The Great Silence
Our Gilded Age and Theirs
Google “second Gilded Age” and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gilded age has become a journalistic commonplace. The unmistakable drift of all the talk about it is a Yogi Berra-ism: it’s a matter of déjà vu all over again. But is it? Is turn-of-the-century America a replica of the world Mark Twain first christened “gilded” in his debut bestseller back in the 1870s?
Certainly, Twain would feel right at home today. Crony capitalism, the main object of his satirical wit in The Gilded Age, is thriving. Incestuous plots as outsized as the one in which the Union Pacific Railroad’s chief investors conspired with a wagon-load of government officials, including Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president, to loot the federal treasury once again lubricate the machinery of public policy-making. A cronyism that would have been familiar to Twain has made the wheels go round in these terminal years of the Bush administration. Even the invasion and decimation of Iraq was conceived and carried out as an exercise in grand-strategic cronyism; call it cronyism with a vengeance. All of this has been going on since Ronald Reagan brought back morning to America.
Reagan’s America was gilded by design. In 1981, when the New Rich and the New Right paraded in their sumptuous threads in Washington to celebrate at the new president’s inaugural ball, it was called a “bacchanalia of the haves.” Diana Vreeland, style guru (as well as Nancy Reagan confidante), was stylishly blunt: “Everything is power and money and how to use them both… We mustn’t be afraid of snobbism and luxury.”
That’s when the division of wealth and income began polarizing so that, by every measure, the country has now exceeded the extremes of inequality achieved during the first Gilded Age; nor are our elites any more embarrassed by their Mammon-worship than were members of the “leisure class” excoriated a century ago by that take-no-prisoners social critic of American capitalism Thorstein Veblen.
Back then, it was about masquerading as European nobility at lavish balls in elegant hotels like New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, locked down to forestall any unpleasantness from the street (where ordinary folk were in a surly mood trying to survive the savage depression of the 1890s). Today’s “leisure class” is holed up in gated communities or houseoleums as gargantuan as the imported castles of their Gilded Age forerunners, ready to fly off — should the natives grow restless — to private islands aboard their private jets.
The Free Market as Melodrama
At the height of the first Gilded Age, William Graham Sumner, a Yale sociologist and the most famous exponent of Herbert Spencer’s theory of dog-eat-dog Social Darwinism, asked a good question: What do the social classes owe each other? Virtually nothing was the professor’s answer.
As in those days, there is today no end to ideological justifications for an inequality so pervasive that no one can really ignore it entirely. In 1890, reformer Jacob Riis published his book How the Other Half Lives. Some were moved by his vivid descriptions of destitution. In the late nineteenth century, however, the preferred way of dismissing that discomfiting reality was to put the blame on a culture of dependency supposedly prevalent among “the lower orders,” particularly, of course, among those of certain complexions and ethnic origins; and the logical way to cure that dependency, so the claim went, was to eliminate publicly funded “outdoor relief.”
How reminiscent of the “welfare to work” policies cooked up by the Clinton administration, an exchange of one form of dependency — welfare — for another — low-wage labor. Poverty, once turned into the cultural and moral problem of the impoverished, exculpated Gilded Age economics in both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries (and proved profitable besides).
Even now, there remains a trace of the old Social Darwinian rationale — that the ascendancy of “the fittest” benefits the whole species — and the accompanying innuendo that those consigned to the bottom of the heap are fated by nature to end up there. To that must be added a reinvigorated belief in the free market as the fairest (not to mention the most efficient) way to allocate wealth. Then, season it all with a bravura elevation of risk-taking to the status of spiritual, as well as economic, tonic. What you end up with is an intellectual elixir as self-congratulatory as the conscience-cleansing purgative that made Professor Sumner so sure in his cold-bloodedness.
Then, as now, hypocrisy and self-delusion were the final ingredients in this ideological brew. When it came to practical matters, neither the business elites of the first Gilded Age, nor our own “liquidators,” “terminators,” and merger and acquisition Machiavellians ever really believed in the free market or the enterprising individual. Then, as now, when push came to shove (and often way earlier), they relied on the government: for political favors, for contracts, for tax advantages, for franchises, for tariffs and subsidies, for public grants of land and natural resources, for financial bail-outs when times were tough (see Bear Stearns), and for muscular protection, including the use of armed force, against all those who might interfere with the rights of private property.
So too, while industrial and financial tycoons liked to imagine themselves as stand-alone heroes, daring cowboys on the urban-industrial-financial frontier, as a matter of fact the first Gilded Age gave birth to the modern, bureaucratic corporation — and did so at the expense of the lone entrepreneur. To this day, that big business behemoth remains the defining institution of commercial life. The reigning melodrama may still be about the free market and the audacious individual, but backstage, directing the players, stands the state and the corporation.
Crony capitalism, inequality, extravagance, Social Darwinian self-justification, blame-the-victim callousness, free-market hypocrisy: thus it was, thus it is again!
At the end of the Reagan years, public intellectuals Kevin Phillips and Gary Wills prophesied that this state of affairs was insupportable and would soon end. Phillips, in particular, anticipated a populist rising. It did not happen. Instead, nearly 20 years later, the second Gilded Age is alive, if not so well. Why such longevity? The answer tells us something about how these two epochs, for all their striking similarities, are also profoundly unalike.
Missing Utopias and Dystopias
As a title, Apocalypse Now could easily have been applied to a movie made about late nineteenth century America. Whichever side you happened to be on, there was an overwhelming dread that the nation was dividing in two and verging on a second civil war, that a final confrontation between the haves and have-nots was unavoidable.
Irate farmers mobilized in cooperative alliances and in the Populist Party. Farmer-labor parties in states and cities from coast to coast challenged the dominion of the two-party system. Rolling waves of strikes, captained by warriors from the Knights of Labor, enveloped whole communities as new allegiances extended across previously unbridgeable barriers of craft, ethnicity, even race and gender.
Legions of small businessmen, trade unionists, urban consumers, and local politicians raged against monopoly and “the trusts.” Armed workers’ militias paraded in the streets of many American cities. Business and political elites built massive urban fortresses, public armories equipped with Gatling guns (the machine guns of their day), preparing to crush the insurrections they saw headed their way.
Even today the names of Haymarket (the square in Chicago where, in 1886, a bombing at a rally of rebellious workers led to the legal lynching of anarchist leaders at the most infamous trial of the nineteenth century), Homestead (where, in 1892, the Monongahela River ran red with the blood of Pinkerton thugs sent by Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick to crush the strike of their steelmaking employees), and Pullman (the company town in Illinois where, in 1894, President Grover Cleveland ordered Federal troops to put down the strike of the American Railway Union against the Pullman Palace Car Company) evoke memories of a whole society living on the edge.
