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.