More information and "sneak peak" video hyperlinks can be found at the blog DownWithTyranny,
whose author writes:
[...] Tonight at 9PM PBS is debuting The Warning by Mark Kirk. I heard him being interviewed on the radio this morning. It promises to be a blockbuster of a program and if you ever wonder how all these highly paid smart guys dragged the whole country-- if not much of the world-- into ruin, you really ought to try to watch. Kirk's goal is to open the black box and unearth "the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." [...]
Sarah Palin: theories as to why she apparently arouses hatred. I probably do hate her, and insofar as I do, I hate that I hate her. To inspire the hatred of others is to wield a peculiar kind of power. There's also a part of me that is in a sense unfazed by her personally, that sees in her a representation of many of contemporary America's most morally objectionable tendencies. It is these tendencies that I oppose with all my might, whether she's there to embody them or not. Right? ...
But, Sarah Palin: she's got to be a symptom of something rather than the other way around, right? Because what symptom could possibly be CAUSED by a Sarah Palin? No. She must be the symptom. The side effect.
Sarah Palin: a side effect. Like television commercials for various god-knows-what prescription medications marketed to Baby-Boomers, so that they don't have to poop at inopportune moments, or whatever it is. SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE SARAH PALIN. Sometimes these advertisements -- the funniest of them, to be sure -- devote, like, over half of their running-time to the announcer guy reading out laundry lists of scary-ass side effects, which MAY INCLUDE MUCUS, SEIZURE, BLOOD CLOT, LOSS OF HEARING, OR -- IN RARE CASES -- SARAH PALIN...
I don't hate Palin so much as I fear the consolidation of political power among those who love her.
Sarah Palin -- to paraphrase the Sex Pistols -- She ain't no human being!, but a constellation of images, allusions and gestures.
The mediated phenomenon "Sara Palin" evokes nostalgia among a large number of Americans -- although, as far as I can tell, not a majority of them -- for a past that does not exist/that never existed.
I am reminded of accounts I have read of what it was like to witness the ascendancy of National Socialism in the tempestuous final days of the Weimar Republic: the celebration of ignorance, of seething, unfocused resentments.
The final revenge of style over content.
Sarah Palin makes George W. Bush look like a civil libertarian. She makes Ronald Reagan look pro-education. Sarah Palin is worse than these men because, whereas their moral precepts were delusional, hers are non-existent.
She's amoral: she represents indifference toward morality, indifference toward the Constitution, indifference toward the quality of life -- and livelihoods -- of present and future generations, indifference toward science, indifference toward representative democracy, indifference toward the separation of the branches of government, indifference toward education, indifference toward art, toward culture, toward freedom, toward poverty, toward the pursuit of happiness, indifference toward the principles espoused by the Founding Fathers, indifference toward religion in its meaningful sense, indifference toward history, indifference toward ideas, and indifference toward suffering.
The only thing toward which she is not indifferent is Sarah Palin. She doesn't care about the people who celebrate her. The people who celebrate her do so in the sense that they live vicariously through her. She embodies a collective, incoherent and self-contradictory dream. This dream pines for the destruction of all things unfamiliar in the interest of preserving the self as the self construes itself.
We really should be explaining the Left objection to her in moral terms: Sarah Palin is amoral.
The Obama transition team has announced its plans to release on the Internet a weekly video address in which soon-to-be President Obama will communicate directly to we citizens. In a press release, it claims that this will, in effect, "make the White House and the political process more transparent."
Not so, says Slate's political reporter and columnist John Dickerson, who points out that "snazzy new technology" alone won't be "enough to bring transparency to the White House." His tough but fair-minded (by which I mean, of course, soberly pro-Obama...) assessment of things seems fairly dead-on-the-money:
During the campaign Obama was transparent—but only up to a point. Unlike previous candidates, he released the names of fundraisers who raised big chunks of bundled donations, a move not required by law. But he stopped short of declaring the precise amounts and affiliations. When it came to releasing the names of his small-dollar donors, his campaign used technology as an excuse rather than as a tool to increase transparency. One of the big acts of technological transparency during his campaign was inadvertent, when it was discovered that his Web site language had been changed to remove criticism of the troop surge in Iraq.
