{"id":30802,"date":"2010-11-13T07:45:09","date_gmt":"2010-11-13T12:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=30802"},"modified":"2011-09-24T16:10:20","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T20:10:20","slug":"technicolor-dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/technicolor-dreams\/","title":{"rendered":"Technicolor Dreams"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Regarding what’s left of our hopey-changey energy shift, the contrarians have loudly proclaimed, “No, you can’t.” They say, “Black is white, up is down, good is bad, war is peace,” hoping we’ll still listen.\u00a0They continue to bellow into the Orwellian echo chamber that we laboriously dissected in editorial after editorial during the Bush years. We only got so far during those years, only broke through the crust of Republican influence to a degree.<\/p>\n

The nation still believed in absolutes back then, unaware that the bottom had fallen out of the democratic process.\u00a0We believed, at least some of us did, that might made right, that America couldn’t lose, that we remained the beacon of freedom and morality for the world. We believed that our superpower was a reflection not only of our big money and war machine but our intellectual superiority and our advanced, hence deserved, standard of living. So, any of you believe that anymore?<\/p>\n

Remember the movie Pleasantville<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, where the characters refused to inhabit their feelings and remained ‘colorless’ until they were awakened by a strong emotional jolt? It took time and a series of confusing, distressing events to figure out that the color changes were not only unstoppable but necessary to a fuller human experience. I’ve written about this movie before because it’s such a perfect analogy for the culture wars and generational splits we’ve suffered. Like the stilted fantasy world of Pleasantville<\/em>, too many of us were black and white during the Bush years, too many afraid to be more than that. Apparently some of us still are.<\/p>\n

Like those kids in Pleasantville who <\/em>kissed and danced and eagerly stumbled into Technicolor, now most of us are looking out at a nation that has suddenly thrown on the e-brakes, threatening to dull our reality with not just a conservative agenda but a radical one. The big powers that\u00a0lurk in the shadows have gone a little desperate, quick to discourage all color and light. They’re intent on imposing their somber tones, their limited spectrum of possibilities, in an attempt to re-establish control of the political terrain that got away from them. Their disinformation machine has been at work 24\/7 to keep a steady flow of illogic and unreality flowing into the mainstream, distracting and distorting,\u00a0deflecting our attention away from the serious issues that have catapulted this nation — the flagship of democracy —\u00a0into a potential banana republic<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

During the brief hiatus between 2008 and 2010, perhaps facing truth for the first time, we learned a lot about our\u00a0country that we hadn’t known before: that our health care wasn’t the best in the world (or even close,) that the bankers and the credit card companies had chained us to contracts we didn’t understand, and they wouldn’t hesitate to destroy us if it served their bottom line. We learned how many hired mercenaries fought our wars, how many safety violations were ignored in big mining operations, and how big, corporate money could corrupt a national election with the help of an activist high court, throwing it into confusion and chaos. We discovered the hard way that the big oil conglomerates had not made any appreciable improvements to safety since the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, and that they could contaminate the world’s oceans and endanger not just the way of life on our coast but life itself, and go unpunished.<\/p>\n

And then — wonder of wonders — instead of running toward that truth, coming together to insist on the corrections that would begin to repair our nation and restore its balance, too many of us turned and ran the other way, arms out to those who have twisted us into a cold-hearted plutocracy. Go figure. When in doubt, drain all the color away and return to black and white.<\/p>\n

So now we’re left with horror stories projected for the future. Nothing can steal the bloom from our cheeks or the color from our lips quicker. It might have been really useful if these projections had made it into our conversations before the vote was taken. Too late now, the lights are dimming and the shadows growing. At the end of this month, for instance, unemployment for some two million<\/strong><\/a> of us will be up for grabs, and although the Dems have championed funding for the people in these last years, the GOP has no intention of doing so. If extensions aren’t passed in the coming lame duck Congress, they won’t be passed at all. Think ‘foreclosures,’ already in the millions. Think food stamps, at an all-time high with funding in jeopardy. Think grinding poverty without safety nets.<\/p>\n

