one dream to catch them all
forever more to bind them
[with apologies to a certain author who felt if the real world paralleled his, the Allies would have destroyed their Ring of Power]
Bob Herbert keeps almost figuring it out:
...People traveling in the real world understand that the federal budget deficits are sky high because of the Bush-era tax cuts, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the spending that was needed to keep the Great Recession from spiraling into another Great Depression.
Even if deficit reduction right now were a good idea — which it is not, given the sorry state of the economy and the vast legions of the unemployed — the deficit zealots have no viable plan for getting their misguided mission accomplished.
What’s needed now is the same thing that has been needed for the past two years and more, a bold plan to put millions of Americans back to work and paying taxes, and a careful, thoughtful, strategic but unequivocal withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.
If we don’t engage these two issues effectively, there is little hope of getting to the other enormous challenges facing the country, including the metastasizing presence of poverty, the worsening problems facing already chronically underperforming public schools, and the deteriorating economic and social conditions that have drained the vitality of so many cities, rust-belt communities and rural areas.
The golden doors of opportunity are closing on America’s young. The United States, once the world’s leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, is now a sorry 12th among 36 developed nations, according to the College Board.
As a society, we’ve lost our way, and there is no chance of getting reoriented if we can’t find the courage to make some really tough decisions about warfare, taxes, public investment, the crying need to educate all young people, and the paramount importance of gainful employment as the cornerstone of a revitalized America.
Great sacrifices will have to be made if the U.S. is to get its act together, and those sacrifices will have to be shared. We can start now, or we can wait and continue to fantasize about an eventual triumph in Afghanistan, or about cutting budgets with some magic cleaver until they’re finally balanced and all’s right with the world, or whatever other impossible dream is floated by the chronically dissembling political class to blind us to the real world.
Well, yes, the operative term in this being if the U.S. is to get its act together. Given his level of insight, I suspect even Mr. Herbert is beginning to realize getting the act together is the last thing the money behind it all really wants. Many more widely read people are beginning to call what's really being sought for what it is: neofeudalism.
The author mentioned in the opening would recognize this situation too.
After a respite, the Shadow always grows from another shape...
2 comments:
It has been growing for a while. To those who remember some particular imagery in the work of that author, this essay contained some genuinely spooky information.
As in Latin America, so too in Vietnam, the point of death squads was not just to eliminate those thought to be working with the enemy, but to keep potential rebel sympathizers in a state of fear and anxiety. To do so, the U.S. Information Service in Saigon provided thousands of copies of a flyer printed with a ghostly looking eye. The "terror squads" then deposited that eye on the corpses of those they murdered or pinned it "on the doors of houses suspected of occasionally harboring Viet Cong agents." The technique was called "phrasing the threat" -- a way to generate a word-of-mouth terror buzz.
In Guatemala, such a tactic started up at roughly the same time. There, a "white hand" was left on the body of a victim or the door of a potential one.
The token of an Eye in the East, and of a White Hand in the West.
Amazing, isn't it? Those who would control us consistently show a terrific lack of imagination. But consider: only an idiot would want to rule the world.
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