[Peace-discuss] Can America be Salvaged?

[Morton K. Brussel]

Maybe not, he argues.

This acidic article, reproduced below from Counterpunch, follows  
naturally from Green's previous spirited, if gloomy, prognostication at

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/05-5

Politics in the Past Tense

Can America be Salvaged?

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which  
proposing a new and better version of corporate-plunder masquerading  
as national healthcare gets you burned in effigy for being a socialist  
stooge by gun-toting angry mobs.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which the  
same people who hate you for being a socialist simultaneously hate you  
for being a fascist.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which  
angry mobs of supposed anti-socialist demonstrators scream at their  
congressional representatives to “keep your government hands off my  
Medicare”.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which  
claims that the government is going to start killing off seniors are  
taken seriously by tens of millions of people.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which  
people are all worked up about government czars, but sat silently  
while the Bush administration destroyed the Bill of Rights and used a  
thousand signing statements to write Congress out of the Constitution.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which  
deficits have all of a sudden become the source of enormous anger  
among people who said nothing about them previously, as the tax cuts  
for the wealthy, off-budget wars based on lies, and unfunded  
prescription drug Big Pharma giveaway transmogrified the biggest  
surplus in American history into the biggest deficit ever.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which  
politicians can rant incessantly about other peoples’ sexual morality,  
get caught screwing prostitutes, and then still be reelected to the  
highest ranks of government by trashing the president.

I could go on and on, but what would be the point?  The positions of  
so many Americans on so many policy questions are truly inane – yes,  
for sure.  I wish that was all that concerned me.  But it all goes so  
much deeper than that.

The entire premise of a self-ruling democracy rests on some reasonable  
degree of rationality and some reasonable degree of an ability to  
discriminate between real information and falsehoods.  Today’s  
American democracy seems to lack these qualities in increasingly  
abundant amounts.
And yet it goes deeper than that still.  The entire premise of a  
society – any society, democracy or not – is that it possesses a  
certain degree of shared community, a ‘we-ness’ that transcends  
narrower tribalisms and self-interest in critical ways and at critical  
moments.  That too has unraveled of late.  Think of the nice white men  
with shotguns blocking the exit from flooded New Orleans during the  
worst moments of Hurricane Katrina.

Looking at America today, it all feels so very past tense to me.

In some very profound ways, this is not the place nor the time you’d  
expect the implosion of an established democracy and society.  To be  
an American is to be a member of the richest and most powerful nation  
on Earth.  If they’re not whining so much in Botswana these days, who  
the hell are we to?

On the other hand, though, it makes a lot of sense.  The moment  
correlates precisely with the peaking of the empire several decades  
ago, now further exacerbated as the deep wells of remedial pillaging –  
our credit cards, our mortgages, our children, a rising Chinese middle  
class, brown people everywhere, the environment – have disappeared  
entirely, with nothing but despair and moral dessication left in their  
place.  Moreover, the folks most aggrieved and most estranged from  
their senses of late are precisely the people who were bought off of  
their sanity at every turn with the latest form of bigotry du jour,  
used to assuage their ever-diminishing sense of relative social  
status.  Over and over again, the people I see on my television screen  
acting absolutely and incoherently stupid in their senseless rage seem  
to be little more than fat, white, Southern, sixty-something racist  
good ol’ boys.

Well past their sell-by dates, they’ve of course gotten tremendous  
help cranking it up again.  That’s no surprise.  I’m not sure these  
crackers are smart enough to even be stupid without coaching.  As  
Lyndon Johnson used to say:  “Couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the  
instructions were written on the heel”.  Lucky for them, those  
marching orders come from a host of politicians and media whores who,  
in an even moderately just world, would receive a wee taste of Abu  
Ghraib in repayment for the reckless destructiveness they’ve fomented  
upon the always precarious edifice of liberal democracy.  There’s  
special place in Hell reserved for these shouters of “Fire!” in  
crowded theaters, these bloodsucking bottom-feeders, especially since  
they are being paid so handsomely for their faithful service as  
prolocutors for predators.

I doubt anyone has ever reminded us of this ongoing danger more  
eloquently than did the famous American diplomat, George Kennan, when  
he wrote:  “The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be  
supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of  
moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional,  
and difficult to explain.  And so the chauvinists of all times and  
places go their appointed way:  plucking the easy fruits, reaping the  
little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow,  
deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing  
their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the  
shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions.   
And until peoples learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the  
sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in  
themselves – as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to  
the cause of popular government – this sort of thing will continue to  
occur.”