The first Gilded Age was a moment of Great Fears, but also of Great Expectations — a period infatuated with a literature of utopias as well as dystopias. The two most successful novels of the nineteenth century, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were Edward Bellamy’s utopian Looking Backward and the horrific dystopia Caesar’s Column by Populist tribune Ignatius Donnelly. The latter reached its denouement when Donnelly’s fictional proletarian underground movement, the “Brotherhood of Destruction,” marked its “triumph” with the erection of a giant pyramid composed of a quarter-million corpses of its enemy, “the Oligarchy” and its minions, cemented together and laced with explosives so that no one would dare risk removing them and destroying this permanent memorial to the barbarism of American industrial capitalism.
This end-of-days foreboding and the thirst for utopian release were not, moreover, confined to the ranks of agrarian or industrial trouble-makers. Before “Pullman” became a word for industrial serfdom and the Federal government’s bloody-mindedness, it was built by its owner, George Pullman, as a model industrial city, a kind of capitalist utopia of paternal benevolence and confected social harmony.
Everyone was seeking a way out, something wholly new to replace the rancor and incipient violence of Gilded Age capitalism. The Knights of Labor, the Populist Party, the anti-trust movement, the cooperative movements of town and country, the nation-wide Eight-Hour Day uprisings of 1886 which culminated in the infamy of the Haymarket hangings, all expressed a deep yearning to abolish the prevailing industrial order.
Such groups weren’t just angry; they weren’t merely resentful — although they were that, too. They were disturbed enough, naïve enough, desperate enough, inventive enough, desiring enough, deluded enough — some still drawing cultural nourishment from the fading homesteads and workshops of pre-industrial America — to believe that out of all this could come a new way of life, a cooperative commonwealth. No one really knew what exactly that might be. Still, the great expectation of a future no longer subservient to the calculus of the marketplace and the capitalist workshop lent the first Gilded Age its special fission, its high (tragic) drama.
Fast-forward to our second Gilded Age and the stage seems bare indeed. No great fears, no great expectations, no looming social apocalypses, no utopias or dystopias — just a kind of flat-line sense of the end of history. Where are all the roiling insurgencies, the break-away political parties, the waves of strikes and boycotts, the infectious communal upheavals, the chronic sense of enough is enough? Where are the earnest efforts to invoke a new order which, no matter how sketchy and full of unanswered questions, now seem as minutely detailed as the blueprints for a Boeing 747 compared to “yes we can”?
What’s left of mainstream populism exists on life-support in some attic of the Democratic Party. Even the language of our second Gilded Age is hollowed out. In a society saturated in Christian sanctimony, would anyone today describe “mankind crucified on a cross of gold” as William Jennings Bryan once did, or let loose against “Mammon worship,” condemn aristocratic “parasites,” or excommunicate “vampire speculators” and the “devilfish” of Wall Street? If nineteenth century evangelical preachers once pronounced anathema on capitalist greed, twenty-first century televangelists deify it. Tempers have cooled, leaving God, like many Americans, with only part-time employment.
The Great Silence
I exaggerate, of course. Movements do exist today to confront the inequities and iniquities of our own Gilded Age. Wall Street bandits are, once in a while, arrested by a sheriff. Some ministers, even born-again ones, do still preach the Social Gospel. But all this seems a pale shadow of what was. Something fundamental about the metabolism of capitalism has changed.
Perhaps the answer is simple and basic: The first Gilded Age rested on industrialization; the second on de-industrialization. In our time, a new system of dis-accumulation looted American industry, liquidating its assets to reward speculation in “fictitious capital.” After all, the rate of investment in new plant, technology, and research and development all declined during the 1980s. For a quarter-century, the fastest growing part of the economy has been the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector.
De-industrialization has set off an avalanche whose impact is still being felt in the economy, in the country’s political culture, and in everyday life. It laid the industrial working class and the labor movement low, killing it twice over. This, more than anything else, may account for the great silence of the second Gilded Age, when measured, at least, against the raucous noise of the first. Labor was mortally wounded by direct assault, beginning with President Reagan’s decision in 1981 to fire all the striking air traffic controllers. His draconian act licensed American business to launch its own all-out attack on the right to organize, which continues to this day.
In itself, however, resorting to coercion to deal with the opposition hardly distinguishes our own gilded elite from the first one. If anything, we live in less savage times, at least here at home. More fatal by far was the arrival of a new mode of capital accumulation, starkly different from the one that had prevailed a century ago. It eviscerated towns, cities, regions, and whole ways of life. It demoralized people, hollowed out popular institutions that had once offered resistance, and stoked the fires of resentment, racism, and national revanchism. Here was the raw material for mean-spirited division, not solidarity.
Dis-accumulation transformed the working class into a disaggregated pool of contingent labor, contract labor, temporary labor, and part-time labor, all in the interests of a new “flexible capitalism.” Ideologues gussied-up this floating workforce by anointing it “free agent” labor, a euphemism designed to flatter the free market homunculus in each of us — and, for a time, it worked. But the resulting reality has proved a bitter pill to swallow. To be a “free agent” today is to be free of health care, pensions, secure jobs, security in every sense. In our gilded era, downward mobility, lasting a quarter-century and still counting, has marked the social trajectory of millions of people living in the American heartland.
Dis-accumulating capitalism also undermined the political gravitas of poverty. In the first Gilded Age, poverty was a function of exploitation; in the second, of exclusion or marginalization. When we think about poverty, what comes to mind is welfare and race. The first gilded age visualized instead coal miners, child labor, tenement workshops, and the shantytowns that clustered around the steel mills of Aliquippa and Homestead.
Poverty arising out of exploitation ignited widespread moral revulsion and a robust political assault on the power of the exploiters. The perpetrators of the poverty of exclusion of our own time have been trickier to identify. In his 1962 book The Other America, Michael Harrington noted the invisibility of poverty. That was half a century ago and misery still lives in the shadows. Helped along by an ingrained racism, poverty in the second Gilded Age was politically neutered… or worse.
Decline, dispossession, and marginalization: a grim scenario. Yet the new political economy of finance-based dis-accumulation also announced itself as the second coming of democratic capitalism. And in the realm of the collective imaginary, if not in reality, it convinced millions.
The Myth of Democratic Capitalism
Aristocrats don’t exist anymore, but it is remarkable how long they lasted as major actors in the country’s political dramaturgy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was still denouncing “economic royalists” and “tories of industry” at the height of the New Deal. The struggle against the counter-revolutionary aristocrat, seen to be subverting the institutions of democratic life, piling up unearned riches, supplied the energy powering American reform for generations. In real life, the robber baron industrialists and financiers of Wall Street were no more aristocrats than my grandma from the shtetl. They were parvenus.