Personally, Obama has grown more opaque about his thoughts. As a journalist I get vertigo thinking about how great it would be to hear Obama talk as openly and honestly about his views as he did in this 2004 interview about his religion that was released this week. That he no longer talks this freely is undoubtedly part of the reason he won. I don't see any sign that he's going to change his behavior, and I'm not sure he should. If the press is going to sound-bite a president to death, why should he open up too much?
Obama will show he is transparent not by delivering his message in some new way but by conveying actual information. He's got to tell the truth, yes, but he's also got to have something to say. His most powerful statements during the campaign were not conveyed through an Ethernet cable but from a stage, alone, with a microphone, the way it has been done for 100 years. If the promise of transparency and candor never arrives but the hype continues, his campaign will have produced the political equivalent of vaporware.
Ha! This is hilarious. On The News Hour with Jim Leher, David Brooks has been predicting that his crippled party will likely need to endure ten-to-fifteen years of working out the kinks before it's able to get back on its feet ideologically or politically. A conservative named Tony Perkins is already proving Brooks right:
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council told CNN that conservatives need to take back control of the GOP if the party is to return to its winning ways.
"Moderates never beat conservatives. We've seen that in past elections," he said.
Rejecting suggestions that the conservative movement was viewed as being out of touch with the electorate, Perkins says the Republican Party needs to go back to basics.
"It's a return to fundamental conservative principles that Ronald Reagan showed work and that people can be attracted to," Perkins said. (Full article on CNN.com)
This is exactly the kind of dream-world nonsense Brooks is referring to. It's going to be very entertaining to watch from the sidelines as the GOP keeps this up! And as it continues to lose election after election after election....
This thought, or some variation on it, has been coursing through the nether regions of my mind lately.
I think it has arisen in conjunction with my attempts to think through what exactly it is that fuels the continuing existence of a political party while the remaining traces of its longtime ideology -- the ideology that the party has (so to speak:) bet the bank on -- have frayed themselves into utter incoherence.
Like stray, dead leaves left over from autumn that reemerge with the melting away of blanket-upon-blanket of wet, winter snow, only to shrivel dry and decompose under the hot July sun.
A voter's resentment (conscious or not), when reproduced, amplified, refracted and echoed back to him by men and women seeking political or economic power, is his blindness. A politics that endeavors to flatter a voter for his blindness is a politics that subjugates and -- indeed -- infantilizes the voter.
To the precise extent to which a voter's resentments are flattered, reinforced and catered to, that voter becomes dependant upon the politician, and more importantly, upon the continued ascendancy of a politics that so flatters him.
It is in this respect that observing the decomposition* of Goldwater/Reagan Republicanism calls to mind a condition that could be described in terms that are not dissimilar to those that were used repeatedly by Goldwater/Reagan Republicans** in undertaking to describe the dreaded, feared, much-lambasted and -lampooned relic, the Welfare State:
paternalism.
__________________ * And if you doubt that that's what we're observing, I'm afraid that you flatter yourself. (I know, lame joke.)
** Not to mention the pathetic/embarrassing "Obama's a socialist" antics of John McCain. It's really hard to pin the 'socialism' label on the Democratic Party in an environment in which the sitting Republican Administration has enacted the most sweeping regime of the nationalization of formerly private resources in the history of the United States.
Author and journalist Thomas Frank, speaking recently in Portland, Oregon. He discusses his latest book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule for about half an hour, after which he takes audience questions.
Frank really hits his stride in this video, by which I mean he delivers a healthy and satisfying dose of eloquent and morally indignant populism. Exactly what I needed to get me through another day of Bailout-talk, with all of the lying, insulting, hypocritical, patronizing cant from Bush, Paulson and Bernanke. Enjoy:
...And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program. And what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute.
