset and the contempt we have for such views are justified
The changes made allowing for the so called advancement of humanity are merely superficial window dress adorning a reality that appears to far worse than we disdainfully deemed our predasessors to be.
The experience of living in a society with foundational values placed on achievement of materialistic success with over emphasis’s on form in all it’s aspects and at every life stage. Having little trust in the natural unfolding of self, it’s wonder of discovery bringing passion to learn, was instead replaced by structured institutions enforced by reward and punishment using emotional manipulations in the form of labels which shamed or praised the “Being” in accordance to compliancy of “doing”. Constantly being told we must prepare for the future, we must refine and mold our character (mask) and in so doing have developed an obsession with an illusive time called future that by comparison came with an equally dead past completely missing the “Now” or the ability to live in it.
Crippled by distorted perceptions of ourselves ,of others and what truly is.
A manufactured mechanic self is what and who we think we are or our point of identity in a constant contradiction to the starved authentic self that must remain within.
Any aspects of the “Self” that was inconvenient to this process were subject to shame and rejection causing them to be denied. Deprived of consciousness these aspects of self become unharnessed energy that now contaminate the subconscious. This precious mysterious source, originally intended to be a wellspring of creativity , to inspire innovative ideas creating dreams to be lived instead become a cesspool called unconscious, giving birth to the nightmares we presently endure.
We perpetually dodge accountability in the wake of the carnage by fallaciously assigning culpability to effects while the prime cause goes unaddressed whose suppressed existence is known only by its shadowy effects of chronic discontent giving rise to ongoing addictions to people, places and things. Last but not least the goverment is in the hands despotic pychopaths with levels of dysfunction to the likes this country has never seen.
The unfathomable heart for which the intellect alone can’t ever comprehend appears to have been caught in it’s
formidable denial system.
One hope in connection is the revealing quality found in the symbols, myths, parables and fairytales that now gather dust.
In them are pointers, triggers that reveal the reality of a Power that is within us but not of us.
They seem to possess an uncanny ability to bypass the intellect awakening through acknowledging and validating the hearts reality along with another attribute that unveils the illusory traps that ensnare it.
WAKEY WAKEY
Youngbloods
“Get Together”
If you hear the song I sing,
You must understand
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand
Just one key unlocks them both
It’s there at your command
C’mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev’rybody get together
Try and love one another right now
Right now
Right now!
Love ya all!!
Judith,
I’m starting to feel like I am a Walmart greeter opening the doors the morning of a 50% off sale. The “obviously confused women” are lining up 1000 deep at the doors. Is there a chance to change the herd mentality?