For their own good reasons, however, they actively conspired in this popular misperception by playing the aristocratic role for all it was worth. In hindsight, what looks like one of the silliest utopias of the first Gilded Age was enacted by these nouveaux riches, performing in tableaux vivants at gala balls dressed in aristocratic drag, or cavorting in the castles and villas they had transported stone by stone from France and Italy, or showing off at the weddings of their daughters to the offspring of bankrupt European nobility, or parading to New York’s Metropolitan Opera in coaches driven by liveried servants and embossed with their family’s “coat of arms,” complete with hijacked insignia and faked genealogies that concealed their owners’ homelier origins.
We may laugh at all this now. Back then, for millions, these aristocratic pretensions confirmed an ancient Jeffersonian suspicion: Capitalists were nothing more or less than camouflaged aristocrats. And mobilizing to rescue the republic and democracy from such a danger was practically an indigenous instinct. However, pushing beyond this horizon of political democracy in the direction of social democracy is a different matter entirely, arousing anxiety about threatening the understructure of private property which is, after all, also part of the American dream. Having an aristocracy to kick around, even an ersatz one, can be politically empowering.
Minus the oddball exception or two, the new tycoonery of the second Gilded Age does not fancy itself an aristocracy. It does not dress up like one or marry off its daughters to fortune-hunting European dukes and earls. On the contrary, its major figures regularly dress down in blue jeans and cowboy hats, affecting a down-home populism or nerdy dishevelment. However addicted to the paraphernalia of flamboyant excess they may be, the new capitalist elite does not pretend these are the insignia of ruling class entitlement.
Once upon a gilded time, the lower orders aped the fashions and manners of their putative betters; today it’s the other way around. Indeed, it is no longer even apt to talk of a “leisure class,” since our moguls of the moment are workaholics, Olympians of the merger-and-acquisition all-nighter.
Although the economic and political throw-weight of our gilded elite is at least as great as that of its predecessors in the days of J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, an American fear of a moneyed aristocracy has subsided accordingly. Instead, from the Reagan era on, Americans have been captivated by businessmen who took on the rebel role against a sclerotic corporate order and an ossified government bureaucracy that, together, were said to be blocking access to a democracy of the bold.
Often men from the middling classes, lacking in social pedigree, the overnight elevation of people like Michael Milken, Carl Ichan, or “greed is healthy” Ivan Boesky, flattered and confirmed a popular faith in the American dream. These irreverent new “revolutionaries,” intent on overthrowing capitalism in the interests of capitalism, made fun of the men in pin-striped suits.
When the captains of industry and finance lorded it over the country in the late nineteenth century, no one dreamed of calling them rebels against an overweening government bureaucracy or an entrenched set of “interests.” There was then no government bureaucracy, and tycoons like Russell Sage and Jay Gould were “the interests.” They worried about being overthrown, not overthrowing someone else.
Our corporate elite are much more adept than their Gilded Age predecessors were at playing the democracy game. The old “leisure class” was distinctly averse to politics. If they needed a tariff or tax break, they called up their kept Senator. When mortally challenged by the Populists and William Jennings Bryan in 1896, they did get involved; but, by and large, they didn’t muck about in mass party politics which they saw as too full of uncontrollable ethnic machines, angry farmers, and the like. They relied instead on the Federal judiciary, business-friendly Presidents, constitutional lawyers, and public and private militias to protect their interests.
Beginning in the 1970s, our age’s business elite became acutely politically-minded and impressively well-organized, penetrating deeply all the pores of party and electoral democracy. They’ve gone so far as to craft strategic alliances with elements of what their nineteenth century predecessors — who might have blanched at the prospect — would have termed the hoi polloi. Calls to dismantle the federal bureaucracy now carry a certain populist panache, while huffing and puffing about family values has — so far — proven a cheap date for a gilded elite that otherwise generally couldn’t care less.
Moreover, the ascendancy of our faux revolutionaries has been accompanied by media hosannas to the stock market as an everyman’s Oz. America’s long infatuation with its own democratic-egalitarian ethos lent traction to this illusion.
Horace Greely’s inspirational admonition to “go West young man” echoed through all the channels of popular culture in the 1990s — from cable TV shows and mass circulation magazines to baseball stadium scoreboards and Internet chat rooms. Only now Greeley’s frontier of limitless opportunity had migrated back East to the stock exchange and into the ether of virtual or dot.com reality. The culture of money released from all ancient inhibitions enveloped the commons.
“Shareholder democracy” and the “ownership society” are admittedly more public relations slogans than anything tangible. Nonetheless, you can’t ignore the fact that, during the second Gilded Age, half of all American families became investors in the stock market. Dentists and engineers, mid-level bureaucrats and college professors, storekeepers and medical technicians — people, that is, from the broad spectrum of middle class life who once would have viewed the New York Stock Exchange with a mixture of awe, trepidation, and genuine distaste, and warily kept their distance — now jumped head first into the marketplace carrying with them all their febrile hopes for social elevation.
As Wall Street suddenly seemed more welcoming, fears about strangulating monopolies died. Dwindling middle-class resistance to big business accounts for the withering away of the old anti-trust movement, a telling development in the evolution of our age’s particular form of “big-box” capitalism. Once, that movement had not only expressed the frustrated ambitions of smaller businessmen, but of all those who felt victimized by monopoly power. It embodied not just the idea of breaking up the trusts, but of competing with or replacing them with public enterprises.
Long before the Reagan counter-revolution defanged the whole regulatory apparatus, however, the “anti-trust” movement was over and done with. Its absence from the political landscape during the second Gilded Age marks the demise of an older middle-class world of local producers, merchants, and their customers who were once bound together by the ties of commerce and the folk truths of small town Protestantism.
Big-box capitalism, the capitalism of Wal-Mart, still incites local uproars that carry a hint of that anti-trust past, but oppositional forces are divided. The capitalism of which Wal-Mart is emblematic generates a dissonant universe of political and cultural desires. It appeals, first of all, to instincts of individual and family material wellbeing which may run up against calls for a wider social solidarity. Moreover, in its own everyday way consumer culture — more far-reaching than anything imaginable a century ago — channels desire into forms of expressive self-liberation. Grand narratives that tell a story of collective destiny — Redemption, Enlightenment, and Progress, the Cooperative Commonwealth, Proletarian Revolution — don’t play well in this refashioned political theater.
The End of the Age of Acquiescence?