We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue...
-- Ronald Reagan, 'The Space Shuttle "Challenger" Tragedy Address', televised on 28 January 1986.
I grew up during the Reagan Administration, followed by four years of George H.W. Bush, passing into my adolescence during the Bill Clinton years. For now, I want to ramble about the twelve years of Reagan/Bush, both the things about those years that I remember from having lived through them and the things I remember about them from having lived subsequent to them. We can talk about the Clinton years at another time (or maybe we just shouldn't talk about them ever!).
I. The world was flat.
It was a time, Dear Reader, of a mass-cultural FLATTENING, during which the consciousness (and conscience) each and every American was slowly but surely DUMBED-DOWN until he became a castaway on his own self-involved, lazy-brained isle of ostensible plenty. The expanding use of plastics in the creation and packaging of cheap consumer junk ushered in a new and more profitable era in planned obsolescence. It was the time during which the Cold War reached the apotheosis of its self-sustaining outlandishness: I'm referring, of course, to the 'Star Wars' missile defense initiative. (Which only ever existed on paper, in tax dollars, and in the meticulously-TelePrompted, content-bereft cadences of Reagan's slow-motion national addresses... Of course, Bush, Cheney, Condi and Co. are clamoring for Star Wars 2.0: 'DA RETURN!!'.)
It was a time of unthinking acquiescence to received wisdom; of consensus formed through every man, woman and child's desire to count himself among the espousers of the consensus-view, of bloated, diet-trend-chasing conventionally and of political and economic group-think. A time that found us aiming our frustrations, criticisms, guilt complexes, and intellectual energies inward; publicly, we adopted the hard-driving but collegial manner of an Atomized Individual Economic Actor after Milton Friedman's own heart. Foot-soldiers in the Reagan Revolution. Power suits. Gay Republicans. The ascendancy of identity politics in academe. Myopia, hypocrisy. Bedazzlement with the shiny gadgetry of Empire. The Magic of Spielberg™, and his big-budget authoritarian morality plays. Disney, and such cinematic achievements as Flight of the Navigator.
II. Politics of Bush/Cheney condones openly the undermining of the moral authority (and coherence) of the USA's democratic project.
But I'll allow that the era of Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-free Coke, Caffeine-free Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, New Coke and Coke Classic had something going for it that eight years of George W. Bush lacks. It pertains to W.'s style of governance (if we can call it either style or governance...), or rather, what it lacks. The Reagan years had as one of its pillars a public face that sought to be seen as serving the interests of the rule of law rather than setting the rule of law aside as bothersome or even naive. A set of communications-directives that took pains not simply to lie to the American people, but to tell all of the right lies. That took as agiven the necessity of being seen not only to respect the United States Constitution, but to be seen as actively upholding it.
I know this might seem like a minor point -- after all, I'm talking only about rhetoric and propaganda -- but for me it's one of the most distressing things about our current situation. Sure, back in the 80's there was Iran Contra and a billion sketchy/criminal military adventures, but at least the bastards bothered to lie in such a way as to offer most credulous or self-preoccupied people in this country the psychological bulwark of plausible deniability. Joe Briefcase could go on believing sincerely that the values of the United States -- you know, as inscribed in the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights? -- set the parameters of Executive Branch activity in -- at the very least -- its objective, tone and spirit.
That really does make a difference, because at least in those days, the racists and xenophobes from -- I don't mean to generalize, 'cause there are plenty of exceptions to this regional truism -- the South couldn't openly rally around the cause of preserving measures and policies that are essentially fascistic, both in their intent and in their means of execution. For instance, when it is revealed that the has CIA waterboarded a couple of people under the cloak of secrecy, that pisses me off now, and it would surely have pissed me off during the 80's and 90's. The sudden revelation that actual torture is being conducted by the United States would have caused much bigger shock waves among the ocean of citizens of the United States than this exact revelation -- except on a much greater scale -- has caused today. (Or, there'd have been at least a shock wave!)
