Welcome Back

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Every so often it’s worthwhile to take the pulse of our political delusion, and the good news is, it’s grown thready and weak. Just as we’ve become used to double-speak and manipulation from our leadership — fearful that those around us, seemingly deaf to good sense, would remain so forever — it’s both a relief and a surprise to welcome back occasional glimmers of Reality. Yes, I know — it ain’t what it used to be. It’s gotten thinner lately, gaunt and red-eyed, a bit meaner. Maybe that’s why so many of us are suddenly aware that it’s sitting at our table, intruding on our daily lives. Reality isn’t the kind of thing we should toy with — it’s been known to bite.

For years I posted the Harpers Magazine weekly review of news which I titled “TW3” — a.k.a., “That Was The Week That Was” — to the Political Waves list/blog. “TW3” consisted of three paragraphs of global news bits, trimmed down to a sentence or two and juxtaposed in such a way as to startle. I faithfully posted “TW3” every week until it became evident that the headlines at Huffington Post were equally as surreal as any compilation of factoids artfully arranged to confound and inform. What had amused and occasionally shocked us had become our everyday fare. Reality took a little vacation. Now it’s back, peeking out from behind the remaining drift of smoke that obscures our motives and projections. How do I know? The national conversation is beginning to make sense, and those politicos who don’t are starting to stumble.

Let’s begin with the social, as opposed to the hard-core political. In Los Angeles Superior Court this week, Dr. Conrad Murray — private physician and Propofol supplier to the late Michael Jackson — got four years in county jail for his crime and will be directed to pay over a million bucks in restitution. The judge who sentenced him spoke of “‘money for medicine’ madness” but because of California manslaughter laws, could not give him the harsher sentence he seemed to think appropriate. Murray will serve only half of that time in county jail and, due to his status as a special risk prisoner and given the state problem of overcrowding, perhaps not even that long. In denying the doctor a probation request, Judge Michael Pastor gave a tutorial in what is required for such a judgment: “Murray has absolutely no sense of remorse, he is and remains dangerous.” In offering his rationale for giving Murray the maximum allowed, the judge spoke of the defendant’s recklessness. Pastor repeatedly cited Murray’s lack of humility, more than once suggesting that the Doctor seemed offended to find himself under scrutiny.

So if hubris is the defining indicator for the level of compassion and mercy a person is granted when caught red-handed, then let’s take a closer look at the stumbles that reveal the petulant and posturing, unwilling to allow a larger picture to intrude on their personal reality. Let’s track common sense and expose arrogance.

Stumble: his Feudal Lordship, Mike Bloomberg, quashed hopes that he might run for president by citing the many perks available to him as Mayor of New York City. He has, he boasted, “my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have.” If Mike can make that statement in a speech, you know it’s just pillow talk. We can only imagine how he actually sees the amount of power his checkbook provides him. Given the harshness of his personal army’s behavior toward the OWS protesters, and his cavalier approach to the poor, this is a sure indicator that Mike believes his money and influence will, now and always, protect him from public opinion. The super-wealthy have Mike’s back. Did you just hear Reality chuckle? That makes Mayor Bloomberg a minority whose continuance is in the cross-hairs; he just doesn’t know it yet.

Sense: arrogance duly noted, the Mayor also said, “The difference between my level of government and other levels of government is that action takes place at the city level. The cities and mayors are where you deal with crime, you deal with real immigration problems, you deal with health problems, you deal with picking up the garbage.” I wonder, then, how Bloomberg — whose personal army has seen to it that New York City has become the “marijuana arrest capital of the world” — would respond to Governors Chafee of Rhode Island and Gregoire of Washington state, who, presiding over medical marijuana states, have gone to war with the DEA. This week the two governors asked the fed to reduce pot down from a Class I drug, making it possible for a physician to prescribe without fear of government prosecution. We simply must, as a nation, re-examine our failed War on Drugs to reflect both a more humane face and less for-profit incentive, such as we find in the privatized prison industry. But for people like Bloomberg, a man to whom hubris is simply second nature, what is good for the little people is academic, at best. I’m still waiting for him, like Putin, to consider himself indispensable to the machine he’s fortified and groomed, and declare a dictatorship.

That level of arrogance is not something we’re born with, although those who have spent their lives in the bubble of inherited money may have no other models to influence them. This kind of “better than” business is also inherent in religious programming. It’s the ultimate tribal credo to think ourselves better than another, pinging on old notions of survival and superiority. I still hear otherwise reasonable people saying that they want their America back, which seems to me a kind of uninformed arrogance, based on unexamined fear. Some of it is racial, of course. It’s easy to see how a race that has long been the leader fears the assent of those whom they have victimized for centuries. We have a name for that: guilt. Unless humankind deals with this need to stand taller by stepping on someone’s neck, it will only continue to separate and assault its own collective psyche. I suspect there are a lot of racists out there who don’t have a clue they ARE one, but unfortunately, even unwitting hubris, like the mark of Cain, is hard to shake once we’ve thrown our weight behind it. And speaking of Cain …

Stumble: yet another sexual misconduct accusation against Herman Cain surfaced early this week, this time from a woman claiming a 13-year affair. Herman refuses to admit it, but he has lost his mojo and his host of supporters following this latest scandal, deemed one too many. Headlines indicate he is “reassessing” his candidacy, although he continues to promote his 9-9-9 financial plan and embarrass all who support him with his dearth of international knowledge. Later in the week we learned that Mr. Cain has not had an eye-to-eye meeting with his wife since this newest accusation, so we don’t know if he will be ditched as both a candidate AND a husband, but one or both looks likely. Oh what tangled webs we weave, yadda. On the other hand, the kind of narcissism Mr. Cain displays will find some way to interpret defeat in his favor.

