...The United States is now at the very dark terminus of a four-decades-long journey, one in which – at nearly each fateful juncture – the Right made the smart maneuver and the Left mostly hurt itself, most notably by allowing its divisive squabbles over purity vs. pragmatism to destroy the best opportunities for progress...
And he goes on to prove it. It helps to remember when you've lived through these things. But it hurts when you buy into what you're sold, and Robert Parry buys into the Right vs. Left- Democrat vs Republican bipolarity.
Agreed, we've pretty much sold ourselves down the river. Yet, a big part of the problem is that we as Nation insist on seeing our division as Right vs. Left. That isn't our division at all. It's a class warfare, but it's not as clear cut even as rich versus poor. It's where every step up the ladder those that have are doing their best to dump on those that haven't, and trying as hard as they possibly can to pretend they aren't, and the injustice is just part of the normal order of things.
Joe Bageant calls this pretty right:
The Republican Party will beat the living piss out of anybody for a buck. The Democrats will fly the flag of FDR, even as they pirate the public coffers on behalf of Wall Street. Don't think the American people have not noticed these things. After thirty years of pistol whipping and emptying of their wallets, they've started to figure out there just may be a public robbery underway, with both parties as accomplices.
And so Americans at both ends of the political spectrum are finally wising up to the need for a third party. Even if it is a third party within their own party, which is no third party at all, of course. However, for Americans it's all about branding, what you call a thing, that's important. Call a six-ounce block of corn sugar with sunflower seeds and raisins stuck on the outside an "Organic Energy Bar" and by god, you have natural food right there on the 7-Eleven shelf. What a thing is called is how a nation a people carefully bred for consumption will see it, thanks to that advertising arm of American capitalism called the news media...
...When it comes to watching the effect of simple repetition on simple minds, you could not do better than my native stomping grounds of Virginia and West Virginia, and the packed "town hall meetings" there during the health care reform initiative. In Southwest Virginia's Voting District 9, the Town Hall meetings' sponsoring congressman was 14-term Democrat Rick Boucher. "Slick Rick," is one of those rightist Democrats never examined by our simplistic, cartoonish media, which treat both parties as if they were uniform in their makeup. Slick Rick is pro Iraq and Afghan war. He is bought and paid for by the utilities and communications companies, and is the tenth most powerful person in Congress.
During the so-called health care debate, a crowd was rounded up to fill his town hall meetings with the sort of screaming, red-faced heartland white folks so loved by news cameras, reviled and therefore watched by urban liberals, both white and several shades darker, and upon which the nightly news depends for ratings and ad revenue. Ruddy overweight working people with neck veins bulging, fists shaking, they made gripping footage for the news hour, even with the sound turned off.
In glaring contrast to to this display of the flow of Aryan blood in the face, sat a lone older black woman. She had come to tell the congressman about her Down syndrome grandchild. The child cannot get the physical and mental care he needs, she said, "because our family can't afford any kind of health care at all ... We are just too poor," she concluded, near tears.
Her touching plea, as ground zero an illustration of our health care non-system as you could hope for, was interrupted by a sheer burst of redneck compassion. A young white man jumped up and screamed, "It's a wonder they didn't abort him!" An angry chorus of mob agreement goes up.
Between that entire sorry assemblage there was not enough combined brainpower to piss, much less ask: Who didn't abort the child? Just whom are we talking about here? And what in the name of heaven does abortion have to have to do with fixing the health care system for 300 million other Americans, at least three-quarters of whom are incapable of ever getting pregnant, either by virtue of age or their plumbing.
The implied villains were -- who else? -- those dirty liberal baby killers. Instantly, abortion rights had become the meeting's main theme. All it took was one well-inculcated hot button word -- abortion. My people, white working class Virginians, had responded right on cue. Few of them could be called political types by any stretch -- most of whom would normally have been home stuffing their pie holes and waiting for the winning lottery number on TV. However, they had shown up at the behest of local Republican businessmen, the Chamber of Commerce and fundamentalist pastors, who in turn were orchestrated by health care industry lobbyists and public relations firms. And so by golly, tonight America was gonna hear the genuine, bona fide, straight-from-the-horse's-mouth unadulterated opinion of the common man! Just as soon as they were all instructed as to that opinion.
Many attendees at Town Hall meetings are sufferers of the agitated inchoate anxiety and frustration of the working class. But as many more at the staged health care rallies, and now the staged "Tea Party" anti-tax rallies, are retired or just plain bored people to whom the free bus ride, or the cheap buffet dinner that often comes with the faux protests looks pretty good. Not to mention the spiffs, the free tote bag of goodies -- chocolates, coupons, a neat little pen light key ring. You can dig through this nickel-dime loot while the group's organizer gives you the "orientation" during the bus ride -- dividing up the planted questions among the alphas in the group, giving tips on how to short circuit the opposing side's speaking opportunities, booing on cue, and so on. And sometimes there is even a free trip to Washington D.C. later to do more of the same, if you show enough talent for the cameras. Boucher's attendees had little talent, and not even a gnat's ass worth of understanding of the issue. But they knew the Devil's mark, and the Devil's mark is abortion. So they responded for the cameras just as they have been conditioned to do.
I know a slew of these people all over the nation and I can tell you this: they honestly do not give a tinker's damn about abortion. They really don't. Not one in a hundred. You will never hear any of them mention the word abortion, except when their preachers and self-designated spokespersons or news reporters urge them to. Or when they are expected to offer some kind of political opinion, or show verbal credentials they are one of their crowd. The term abortion is tucked away somewhere in their heads in a file holding the vague lexicon of "stuff I understand that I should believe in." There it remains, a stale unexamined little brain fart until the appropriate hot button word is pressed, until summonsed up by those who instruct them directly or indirectly as to what they should believe. And then right on cue, like serially wired blasting caps they are detonated at the Town Hall meetings or Tea Party protests, setting off a chain blasts of "citizen anger."
The sad truth is that the pent up emotion has little to do with feelings about health care, or taxes (when the hell has any working American not been against any kind of taxes?) but a helluva lot to do with all the shitty breaks, insult and degradation that come with being an underclass citizen of the empire. We are conditioned in much the same way a dog is trained to bite on command. It doesn't matter who gets bitten, just that the dog gets the satisfaction of biting somebody for a change, and that his master looks pleased when he does. ..
There you have it pretty much.
Democracy flatlines when the lizard brain takes over as the frontal lobes atrophy. The heart beats. The lungs and bowels work. The patient may smile, and even ask you if you've seen "American Idol" lately or some such nonsense. There's the only vote the citizen has that's really cared about.
It's not a bipolar disorder the Republic suffers from. It's the senile dementia all Empires decay with as they feed their muscle with the steroid of power.
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