To be sure, it of course wouldn't have been true that the practice was isolated, and I don't deny for a moment that there are unnerving harms that accrue from the kind of false consciousness that plausible deniability taps into. But, I have to say that by contrast, it is far more disturbing to witness, as we do today, rednecks -- both unreconstructed and in their exurban, Jesus-loving, middle-management-type Joe America incarnation -- rallying around the cause of actually justifying depraved, wicked, and -- I would honestly (and perhaps naively) have assumed throughout my entire life, heretofore -- Un-American practices.
What's shocking to witness is that in the current era of Bush/Cheney, when the veil is lifted from such an onslaught of depravity, cynicism and hypocrisy, the effect is (1) an upsurge in masochistic/patriotic fervor for despotism among lots of (although surely not all) uneducated people, and (2) one of little more than a widespread gross-out and disdain from onlookers who feel totally helpless to change the political and moral tide in the United States. Of course, I identify myself, for better or worse, as one of this second group of onlookers. I was raised, after all, in a nominally middle class (by which I mean upper-middle class) home during the Disneyland 80's. My sense of anguish and doom at the state of things in this country often reaches extremes of hopelessness, nausea and existential confusion.
So I and others who are disgusted by the things that are being revealed about our government, and about the Bush/Cheney Executive Branch in particular, are at this point just trying to cope with all of this evil and madness -- and I'm quite sure that our reaction is shared by the vast majority of people, which is not always the same thing as the vast majority of voters. And anyway, this group is fractured in so many ways, and politicians and advertisers are doing their best to keep our conception of our self-interest fractured (of which, more commentary soon [hint: a significant ray of hope that we can consolidate our power lies in the candidacy of Barack Obama]).
Meanwhile, we watch the first group -- a contingent of uneducated poor people from Alabama or wherever -- whose identification with militarism comes from its lack of access to life options other than either joining the military or working at Quickie-Mart, whose blood lust comes partly from ignorance (which could have been spared them if there were decent schools for them to attend), partly from sexual repression (which is deepened by the stranglehold of extreme, hyperconservative, evangelical quasi-Christianity), and partly from a deep class resentment, the true, economics-based nature of which US culture has taught it not to be able to identify, in favor of cultural resentment, liberation-consumerism, xenophobia and the taking of pride in one's own backwardness.
It's gross...
IV. Let's consolidate our political power to put an end to the USA's dalliances with despotism under Bush & Cheney.
I guess my thought is this: is there a way for people who feel as disgusted as I do to create political solidarity among the widest group of voters that I possibly can? I mean, I know anecdotally that there are plenty of people in the country, both my age, older and younger, who are equally upset about this stuff on an equally visceral, existential level. In other words, all of us who feel this way -- irrespective of what other political views of cultural values we hold in common, irrespective of whether we prefer going to cocktail parties or bible-study meetings -- feel it with passion and don't know exactly how to stop the unchecked, onward march of the immorality and self-destructiveness of the present political course of the United States.
V. Barack Obama's 8/28/08 speech begins successfully to consolidate support for rebuilding the USA's moral authority.
Well; as it happens, most of the preceding rant was written a few days before this post. But I think that we have a figure around whom we can rally support for rebuilding American moral authority, and saving the idea of democracy so that it can live to see another day. That figure is, of course, Barack Obama. And contrary to the unthinking and flippant commentary of rightwing hired goons like David Brooks (who used the term "underwhelmed" in his characteristically simple-minded reaction on PBS -- screw you, you fake moderate liar; you're nothing but Rush Limbaugh in a three piece suit...), Barack's speech last night was amazing.
What many commentators (Brooks included) seemed to miss was this: the point of having upwards of 80,000 people assembled at the speech was not because of the impact it would have on Obama's rhetoric; it's because of the reaction shots! Anybody who paid any attention could see that witnessing that many people -- a group that was genuinely and unmistabably diverse -- being moved to tears by their shared purpose, values, goals and sense of urgency sends a very powerful set of signals indeed to a very broad cross-section of the United States population.
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