Sense: on an MSNBC “Morning Joe” segment discussing Newt Gingrich rising to the top of the wing-nut faction against (serious contender) Romney, Ann Coulter’s commentary referring to John McCain as a “douche bag” and Ted Kennedy as a “human pestilence” was bleeped. Well, we’re talking about “liberal” MSNBC, after all. When John McCain’s daughter, Meghan, signed on with them to offer political opinion, the maverick quipped that she was “going over to the dark side.” There are those who might think that Ann should be allowed to spew hatefulness mid-morning as a First Amendment right. Tit for tat — and no pun intended, but take one if you wish — if Janet can’t show her nipple ring for a few seconds and naughty words are described as costly FCC profanity “bombs” prior to late evening hours, then Ann Coulter’s hate-talk needs to be muzzled straight away. Good on MSNBC who were imminently prepared to edit — for thirteen long seconds — Scarborough’s controversial guest.

Stumble: the new Republican presidential front-runner is yesterday’s nightmare, Newt Gingrich. And like an old dog sniffing the wind at one last hunt, Newt is rising to the occasion with more than his usual share of hubris. Having run through every other race-horse in the stable, the Pub base have now cast their favor to a nag whose track record has been, by various degrees, arrogant, hostile, deranged, embarrassing and incoherent. When someone as notorious as con-man Jack Abramoff declares Gingrich to be “engaged in the exact kind of corruption that America disdains,” you’d think the public would think twice. But the portion of the public that doesn’t give brain-power too much credence has now settled on Newt, forgiving him his personal indiscretions and political history.

Gingrich, while flip-flopping as wildly as Mitt on policy after policy, has never committed himself to truth-telling and has, instead, insisted that he has been “chosen” as a national leader by the same Gawd Almighty who helped him write his earlier “Contract with America.” You may remember that as the rhetoric that brought fundies into vogue and reduced Bill Clinton’s better instincts to a brief memory. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the same old stuff from Newt that we heard in the early ’90s. Amazingly, several mistresses-turned-wives later, Newt is still in the race for Republican nominee — much like candidate McCain, who just waited around until the flies settled on the carcasses of his fellows — and he still has a contract he’d like to peddle to the rubes.

Sense AND Stumble: it currently appears that the Republican nomination is destined to be won or lost by ANYONE other than Mitt Romney, targeted by the White House as the only serious candidate but rejected by the base because he’s “not a Christian.” One of the biggest stumbles I can think of is for those who handle snakes and speak in tongues to look down on another because of magic underwear. Really? Another rationale for the tepid response to Mitt and his lackluster numbers seems to be that he is “too nice” to Obama. Dixiecrat instincts drive the Republican core, and as we’ve seen, it’s best to adopt their bias if you want to win. I suppose this makes sense to a party looking backwards toward the glory days of yore, but Reality is laughing up its sleeve.

As this particular Republican race was never about common sense anyway, let’s be sensible about what a gigantic SNAFU this is for the sclerotic party and celebrate such a pass. Having Newt to kick around would be almost as good a gift to Dems as a Cain or Bachmann. It appears that the Pub base is refusing to allow themselves any political relevancy in the coming period, as previewed by stats indicating that FOX News dropped in prime time by double digits this year. Yet even as we anticipate dodging a conservative bullet in the coming election, it’s a stumble for the Pubs to continue to be so regressive as to become an international joke. But the joke’s on us — it’s a major stumble for our nation to have allowed our political parties to become polarized to the point of irrelevancy.

I could go on and on, but I expect you’ve got the gist of this. Reality keeps popping up to wave away the clouds of delusion, and it couldn’t come back at a better time. For those of us who are sure that the Democrats’ instincts are no better than the Republicans’, I suggest that it’s still required to begin at the beginning. The parties are not created equal, nor is their influence.The press deals in false equivalency when it tells us the parties are equally unyielding and deadlocked. Frankly, it’s more like they’re brain dead, without the tools to revive themselves, and that’s an opportunity for we, the people, to step into the vacuum of leadership.

What is too outlandish to contemplate for more than a moment — like a Gingrich presidency — has to be eliminated quickly, along with the non-productive philosophy that protects the Koch Brothers while the citizen-advocates camped in parks across the nation are deemed disreputable and disposable. The system that allows such corporate entities to accumulate money and power and wield it like a club is a layer waiting to be peeled. Exposing the true colors of those serving as representatives of the public while serving the plutocracy is long overdue, and Reality is offering us a high-five on that one. We must continue to whittle-whittle-whittle away at the delusion, mythology, and rhetoric until we get to some real representation and common sense policy. And as we pull this failed system apart, piece by piece, we’d better be engaged in creating a worthwhile replacement. We literally hold democracy in our hands. As Eric pointed out, we forgot to do that in the ’60s, we cannot fail to do that now.

We need to restore what Robert Reich calls “the basic bargain.” That’s what our old friend Reality is pointing us toward, making obvious all that is broken and ignored in the American system. If we, the people, prefer to reconstitute that basic bargain with new parties that better reflect the needs of our 21st century society, well and good. So stay sharp, informed, involved. The [r]evolution has already begun, and it will need a consensus of consciousness before we know how the politics will shape themselves in the future. Meanwhile, it’s Reality that counts — that little thing that keeps popping through the cloud of bullshit and waving hello. Reality, plain-spoken, bottom-lined and so very welcome, is my hero of the moment, playing an intriguing game of Where’s Waldo that gets easier by the day.