However, the wheel turns. The capitalism of the Second Gilded Age now faces a systemic crisis and, under the pressure of impending disaster, may be headed back to the future. Old-fashioned poverty is making a comeback. Arguably, the global economy, including its American branch, is increasingly a sweatshop economy. There is no denying that brute fact in Thailand, China, Vietnam, Central America, Bangladesh, and dozens of other countries and regions that serve as platforms for primitive accumulation. Hundreds of millions of peasants have become proletarians virtually overnight.
Here at home, something analogous has been happening, but with an ironic difference and bearing within it a new historic opportunity. One might call it the unhorsing of the middle class.
During the first Gilded Age, the sweatshop seemed a noxious aberration. It lawlessly offered irregular employment at sub-standard wages for interminable hours. It was ordinarily housed helter-skelter in a make-shift workshop that would be here today, gone tomorrow. It was an underground enterprise that regularly absconded with its workers’ paychecks and made chiseling them out of their due into an art form.
Today, what once seemed abnormal no longer does. The planet’s peak corporations depend on this system. They have thrived on it. True enough, it has also encouraged the proliferation of petty enterprises — sub-contractors, consulting firms, domestic service companies — fertilizing the soil in which our age of democratic capitalism is rooted. But the ubiquity of the sweated economy promises to alter the nation’s political chemistry.
Many of the newly flexible proletarians working for Wal-Mart, for auto parts or construction company sub-contractors, on the phones at direct mail call centers, behind the counters at mass market retailers, earn a dwindling percentage of what they used to. Even new hires at the Big Three automobile manufacturers will now make a smaller hourly wage than their grandfathers did in 1948. So too, the relative job security such employees once enjoyed is gone, leaving them vulnerable to the “lean and mean” dictates of the new capitalism: double or triple work loads; or, even worse, part-time work, work always shadowed by indignity and fear; or, worse yet, no work at all.
Meanwhile, the white collar Tomorrowland of “free agent” techies, software engineers, and the like — not to mention a whole endangered species of middle management — lives a precarious existence, under intense stress, chronically anticipating the next round of lay-offs. Yet many of them were once upon a time members in good standing of the “middle class.” Now, they find themselves on the down escalator, descending into a despised state no one could mistake for middle class life.
“Flexible accumulation” joins this dispossession of the middle class to the super-exploitation of millions who never laid claim to that status. Many of these sweated workers are women, laboring away as home health care aides, in the food services industry, in meat processing plants, at hotels and restaurants and hospitals, because the arithmetic of “flexible accumulation” demands two workers to add up to the livable family wage not so long ago brought home by a single wage earner.
Millions more are immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, from all over the world. They live, virtually defenseless, in a twilight underworld of illegality and prejudice. Thanks to all this, the category of the “working poor” has reentered our public vocabulary. Once again, as during the first Gilded Age, poverty seems a function of exploitation at work, not only the lot of those excluded from work.
Might these developments augur the end of our second Gilded Age; or rather the end of the age of acquiescence? No one can know. Yet anger and resentment over insecurity, downward mobility, exploitation, second-class citizenship, and the ill-gotten gains of our Gilded Age mercenaries and their political enablers already rippled the political waters during the mid-term elections of 2006. This primary season has witnessed a discernable leftward shift of the center of gravity within even the cowed leadership ranks of the Democratic Party, a shift driven in large measure by the sub-prime mortgage collapse and the ominous rumblings of severe recession.
Anger and resentment, however, do not by themselves comprise a visionary alternative. Nor is the Democratic Party, however restive, a likely vehicle of social democratic aspirations. Much more will have to happen outside the precincts of electoral politics by way of mass movement building to translate these smoke signals of resistance into something more muscular and enduring. Moreover, nasty competition over diminishing economic opportunities can just as easily inflame simmering racial and ethnic antagonisms.
Nonetheless, the current break-down of the financial system is portentous. It threatens a general economic implosion more serious than anyone has witnessed for many decades. Depression, if that is what it turns out to be, together with the agonies of a misbegotten and lost war no one believes in any longer, could undermine whatever is left of the threadbare credibility of our Gilded Age elite.
Legitimacy is a precious possession; once lost it’s not easily retrieved. Today, the myth of the “ownership society” confronts the reality of the “foreclosure society.” The great silence of the second Gilded Age may give way to the great noise of the first.
Steve Fraser is working on a book about the two gilded ages. A Tomdispatch regular, he is the author of, among other works, the just published Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace. He is Editor-at-Large of New Labor Forum magazine.
Copyright 2008 Steve Fraser
We will continue to have a large middle class in America to the extent we DECIDE (in elections) to have one. Allowing Republicans to win again and privatize entitlements along with all health care while permanently ending estate taxes and lowering capital gains taxes (for people who already have the “capital”) IS NOT HOW YOU “DECIDE” TO RETAIN A MIDDLE CLASS.
You elect Democrats now, A LOT OF THEM, or you lose the economic issues for the lower 95%. Waiting for an imaginary uprising, revolution, movement, etc., etc by a third or fourth party force is naive and silly in the extreme. Win what you can win now and stop going farther down that “wrong track” that pollsters constantly tell you that about 3/4 of our people can sense by intuition!
What really makes me sick is to read that people are running out of food to the point that they are rioting, while Ivana Trump has a wedding at the Mar-a-Lago estate where she feeds her guests a 12-tier, 600 pound wedding cake laced in real gold that is actually edible. This obscene flaunting of wealth in the face of such misery and suffering is almost too much to bear.
Well done, on the matter of the Great Looting. Devolution (that is, the transferal of decision making around publicly-owned resources to lower authorities and local players) as a tool of deconstruction of the American ideal is also an essential item of discussion here. The looting of the commons (i.e. the national parks, forests, rangelands, air, water, soil, wildlife, fish, etc.) is accelerating across the American landscape.
Privatization has always been the unstated endgame of “shrinking government down to a size that could be drowned in a bathtub”. While we’ve been pumped full with the fear-mongering around monkey-wrenching tactics of EarthFirst!, there is a Great Silence around the deliberate deconstruction and internal monkey-wrenching of federal government agencies charged with the management and protection of the commons.
We are now witnessing the aftermath of the tragedy of the commons as corporate foundations step in to “fix” these disasters but must do so their way, which is to own, wring-dry of profit potential, then sell-off, creating the whole other tragedy so well described in this article — call it Tragedy of the Commoners.
capitalism is anti democratic- a moment’s thought will tell you that. as well as even the most cursory examination of history. it is our “great lie” told over and over from the political podium, the classroom desk and the pulpit. insanity is often (humorously) defined as performing the same act over and over and expecting a different result- we indeed must be an insane nation. . .
In 1970 corporations paid 29% of the US tax burden. Today they pay 7% and the percentage they pay continues to drop.
The US will only pull out of its descent to third world status when this statistic heads back toward 29%.
