{"id":34967,"date":"2011-02-26T06:51:18","date_gmt":"2011-02-26T11:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=34967"},"modified":"2011-09-24T16:04:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T20:04:00","slug":"old-wounds-a-house-divided","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/old-wounds-a-house-divided\/","title":{"rendered":"Old Wounds: A House Divided"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

I’d planned on tackling the budget this week, and the probability of a government shutdown at the hands of overeager congressional newbies. The\u00a0Baggers are naively flexing their muscles to show ‘why they were sent’ and strike a blow against big government. Very simply, what’s going on — in the House of Representatives, in conservative PACs and think-tank planning sessions, in state capitols gone Republican and in the corporate boardrooms and press outlets they own — is a calculated frontal assault on the working class. This is plain old in-yer-face class war, a somewhat hysterical effort by the wealthy movers and shakers to regain control of the awakening public by PR campaigns and political influence rather than by force; force may come eventually, or at least we’ll smell it in the wind.<\/p>\n

\"Rep.<\/a>
"Who's going to shoot Obama?" That's a question posed by an unidentified town hall attendee to Georgia Republican Paul Broun.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It seems obvious that we have come to an impasse\u00a0that ‘politics as usual’ can’t even begin to address. With the nation’s belt already tightened to\u00a0touch its backbone, a missed federal payday would\u00a0cost penalties and defaults for millions of citizens. Seniors without their Social Security checks might not be able to buy food or meds. Public servants without their pay may not have personal resources to rely on,and these are the people who keep the world around us running. The possibility of government grinding to a halt is very serious.<\/p>\n

Then why is it that so many of us miss the radical implications of this legislative collision? I think it’s for the same reason that, like the Georgia congressman at a recent town hall meeting<\/a>, we tolerate without censure or repudiation a question like, “Who’s going to shoot President Obama?”<\/p>\n

To plumb the depths of ‘why,’ we have to dial back a bit and look at history and the human condition. The GOP (in all its guises) has declared war on those who would deny them total freedom to exploit others. Examples? Easy and obvious: Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana. A classic case of overreach by a party that has sucked the nation into a vortex of confusion and emotional double-dealing. Now, while successfully bludgeoning the Obama administration for failing to create enough jobs to fill the black hole of unemployment, the GOP at the same time puts 800,000 jobs or more<\/a> at risk with its slash ‘n burn proposals. The budget crisis gives them opportunity to pull the government down, defund existing policy,\u00a0and recreate a conservative fiefdom.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Recreate, you murmur?\u00a0Sure, though\u00a0it’s impolite\u00a0to talk about it.\u00a0We once had a very profitable enterprise going in these United States, using the labor of people we kidnapped, held captive, and bred to do our heavy lifting.\u00a0We set\u00a0a national pattern of human trafficking and exploitation that we’ve yet to overcome. Even if we’ve put slavery behind us, the attitudes of exceptionalism and superiority that fed it remain. Slavery is a wound we’ve never healed, a piece of the American experience that we have refused to come to terms with, carved deeply into our national DNA. Our approval of slavery cannot fail to have karmic implications, considering the democratic values we promoted as our declaration to other nations and to ourselves. We’re born and bred hypocrites, aren’t we?<\/p>\n

The idea of owning another person is almost too much for me to comprehend, but the\u00a0kind of class distinctions it would create are easy to imagine. After an initial expenditure, one had a lifetime servant and employee, along with its progeny. Riches, indeed. Slavery’s morally reprehensible riches flew in the face of the founders’ intent to declare an unheard-of measure of equality in a new land. In order to soothe the moral hesitations that slave-holding prompted, our ancestors used the same process we use today to distance ourselves from our conscience: stereotyping, prejudice and demonization, along with levels of denial and rationalization that border on emotional illness.<\/p>\n

In our first years as a republic, we were unable to reconcile our higher aspirations on this issue with our lower motivations, so for about 75 years we put it on the back burner, simmering quietly. Those of us reluctant to pursue\u00a0slave-holding learned to do without, building a working class; those who embraced slavery quickly absorbed it into their lifestyle and culture. The immense prosperity of the Southern states was built\u00a0entirely on the scarred backs of their\u00a0captive workforce. The opening of the Western frontier in the mid-19th century brought matters to a head; laws fashioned around slave-holding were different from state to state, a complicated and unwieldy cause for concern. About that time, a young lawyer from Illinois threw his stove-pipe hat in the ring, campaigning for president with these words:<\/p>\n

