My Country, Misery

So...

Tom Ridge came clean
this week. Woo-hoo.

What a brave and selfless
act. Reminds me of Colin Powell completely and totally kinda sorta
dissing the Iraq invasion. Great to hear that everything we knew
and said and got clobbered for saying at the time was in fact true.
Thanks a lot, General. That's really helpful. Not so great
about the whole timing thing though.

Colin Powell was probably
the only human on the planet who could have stopped the Iraq holocaust,
but he waited instead. He seems to think that loyalty to the president
is more important than loyalty to the country, loyalty to principle,
or loyalty to the idea of preserving lives. Or so he claims.
Given what he has said since he sold the war to Americans with his unconscionably
despicable Security Council dog-and-pony show, I'm hard-pressed to
see how he's been loyal even to Bush. Seems kinda like he's
only loyal to Colin, trying to save a place for himself in the history
books.

Mr. Ridge, on the other
hand, has a book for sale, just in case no one noticed that particular
coincidence. Perhaps that explains why he is now revealing the
truth about the politicization of the buffoonish 'terrorism' color-coding
system, a mere five years after he claims it was used to justify the
Bush administration's continued existence, and almost used - save
for the brave interventions of, wait for it now..., one Tom Ridge - to put Bush over the top on the eve of the 2004 election. Once
again, a bit of timely honesty from Ridge at exactly that moment would
almost certainly have terminated the Bush nightmare at a 'mere'
sickening four years. Imagine the effect on votershad the Little
Emperor's Secretary of Homeland Security resigned in protest on the
eve of that election, and said exactly why. Alas, Tom seems to
think 2009 a more timely year for his revelations. And then, of
course, there's the book...

All of this has me thinking - as I'm afraid I've found myself doing pretty much every day
for at least the last decade" - What the hell happened to America?"
This country seems to have deteriorated mightily over the course of
my lifetime, and I know from the email that I get that I'm hardly
alone in believing that.

I'll confess right
off the bat that I am more than a little suspicious of the question
itself. Doesn't every generation think that life was better
back in the day? Could it be that I'm just part of the latest
cast of regular, vanilla-flavored narcissists now busy transforming
themselves into full-blown, old and bitter narcissists?

There's some pretty
good reason to think so. Iraq is a disgusting piece of savagery
that was sold on lies and never should have happened in a remotely moral
universe. But Vietnam was worse. The Caligula Kid - George
W. Bush - and his growly pally, Dick "Dick" Cheney, are about
the last persons out of the whole 300 million of us who should have
been selected to reside in the White House. But so was Nixon and,
in some ways, Johnson too. Karl Rove was a monster who cheapened
American politics and the practice of government in every fashion he
could possibly imagine. But so did his mentor, Lee Atwater.
And so did Atwater's spiritual antecedent, Joe McCarthy. It
many ways, the present disaster often looks like just more of the same,
history's proverbial one damn thing after another.

But my gut tells me that
the feelings rumbling around in there are not just the bitter ruminations
of some geezer who isn't even old enough yet to qualify as an old
man. I do think something profound and fundamental has changed.

It's hard to put your
finger on it, though. For one thing, it's not just one thing.
It's not just the politicians. It's not just the media.
It's not just the institutions of government or the political parties.
It's not just the public. It's all of that, and a lot more.

And for another thing,
it's not just this or that deadly sin, but all of them, plus a few
that weren't even on the original manufacturer's list. Is
it that we've become more deceitful, or more fearful that is the problem?
More corrupt, or more vicious? More slothful, or more greedy?
And so on, and so on. So many ways to destroy a culture, so little
time...

At the risk of sounding
a bit too much like the very people I most loathe in the American political
and cultural discourse, I think what's happened is that the society
has fundamentally lost its moral bearings. No, I'm not talking
about some hyped-up, jerked-off, compulsive obsession with all things
sexual. That regressive fixation, complete with enough hypocrisy
to sink a small continent, is of course so much a part of the problem,
not the solution. What I'm referring to is an unmooring from
basic, just, unselfish - and one might even say, patriotic, in the
true sense of the term - dignity, generosity, humanity.

Look, let's not kid
ourselves. There's always been a dark side to the human spirit,
and you'll never go broke betting on the proposition that politics
draws more needy and black souls to its practice than do most other
professions. As already noted, before Rove there was the shameful
scourge of McCarthy, and he was hardly the first political practitioner
of the dark arts, in America or elsewhere. But it's different
today.

To begin with, this country
has unquestionably drifted to the right over the last thirty years.
This is not an entirely simple equation, and indeed, in the domain of
social issues such as gay rights or the integration of women and minorities
into the economic and political institutions of society, I would even
argue that we've witnessed a progressive turn during these last decades.
Moreover, it's even possible that we are in the early stages of a
leftward turn in other domains as well, given the current crises of
American capitalism and foreign policy. Nevertheless, even with
all those caveats, who would have imagined in 1970 that America would
be far more regressive four decades later, rather than far less?

It's a libertarian
sort of regressivism, to be sure, hence the aforementioned drift to
the left on social issues, and perhaps even a new isolationist cast
on foreign-policy questions, rejecting the worst excesses of imperialist
predation. That's hard to say. The Iraq experience provides
evidence for both a more optimistic or a more pessimistic interpretation
of public opinion when it comes to foreign adventures.