All politicians should be judged by their success in restoring the 29%. It is an objective benchmark from which to measure their performance.
When everything implodes, and soon it will, then the masses will rise up.
The idea that electing Democrats, as espoused by DD, will somehow save the middle class is ludicrous. It was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, along with a Democratically controlled congress that first started shipping middle class jobs wholesale to third word countries through a myriad of ill conceived trade agreements starting with NAFTA.
Lobo Gris
The elites learned their lesson back in the late nineteenth century - they have used their time well.
The people lost back then, and we have been conditioned by the elites ever since. A small backlash in the 30′ and 60′ but soon they were back on the track again.
They don’t care about the people - we are just serfs:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7nD7dbkkBIA
The idea that lobo gris even has an independent idea “is ludicrous”. Where, ole mouthy buddy, is YOUR solution?
re 12:07pm
the writer, yet again, demands that we ignore the fact that we DID elect “democrats, a lot of them,” in 2006, and demands that we ignore their pathetic record since then and vote for more of the same, praying that this time will be different.
expecting the Ds ever to act in the interests of the workers is what’s “naive and silly in the extreme.” dennis kucinich and john edwards were the only Ds in contention for the presidential nomination who even talked a decent game, and look what happened to them.
clinton’s and obama’s (and by extension, howard dean’s and the dnc’s) acquiescence in marginalizing these two should be ample proof that the indefatigable poster is full of donkephant dung, and that the Ds are as unworthy of our votes (or even our desperate prayers) as the Rs.
our interests do not interest either of them.
Easy there DD. I agree with you both and see choosing the republican-lites as a lesser of evils, first step. Then, a massive Awakening of muddle Amerika to retake our Bill of Rights, our airwaves, presses, internet, and our government. We’re close enough to the precipice to glimpse our imminent fates. Tipping points in the electorate are all we have left — (if only critical thinking and skeptical inquiry were regarded as fashionable virtues).
It well past time that Dubya, Cheney, & Co. be recognized as revisionists who want to take America back to the Robber Baron era with a “spoils system” political set-up. Therefore, progressives should be unafraid to use the language of their predecessors who were able to confront the troglodytes of their time. Whenever progressives let their nemesis frame the debate via language, they have already lost. The prime example was when the scabs who Reagan hired to break the Air Traffic Controllers were referred to as “replacements.”
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Daniel David April 23rd, 2008 1:59 pm
“The idea that lobo gris even has an independent idea “is ludicrous”. Where, ole mouthy buddy, is YOUR solution?”
My solution is to quit electing Democrats and Republicans which are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Where is your solution?
Lobo Gris
Great article by Steve Fraser.
I wish to add some essential points not covered by Steve Fraser.
Communism = political oppression
Capitalism = economic oppression.
Wonderful ……..Capitalism defeats Communism.
The irony of it all is that current day corporate capitalism has proved to be just as evil as Karl Marx had brilliantly predicted, including the outsourcing of jobs. Logically though, it cannot be concluded that communism is a better system than capitalism.
Ironically as well, the “winner”, corporate consumer capitalism, has proved to be just as “godless” as Russian communism. The U.S. has lost its’ soul to the materialism of a corporate consumer culture. Americans no longer worship God, Americans worship money and financial success.
Of course, this generalization ignores the many great American patriots, religious and non-religious, who have always questioned the injustices of American capitalistic culture.
This leads to the one great error Karl Marx made. Marx overlooked the power of democracy to check the greed of capitalism.
In this second Gilded Era Fraser speaks of, Americans seem to have lost the lessons of democratic renewal that prevailed after the first Gilded Era. Americans now seem to forgotten the power of democracy to curtail the greed of capitalism. Americans have lost their civic soul to the materialism of consumer capitalism. Just note the hypocrisy and idolatry of the “Christian” prosperity gospel (not excluding many conservative Catholic fundamentalists)..
In our materialist culture, Americans seem to have lost the higher angels of our human nature. True Democracy is as much a practice of the human spirit as in the practice of religion. True democracy has the same spiritual dynamics for radical social transformation as in the practice of religion, but without the oppression of theocracy.
As stated by the well know economist and author William Greider, there is hardly any major social unrest in the world that cannot be solved by “MORE DEMOCRACY”
Americans need a renewed hunger for democratic truth. Educators, professors, civic teachers, and church pastors need to teach the true spiritual dynamics of democracy. Democratic renewal in America is the first step to a more just, sustainable and compassionate world.
Plutopia - by Joe Peonne
“I swear to God on high I have not lived long at Corporate Headquarters. I swear it has only been a few years, Judge. I didn’t know where else to turn, who else had running water, clean showers, good food, medical facilities, and more.”
“That’s no excuse, Mr. Peonne. You know prisons have the same amenities. Or nearly. You should have turned there. After all, we’ve set them up for you and your kind.”
“Not the prisons, Judge. Please, I’ll do anything you want. I’ll go kill Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, anyone.”
“Anyone?”
“Well, almost.”
Joe Peonne happened to hold no such barbaric views. He would desert from the Army immediately and go on the run again if it would spare him prison. He only hoped to tell the judge what he wished to hear.
“That’s the wrong attitude, Mr. Peonne. Here in America we don’t just send people off to kill people. Not without a good reason, at least. We send people off to democratize whole countries, while defending our own.”
“I know it has nothing to do with oil, your Honor.”
“It most certainly does not,” the judge snapped.
“I know, I know. I owe, I owe, is what I’m trying to say. I’m sorry for robbing Corporate Headquarters by secretly living there. To survive. I’m willing to do almost anything to pay back my debt to society, to stay out of prison.”
“Your debt to society may be to go to prison, Mr. Peonne. And why not, you’ll be with your people there. You have something against your people, Mr. Peonne? Something you might like to share with us, hmm?”
“It’s prison I hate, that’s all.”
“Rise above it, young man,” declared the judge. “We must all learn to rise above our lot in life, while accepting it fully, whatever it may be.”
“Some lots are better than others, Sir.”
“What does your lot have to do with anything? It’s the positive attitude that counts, in all things.”
“Live and let live, Judge?”
“Precisely.”
“Or live and let die?”
“Twenty years! Hard labor! Or simply no labor at all. Sheer confinement if you prefer. Be gone now, young man. Think long and hard about your role in this world. Be honest about it and you will be rewarded, inwardly at least. Trust me.”
“Oh, I do, Judge. I trust you’ve killed me. More and less. I don’t mean that personally, you understand? I know you’re just doing your job.”
“Thirty years! I don’t care! Make it forty! Be gone!”