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With those words, Abraham Lincoln held a match to the fuse of history. While president-elect, he was targeted in Maryland by Southern sympathizers who refused to accept his national leadership. Pinkerton detectives foiled a plot to blow up the train that would carry him to his inauguration. After the Emancipation Proclamation, the level of vitriol directed at the 16th president became palpable and rancorous,\u00a0his\u00a0leadership perceived as a\u00a0danger to\u00a0Southern principles. No American war was so bitter or so tragic as the ‘War of Northern Aggression.” I wonder, as well, if any subsequent president except Obama has been so instantly hated.<\/p>\n

When the cause had burned itself out, we were all ‘one thing,’ but half of the nation refused to give more than minimal lip service to the new laws governing it. If Lincoln had lived, perhaps the Reconstruction would not have been so harsh. Perhaps the South would not have recreated itself as permanently hostile to the Union and perpetually resentful of its involvement in their lives.\u00a0Unfortunately, the die was cast on Good Friday of 1865.<\/p>\n

Mere days after Lee’s surrender,\u00a0Lincoln was assassinated by a white supremacist. John Wilkes Booth, upon hearing\u00a0the president’s\u00a0speech suggesting voting rights for surviving black soldiers, exclaimed, (in the version with objectionable words removed,) “Now, by God! I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”\u00a0 In one of the final entries in his personal diary, Booth wrote, “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.”\u00a0Booth was later shot\u00a0by a soldier who insisted that he, too, was following God’s orders.<\/p>\n

Do those words sound too fresh, too current to have been written almost 150 years ago?\u00a0In the ‘fair and balanced’ FOX News echo-chamber where there is only nationalism, patriotism and exceptionalism, we hear words like that —\u00a0and worse —\u00a0every day. We live in a time of flash-point emergency, income disparity not seen since the days of the robber barons, and a\u00a0citizenry that is\u00a0uninformed<\/a> to the point of sheer ignorance. We no longer have actual slave-holding in this nation, but\u00a0the moneyed class still\u00a0revels in superiority and entitlement, while its promotion of\u00a0servitude,\u00a0privatization, corporate coup\u00a0and\u00a0free market theory\u00a0has\u00a0created a virulent classism that\u00a0has devoured the good of\u00a0generations of\u00a0citizens and their kids.<\/p>\n

The nation is divided against itself, surely it is. It has been divided to one degree or another since its inception. Only the rule of federal law running like a thread\u00a0through all 50 states has kept it knit together. Today, we’re witnessing an orchestrated assault by the radical right against federal authority, as well as an attempt to redraw the Constitution itself. We’re living with a palpable increase in racism and classism, but it isn’t just the split in demographics that we must heal. Our work must begin within ourselves.<\/p>\n

The division that we need to heal, now that Chiron has settled itself in Pisces, is the internal schism between our ego and our altruism; between our self-interest and our moral aptitude. Many of the founders were slave-holders,\u00a0reluctant but pragmatic; they were no less a ‘house divided against itself’ than we are, when we secure our position by undercutting some other worker or turn our heads away from injustice in order to protect ourselves.<\/p>\n

Linguist George Lakoff recently wrote an excellent analysis of\u00a0conservative goals entitled What Conservatives Really Want<\/a>. What they want is a return of the old days, the old ways, devoid of social responsibility. They want to reaffirm the virtues of carrot\/stick, reward\/punishment, and enhance the ironclad authority of a patriarchy informed by a Christian Old Testament God. Paul Krugman accuses them<\/a> of using the Shock Doctrine to privatize us back into another century.<\/p>\n

As all of this becomes increasingly personal and obvious to us, we need to make decisions about who we will become in the 21st century. Like our 16th president, I believe that this is the time to become “all one thing or all the other,”\u00a0yet I don’t believe it’s possible to go backwards.\u00a0The evolution we seek will happen within us as we become the ‘best self’ that we wish we were, decision by decision.\u00a0That\u00a0is the only self we can live with if we are to make a new American declaration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves I’d planned on tackling the budget this week, and the probability of a government shutdown at the hands of overeager congressional newbies. The\u00a0Baggers are naively flexing their muscles to show ‘why they were sent’ and strike a blow against big government. Very simply, what’s going on — in the … 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\/34967"}],"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=34967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}