But where you really
see the rightward turn is in the economic domain. Once, thirty
or forty years ago, it was literally a national project to worry about
the poor. So much so, in fact, that we decided to fight a war
on poverty. By the 1990s, however, that war was lost through an
abandonment of the battlefield equating to unconditional surrender.
One of the most profoundly significant, and yet simultaneously most
subtle developments of the Clinton years was the new and near total
emphasis on the lot of the middle class. Not only had America's
poor fallen off the radar screen, but in fact, if they got in the way
of the middle class achieving all its bourgeois aspirations and acquiring
all its requisite trinkets, then not only would the poor cease to receive
additional aid and attention, they would also be cut off from their
pathetically minuscule existing forms of relief. This is the true
meaning of the welfare reform bill, signed by Clinton in order to guarantee
an election he already had in his pocket. The middle class was
saying that it wanted tax breaks and a balanced budget, which meant
something had to give. There went welfare, and with it the war
on poverty.

Just a quick glance at
the current political landscape and the figures who populate it gives
you a sense of the change that's transpired. The center of gravity
in American politics has moved considerably to the right. Once,
not so long ago, the Republican Party was dominated by its centrists,
and people like Ronald Reagan were viewed as kooks. It's worth
remembering that in the 1970s Reagan's presidential aspirations were
literally the butt of endless jokes by political comedians. But
the guy went from joke to president to saint, and that says a lot about
where we are today. At this point, there are almost no center-right
figures in the Republican Party, at least at the national level.

The movement of the Democratic
Party has followed a similar trajectory. You'd never know it,
of course, by listening to the screaming inanities of regressive lunatics,
whether elite or rank-and-file. Notwithstanding their foaming
rants about Clinton or Obama or Reid or Pelosi being socialists, however,
the truth is none of these figures are even vaguely liberal by traditional
standards. Compare them to Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson
or even Harry Truman and this is easy to see. Ditto any comparison
of these folks to progressives in other Western democracies. Watch
what they don't do - whether that is ending an obscene war or legislating
universal single-payer healthcare, or standing up for gay rights - and one can instantly appreciate how little these figures are willing
to fight for progressive politics, and how lacking in progressivity
are the politics for which they are unwilling to fight.

In addition to the proliferation
of adherents to truly scary right-wing politics, and the shifting of
the political landscape to the right - which may be more properly
considered as the mainstreaming of extremism - I think we've also
experienced a decimation in the ranks of the politically courageous,
people willing to sacrifice career, reputation or even their lives in
order to stand fast against the worst impulses in American politics
and the most vicious purveyors of those ideas and attitudes. It's
not so much that these people were progressives and now they're not
as it is that they were Americans with integrity, outliers filled with
enough decency and courage to stand against the collection of scary
monster outliers of the regressive right. Yes, there was Joseph
McCarthy. But there was also Joseph Welch. Yes, there was
Father Coughlin. But there was also Edward R. Murrow. Yes,
there was Richard Nixon. But there was also George McGovern.

Those white knights of
integrity seem all but disappeared today. I can remember my astonishment
during the Bush versus Gore debacle of 2000 that there wasn't one
single elder statesman of American politics - some Jerry Ford-like
figure - who stood up and said "I'm sorry, but this is wrong".
Who risked the alienation of his party and peers by making the case
that it's far less important who wins the vote than it is that the
vote be legitimately won. I remember during the Clinton fiasco - when a sitting president the United States was being impeached for
lying about a blow job, when he was almost hounded out of office by
members of Congress who literally were stalking boy interns or trolling
airport men's rooms for sex, having serial affairs and dumping their
wives for their paramours as their spouses lay in the hospital cancer
ward on their recovery bed, or fathering children in second families
no one knew about - I remember thinking who will call an end to this
madness which has infected the American body politic? But nobody
of stature did. Nor did they, of course, in the worst instance
of all, as a handful of psychopaths invented a couple of absurd pretexts
and marched the country off into a completely unnecessary war in Iraq,
which has now claimed perhaps a million lives. How is it that
nobody of standing had the courage to stand up and say to the American
public, "Come to your senses, this is wrong, the administration is
lying to you, think for yourself!"?

So much is wrong in American
politics today - genuinely more so, I think, than in the past.
So many are culpable. Congress is more worthless than ever, and
that's really saying something. The Democratic Party has thrilled
the biology community by creating a whole new class of invertebrates,
utterly worthless in office, and wholly undeserving of the title of
opposition party when not. The mass media has become the most
despicable collection of whores to power imaginable. Whatever
sense there once was - from the original notions of the Founders up
through the era of Cronkite - of the media serving the public interest
as critical watchdogs over government has long since transmogrified
into just another profit center on corporate balance sheets.

But even more fundamentally,
something has changed at the level of political culture. Something
is broken at the level of human decency. The toxic combination
of rampant American individualism, right-wing successes in framing public
attitudes in all the sickest and most corrosive ways, a litany of false
prophets preaching bogus religious salvation through even more deceitful
notions of political morality, and the gravitational pull from the declining
trajectory of an empire that has most assuredly now passed its sell-by
date - all of this has conspired to produce a monstrous polity lurching
about the global landscape without a heart or a conscience, and eating
itself from within for the very same reasons.

Worse still, as time
marches on, fewer and fewer will remain who remember that it wasn't
forever thus.

That once there were
lines that were not crossed in American politics.

That there were notions
of decency that transcended partisanship and ideology.

That those who left flesh
overseas fighting the country's wars and brought home Purple Hearts
instead were not vitiated during political campaigns as allies of America's
adversaries, and especially not by cowards who somehow managed to skip
their generation's major national security engagement.

That there were political
crimes that simply required courageous responses, regardless of the
sacrifices involved.

That political leaders
could and should sacrifice their positions and perhaps even their careers
in order to avoid the taint of association with morally repugnant policies.

That even troubadours
had a responsibility to sing great anthems in protest against injustice,
rather than cashing out and selling panties and bras for Victoria's
Secret.

That there was once a
thing known as true patriotism, elevating the public interest over everything
else.