————————————————————
We found Joe Peonne unconscious at the edge of the woods near Freeland. We took him in, and in return he told us his story of the state of the corporate world these days. This, his story: Joe Peonne - Plutopia.
http://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/featured-postslinks/tropetopia/
lobo gris,
Once upon a time Will Rogers, I believe it was, declared that enemy submarines were not such a big problem. We need only “drain the Atlantic and then pick ‘em off the bottom”.
Your insightful plan to stop electing both Republicans and Democrats shares a similar practicality problem. What is not shared is that Rogers was an intentional comedian and everybody understood he was throwing out stooge-stuff for levity. As for you? What are we supposed to do when the commentary is neither serious nor funny?
Davian: We’re close enough to the precipice to glimpse our imminent fates
And it was the regressive right policies that brought us to the precipice. If the progressive left manages to block the society’s fall from the precipice, do you think the regressive right is going to lead the people in thanking us? Hell no. The regressive right will lead the people in blaming us. The progressive left can’t compete for public mindspace - the regressive right owns the propaganda channels. So let the regressive right drag the society off the precipice, let the people feel the pain, let them realize that it was the regressive right that caused their pain, and let them stand up and finally walk their sore asses over here to the progressive left. In the meantime, enjoy the many benefits of your individual progressive agenda, and share the benefits as much as you can. Don’t forget, most of the world lives on the progressive left but is under assault by the regressive right. We’re doing the whole world a favor by allowing the regressive right to commit its suicide sooner.
What can be done about corporate media that force feeds us irrelevant information and withholds information we need to make intelligent decisions? There is an energy crisis, an environmental disaster on the horizon, a depression looming, and a raging war that is slated to last forever. I don’t doubt that Democrats are involved in corporate greed, but their platform is much more to my liking than the republican platform. When I was young I used to pride myself as an independent thinker and voted for the man, not the party. Then I realized that the candidates are interchangeable, like mass produced parts. That is when I actually joined my local democratic party. Now I have some input into the values of my party. I do believe in grassroots.
NATE W. & STEVEN RILEY: Excellent posts.
One missing factor the article didn’t relate is the role of media. A lot of people are relatively sated, even if they are learning to live with and on less; and then there’s the subtle somnabulism that comes with television, a 20th century “new opiate” of the peoples. A lot of people are bitching perhaps about rising prices, but they do NOT see themselves in the same dire straits that those living a century or so ago recognized. Many people think Creation already happened, that History is something in the past, that once these certain events are shown to us, they never recur. In short, they can’t see the design built into the structure of time. Quite plainly ALL things come full circle. There certainly are parallels between these two ages, and if we go back further, one could make an equal case that today’s global corporations are veritable pharaohs who look upon the world’s workers as virtual slaves. The only real difference is the slaves get to hold paper money and are “free” to shop. No matter the food is becoming one notch above Soylent Green, or that the same chemical exposures that are killing them, require enormous fees to be treated; or that the quality of life is everywhere declining due to so much anger, incivility, fear, cynicism and justifiable outrage given what the “leaders” are investing in, and what it will mean to our children’s children.
Depression, if that is what it turns out to be, together with the agonies of a misbegotten and lost war no one believes in any longer, could undermine whatever is left of the threadbare credibility of our Gilded Age elite.
Let’s pledge right now to force our “gilded elites” to take credit for their catastrophes. And while we’re at it, let’s build the alternative economic/civic system based on progressive principles, not reactionary hysterics. Try localism, strong local economies, with the crucial attribute of local economic/political power. Self-sufficiency and security in land, water, food, energy, industry, finance, shelter, education, healthcare, transport. Market demands by and for the people, producers as caged little beasts of burden, groveling for their next order.
GINI Coefficient of Income Inequality
US ———– .48 (and rising in inequality)
Uruguay ——- .45
Venezuela —– .48
Uganda ——– .45
Cambodia —— .42
Kenya ——— .45
Jamaica ——- .42
Iran ———- .43
Mexico ——– .46
Mozambique —- .47
Nice company to be in with high inequality!
USA’s own CIA ‘country casebook’ warns that any country with a GINI index of inequality higher than .45 is in danger of “civil unrest and revolution”
All European advanced democracies, Japan and Canada have GINI rankings from low .20’s to mid .30’s.
US is still a bit better, but closing in fast, on Mugabe’s Zimbabwe ‘police state’ dictatorship at GINI of .56.
Nice company we keep!!
“What we have here is not normal economic policy, but is a form of looting.”
George Akerlof, Nobel laureate in economics, said of the Bush administration’s economic policies all the way back in 2002.
Good article until this comment
“This primary season has witnessed a discernable leftward shift of the center of gravity within even the cowed leadership ranks of the Democratic”
Also, the writer fails to point out a big difference between then and now.
Technology and the dismantling of the Constitution, giving us a police state apparatus built after the phony GWOT that makes Orwell look unimaginative.
When the masses finally rise up to protest, they are likely to find themselves with a boot in their face.
I founds this somewhere, lost the link, and it would be entertaining if it didn’t seem like thye could actually get away with it today (unlike in 1999 when it seemed ridiculous)
“Announcing To All of the Chosen Line
THE FORTHCOMING GRAND EMERGENCE OF THE GLOBALIST HEGEMONY
1. The master computer in Brussels has previously completed the
composition of MASTER FILE 666, with the names of those selected as
Global Elites. These families and individuals of unique genetic status
have been or will be notified at the appropriate time and according to
need, as deemed appropriate by the Committees of the Grand Supreme
Lodge. The following plan is now approved by the all the Committees of
300 and the Luciferian Grand Supreme Lodge of Illuminized Freemasonry.
2. The worldwide distribution of “smart cards” has begun. These will be
initiated in the US through the encrypted encoding of driver’s licenses.
A preliminary version will contain a computer chip with minimum
essential codified information. These will be offered to the surviving
worker non-Elites. The Elites will be granted a Platinum version with
much greater versatility, so that national currencies may be phased out
and eliminated.
3. Active Patriots, Christians, and all proponents of bigoted
nationalism who now survive are now to be placed under the new
tracking program, the selection of those of the preplanned slave
population for the granting of the SMART CARD. In addition, an
arranged economic collapse, with the crashing of financial markets
worldwide will soon follow, rendering all non-elites totally dependent
upon government for their survival, the economic crash having been
designed to wipe out bank accounts and investments leading to total
individual impoverishment. Property values will plummet, and all
residual private assets are to be seized by UN Forces and will revert
to ownership by the global collective in the future cashless society.