Feeling their oats, newly elected Republican governors are killing off over a billion bucks in high speed rail jobs for the Midwest. The Debt Commission, a.k.a. the Cat Food Commission, has determined that Social Security<\/strong><\/a> — the most popular, successful and least fraudulent program in our history — along with Medicare will have to be whittled down to a nubbin in order to deal with our gargantuan debt. Better to task the public safety and wellbeing, they reason, than interfere with the profits of the wealthy, such as the renewal of Bush’s giveaway to high rollers. Eliminating as much of Obama’s health care program as possible comes next, without touching the mandate that delivers the public into the hands of insurance carriers, of course. Gift horse, mouth.<\/p>\n

Obama has been especially proud of hard earned boons to education; now they’re on the block. We’ve already seen capitulation on the Afghanistan drawdown, and Gates has said if we’re going to eliminate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell we’d better do it now because once the Pubs take the House, no such legislation will be possible. Meanwhile, and perhaps worst of all, Darrell Issa, slick and oily new Chair of the House Oversight Committee, is chomping at the bit to issue subpoenas investigating imagined overstepping and dunderheaded conspiracy theories, as well as possible impeachment. He once told Limbaugh that Obama was “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times,”\u00a0so I don’t think it’s overstatement to say that his intentions set the tone for governance in these next two years. We’d best brace ourselves for high drama and wheel-spinning obstruction.<\/p>\n

So what to do next, with color quickly fading from our national landscape? Let’s remember that Republican super-confidence is the territory of the black\/white system that doesn’t second guess itself. That level of confidence is both malevolent and hubristic, so understand how brittle it is. We’ve seen how disciplined obstruction works for two years now; we’ll endure two more on steroids, the tragedy being how unprepared\u00a0a vulnerable public is\u00a0for such an assault. Still, there’s good news. The right has no actual mandate, nor power over the Senate or Executive branches of government. In fact, the mandate is for what the Dems might have delivered and the GOP most certainly won’t: jobs, leveled playing field, social safety net and assistance programs. The Pubs are set to shoot themselves in the foot on a daily basis until 2012.<\/p>\n

This is about abuse of authority, of course. Democrats are most often anti-authoritarian types, while Republicans march in lockstep. Back in the Bush years, the nation still thought the Republicans had the juice to do those things they said they could do. Then, year after year, we saw the truth of that, from the Towers to WMD to torture to Katrina and back again. Nobody was surprised when Bush fled his presidency on the heels of economic meltdown, and nobody was surprised when the Republicans tried to paint Obama with that brush. The Father Knows Best<\/em> scenario might be fun to visit, as it is watching the stuffed shirts in Pleasantville<\/em> get their due, yet nobody but the youngest souls among us need that level of authority\u00a0to keep them safe from themselves any longer. Devolvement isn’t in our future and accepting responsibility for our circumstances isn’t about allowing ourselves to be victimized or manipulated.<\/p>\n

Do NOT let this election fake you out. The Bush years aren’t back, and the Republicans haven’t made a comeback. If anything, their extremism has become a handicap they may not be able to overcome. Black and white thinking is no longer an option in this diverse world of ours. We’ve got to get real now, lush and expansive with nuance. It’s no longer possible to turn back time to an unbroken America, an unexhausted military, a financial system that can pretend to be fair to the working class or less than corrupt in delivering booty to the rich. We’ve gone viral on too many levels now, and we all know it.<\/p>\n

If we could step into a more adult outlook for a moment, we’d realize that the tapestry of our national consciousness is more richly complex because of what it has endured, what it no longer believes, and what it hopes to salvage of its past, extend into its future. We aren’t so smug or self-absorbed any more, not so sure we know everything but many of us are aware that it’s now or never to do what’s right, fair and just. And ya know what? Sounds like the beginning of wisdom to me. Like the hopey-changey thing really worked. It puts a spot of color in the cheeks just to think of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves Regarding what’s left of our hopey-changey energy shift, the contrarians have loudly proclaimed, “No, you can’t.” They say, “Black is white, up is down, good is bad, war is peace,” hoping we’ll still listen.\u00a0They continue to bellow into the Orwellian echo chamber that we laboriously dissected in editorial after … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}