4. Major UN controlled military forces are now awaiting the call to
quell the anticipated riots and insurrection. In the chaos resulting
from the arrival of the “God Ship” with our Dark Angels from space,
there will be further economic collapse and the announcement of the
termination of welfare and social security, the acquisition of those
citizens ( mainly of the Black race and white North American and
European stocks) who are already known through postal surveillance and
via detection of the distribution and vicious e-mailing of
anti-globalist diatribes, will be accomplished expeditiously .
Meanwhile, the pure and undefiled gospel of LUCIFER will be proclaimed
to all the world by the New Gods who will descend from the Mother Ships.
Our Blessed Lord Maitreya will sound the glorious news to all upon the
Earth through telepathic communication with every kindred, tongue, and
people. The sheeplike enemies of our glorious global government, under
the guise of the Christian “Rapture,” will be taken via closed vans,
buses, or other vehicular conveyance, not to departing space ships, but
to the abattoirs in the central zones, where they will immediately
terminated?5. The above selective procedures cited will be amply augmented through
the non-selective methods now being considered. Intravenous lethal
injection is permissible but it is considered prohibitively expensive.
Projectile penetration is cumbersome and also quite detectable because
of noise generation The preferred method will be mainly non-selective
via the mass application of gaseous nerve agents and aerosolized
biologicals, as soon as all required facilities are made ready.
Negotiations are now underway with those national regimes, mainly
Islamic, which are presently NBC Warfare capable, and who will be of
great assistance in the deselection of non elites prior to their own
demise. The coming depopulation measures will be a combination of
intrinsic and extrinsic insertions, utilizing nerve agents, plague, and
botulin, in a concerted effort to cleanse the planet of degenerates and
useless eaters, perhaps to an approximate number of one billion total
inhabitants sufficient to provide an ample slave population. There are
some areas in which both human and animal depopulation may be
appropriate, followed by total combustion through the selective
employment of thermite fuel-air bombing techniques. Regrowth and
replacement of desired fauna may then be accomplished through already
designated criteria. Mass depopulation will also be carried out in dense
population centers by so-called “terrorist attacks,” using lethal
aerosols of anthrax, Zyklon B, Plague, and the new Ebola-like viruses
that have been mutated to become effective airborne agents of death.
Employment of anthrax, and selective use of VX, Zyklon B will also be
theoretically useful in preservation of certain UN Biospheres where
rewilding does not require live fauna for several years.
6. Weather alteration and seismic–vulcanism are to be accelerated in
areas in which there are already critical tectonic imbalances.
Insertions of deep devices will have been finalized. Serial detonations
with computed enhancement of shearing effects, will be utilized to the
furthest extent possible in the production of DESTRUCTIVE earthquakes
and tsunamis.
7. As a part of the FEMA Organized Rescue of Communal Entities
(FORCE) program, United Nations Global Guard paratroops now at full
readiness will be inserted in most areas. Mechanized UN infantry units
will appear as though be magic across the countryside, emerging from the
previously prepared and occupied “closed” military bases. “Mopping up”
of deselected groups will then be accomplished through sanctions as
described above, and mass burials of both living and dead individuals
will be accomplished by the most expeditious means available, with
careful attention to disease prevention in UN personnel. Body Bags are
now prepositioned for the hygienic transport of the dead where burial
facilities are not yet locally available. Bulldozer equipment will be
selectively utilized in some areas to facilitate the rapid excavation
and filling of mass graves. These areas must not interfere with the
habitations of the designated Elites who will have occupied the
underground facilities as a means of avoiding the wrath of the false
god, Adonai.
8. The primary issue that still remains is the means of rapid and secure
notification and transport of all Designated Elites, so that survival
enhancement may be rendered sufficiently effective. You are required to
report immediately to assigned points, such as Sedona and Mt. Weather,
and thence to the interconnecting tunnels. Housing in the pre-prepared
underground facilities will be mandatory for those computer designates
considered critical to the future Globalist World State, including
Royals, civilian administrators, top military leaders, and their
families. Be prepared to bring a bare minimum of your personal effects,
for each of the hundred underground cities are designed for relatively
luxurious sustenance and entertainment of these Elite Selectees and
essential government personnel for a period of two to four years.
Provision is made for certain especially beautiful and youthful members
of the degenerate subhuman races, those animalistic strains ascertained
to be without the merest vestige of the Royal Merovingian Bloodline,
neither of the Illuminist lineage, nor of that of the noble Khazari
Juwes. Those totally devoid of even a scintilla of nobility, both males
and females, shall be used as subjects in the sexual ceremonies and
sacred rituals of the Order. Afterwards, these subjects are to be
dedicated and sacrificed to the glory of the holy Name of Lucifer, the
acknowledged one true God of this Earth. Surely it shall be a glorious
and memorable time for all!
The ultimate return to surface conditions depends upon ambient regional
ecology and the residual presence of localized insurrectional
activities, all of which must be virtually neutralized, disarmed, and in
complete suppression prior to the final Grand Emergence of the Global
Hegemony (GEGH).
LONG LIVE THE REIGN OF OUR GOD LUCIFER AND HIS
GLORIOUS FOURTH REICH,
THE GLOBALIST WORLD GOVERNMENT!
WARNING: TAKE CONSIDERABLE CARE TO INSURE ABSOLUTE SECURITY AND TO
PREVENT PREMATURE RELEASES AND DISSEMINATION OF THESE INSTRUCTIONS TO
UNDESIRABLES. SECURITY BREACHES MAY RESULT IN PEREMPTORY DESELECTION.
(signed)
Grand Supreme Imperator
ILLUMINATED FREEMASONRY”
This is what one expected and saw in 1929 and what FDR rightly called the “concentration of great wealth — and economic royalists” gaming the economy of a nation like a giant Ponzi scheme.
And this is one sees today in a country that has been entirely captured and occupied by a hidden ‘corporatist Empire’ working through its installed, two-party “Vichy” facade of a phony government.
In his fantastic new book, “The Assault on Reason”, Al Gore states that our country has been taken over by a “radical right-wing corporatist ‘faction’ which holds in utter contempt the concept that such thing as ‘the public interest’ even exists.”
Gore’s only understatement is calling this cancer a corporatist ‘faction’, rather than more accurately, a corporatist ‘Empire’.
best for 90% of americans to flee to canada…especially families and go to a conservative province… the voters who voted for hillary proves too many people in america has been dumded down so much that there will be always the corp robber barons making slaves out of we the people
..
seeing that hillary got that many votes speaks volumns.. there is no HOPE in this corporate controlled system of brainwashing to make slaves out of americans…and america is a magnet to draw the worlds most corrupt and greedy to come here and make the slaves in more misery so they can also get rich… america is fast becoming a third world country..
the clinton yrs in power was about SETTING us UP for all this.. with their nafta and gatt bringing to america … THAT set this up for all of 90% of americans to be harmed…… and then hillary did it again with voting for this war for the robber barons again to hurt the 90% of americans…
the clintons work for the robber barons to make sure americans are in slavery!! and their voters are the types that would elect hitler even after knowing what hitler has done.. they are brainwashed so strongly by the corp evil.. that there is no hope here … destruction will be the ONLY way that solves this problem.. so best to get away and maybe come back AFTER the destruction..
This is a great and informative article.
I knew there were important parallels between whats been happening in the last 20 years and the period of time ending with the Great Depression. This article makes much clear.
I read Bonner and Wiggins ‘Empire of Debt’ a few years ago. It had a great chapter in there about how Italy fell into Fascism during the 1880- 1920 period of time. Debt, and the willingness of politicians to find foreign scapegoats for local bitterness, was used to spiral Italy into a black-hole from which it took until 1960 to recover. God, I hope that doesn’t happen here.
Daniel David April 23rd, 2008 4:37 pm
My plan is serious all fight. That you don’t take it as such is not my problem or the problem of others. What goes flat is your attempt at a practical joke that promises change that will never happen by electing Democrats.
Lobo Gris
Fraser writes:
“Even now, there remains a trace of the old Social Darwinian rationale — that the ascendancy of “the fittest” benefits the whole species — and the accompanying innuendo that those consigned to the bottom of the heap are fated by nature to end up there.”
One problem with that Social Darwinist perspective is that as the capitalist economic system inevitably evolves into crony capitalism as it matures, those who rise to the top and are emulated by others are usually those who are the most unprincipled and least concerned with the common good. So the society evolves into one even less altruistic, less empathetic, and less principled, and more egoistic and self-absorbed, heading toward human extinction.
“Communism = political oppression”
“Capitalism = economic oppression.”
“Ironically as well, the “winner”, corporate consumer capitalism, has proved to be just as “godless” as Russian communism.” - Stephen V. Riley
A corrupt system is a corrupt system no matter what the name, a just system is a just system no matter what the name.
MiMiCcS - “I founds this somewhere, lost the link, and it would be entertaining if it didn’t seem like they could actually get away with it today (unlike in 1999 when it seemed ridiculous)”
…this is the unfolding of Rudolf Steiner’s (founder of Waldorf education, Biodynamic gardening, and Camphill…) prophecy if the “Ahramanic” effects and efforts of are not harmonized by humanity leaning toward the “Luciferic” warming essence.
I’ve been associated with some people who function under Steiner’s mythology (here myth is used as the way the human mind naturally organizes and not as a falsehood). As I meditated on and experienced the world in regard to their perspective the grand realization came about me that Love protects and conquers one from all threats of universal nature. The people who subscribe to the scenario you presented and Steiner’s view’s later affirmed this insight within a discussion of microwave weapon experimentation going on in Iraq.
Thus, in my view and experience, the best way to harmonize the Aharmanic forces, whether you personify them or call them the ‘tyrannical state”, and to alleviate Siouxrose’s perspective of “the quality of life is everywhere declining due to so much anger, incivility, fear, cynicism and justifiable outrage given what the “leaders” are investing in…” is to pick up the Constitution and start a conversation on impeachment with your Congressional Representative - a conversation based on the warmth of Love no matter how “justifiable” the “outrage” - don’t deny the outrage, just don’t make it the basis of conversation for what we’re doing as a Nation.
If we do this, impeach not with self-righteousness and vindictiveness but with Love, then the power of Ahraman and the State will not be turned against humanity as it is now evolving, but will be used for the uplift of humanity and it’s grandest expression yet!
Find Love, find your Constitution, find your Congressional Representative, find your voice and find the greatest expression of the American Spirit to date - the impeachment hearings of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney!
A corrupt system is a corrupt system…point being it’s “the how” that matters.
Impeach with love? I have no love in my heart for war criminals such as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Yoo, Abrams, Rice, Tenet, Rove… Oh, so many war criminals, so little time. I know, I know. I try to aspire to the likes of Gandhi, MLK and Jesus, and that lasts me about a day (really, maybe only a half day, all loving and stuff). But I’m no Gandhi, MLK or Jesus. When I see a child with his arms and legs blown off and tears running down his father’s face, when I see a woman crying out to Allah for justice after her house has been destroyed by bombs, when I see bloated bodies floating in the waters of the 9th Ward, I feel only hate for the ones that allowed it to come to this. I feel love for the victims, but no love for the psychopaths that caused such suffering.
anne faith - “But I’m no Gandhi, MLK or Jesus.” - I beg to differ, they were all human beings (and I assume you are) with human feelings; thanks for sharing yours. I don’t think any of these people would deny being extremely disturbed from the experiences you depicted, it’s “how” they learned, not to deny, but to differentiate and emote their feelings that made the difference, for themselves personally and for humanity.
As it has been for a few years now, some of my witnessing and activism is to take pictures of depleted uranium babies and cluster bombed children into the streets, always a visceral reaction and conversation starter, and not as a mockery of the child, but to honor their brief life here…and in some way to make amends for my part (lack of vigilance and social engagement) in this Middle East and Inner City America holocaust we find ourselves in.
There are millions of highly sensitive people who would engage in the conversation for righting the injustices committed in America’s name, but fail to do so because of the harsh tone of the language. One can say “what about the harsh tone of a cluster bomb?”, but with these people, and to touch the humanity of the Republicans needed to impeach, a conversation based on hatred will not be functional and achieve the maintenance of our inalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Yes, somewhere beneath the cold crust and arrogance even the war criminals would thrive best with Life and Happiness. The work of Thick Nhat Hanh has helped me personally; especially Call Me By My True Names on audio tape: how this human being could literally “carry the dead bodies of his brothers” and help rebuild the city of Ben Je 4 times after bombings, and continue to find a smile and write poetry about the horrors was for a long time beyond me.
And he never denied his anger, as he said “he knows the anger is him.” So, how to proceed? As anger, as hate? Are there different words to describe the feelings that arise in regard to the criminals, or is it always hate?
This is why I still push for impeachment: to culture a dialogue that can help heal America from it’s deeply entrenched behaviors of hatred and anger, such as that I witnessed at a recent Congressional town hall meeting. It was my ability to present impeachment without frustration or shrill self-righteousness that allowed me to touch and uncover, and have recognized publicly, the remaining “fear of being soft on terror” and “being non-constructive” that Representatives have, that aids me for going forward with the argument for impeachment, and thus lend a hand and some words for making this, not a perfect, but more perfect Union.
Peace, Joy and…yes, Love, for you and all.
Thanks, Puck Twain. You make some valid points, and you’re on a higher plane than I am. Maybe I’ll get there someday. Peace and love to you too.