Hear, hear.  Sorry to say it, George, but you’re lucky to have died  
when you did.  It’s only gotten so much worse in just the last few  
years.

And while the O’Reillys and the Reagans of our time have joined forces  
to turn “the counsels of impatience and hatred” into an entire  
political party and more, they are, of course, mere conscious tools of  
the Big Green Greed that ultimately drives the system.  They know they  
are prostitutes, but the money’s good.  And so is the fame and  
adulation – no small thing for these sorry critters.  Look at the  
Becks and Limbaughs and Gingriches of this country.  Were there ever  
people in this world with so much self-esteem ground to be made up  
from the transparent ostracization of their younger days?  Were there  
ever individuals so obviously motivated by retribution against  
everyone who treated them like the jerks they were in their formative  
years?  Was there ever a walking warning sign more brightly flashing  
about the costs to society of youthful bullying?  I’m sorry Glenn, I’m  
sorry Rush, I’m sorry Newt.  I know when you were younger you were  
pudgy fast-talking smart-ass petulant pricks who made up in wedgies  
from bigger guys what you never got in attention from attractive  
women.  But isn’t about time you stopped taking it out on America?   
I’m sorry you got your ass kicked on a weekly basis, but I didn’t do it.

Though I’m thinking about it now.

It takes a willful act of ignorance (something we see a lot of these  
days) not to perceive the United States as the latest in history’s  
falling empires.  Like Rome, the true contribution of its sometimes  
great ideas has ultimately been substantially buried under the rubble  
of its ill-fated decision to greedily grasp the nettle of empire.   
Unlike Rome, this puppy is taking decades, rather than centuries, to  
collapse.

Empires come and go, of course.  Rising and falling is what they do.   
It’s their job in life.  What is truly frightening to contemplate,  
however, is what happens when an empire falls in the era when  
technological capacity absolutely dwarfs political maturity?  And what  
happens if that occurs not just anywhere, but in arguably the most  
immature, self-serving and self-indulgent of developed societies on  
the planet?

The only model we have for this so far is the Soviet implosion of two  
decades ago, though even that is only a partial representation, since  
the Soviet bear was no match for the American boor in piggishness.   
Even so, that history does not bode so well, outward appearances  
notwithstanding.  We should all collectively be walking on eggshells  
thinking about the tens of thousands of strategic and smaller tactical  
nuclear warheads that may or may not be accounted for.  Nor is the  
renascent and rather irredentist new Russia necessarily a pretty  
picture either, a fact that may become increasingly relevant in the  
coming decades.  Still, all this noted, the Russian imperial collapse  
has to be said to have been relatively uneventful, closer to the post- 
war British and French experiences than to any cataclysmic end of days  
scenario.

I wish I could be so sanguine about the implosion of the American  
empire.  In one sense, it was probably a good thing for the Russians  
to go through this experience with only a fake democracy and repressed  
civil liberties in place, and some serious if undemocratic quasi- 
dictators running the show.  It might have saved the country from the  
worst elements seizing control.  I don’t much care for the product of  
American democracy and political discourse as things now stand.   
Imagine how it might all turn out under real duress, with the Glenn  
Becks and Rush Limbaughs further egging on both the angry rabble on  
the ground and the Sarah Palins in the political sphere.

I’m tired of overused Nazi references these days, but the most salient  
analogy has to be to 1930s Weimar Germany.  The economy is broken, the  
political system is broken, the public is struggling, angry and full  
of nationalistic rage at their country’s failure to possess all the  
riches and glory it and they deserve.  And so say bombastic  
demagogues, backed by a small army of street thugs, and offering both  
a scapegoat and a solution.  Given a democratic election in which  
voters can choose between a dynamic, assured and energetic salvation  
figure, on the one hand, and an enervated, inept and passionately  
passionless status quo government, on the other, it’s not hard to  
figure what will happen.  And what did.

Above all, what is wrong with this country (and what therefore  
inevitably becomes the world’s problem too – just ask the people of  
Iraq), is not so much the vicious thugs who would just as soon vacuum  
it free of any piece of wealth they can get into their hands as take  
their next breath.  Nor is it the existentially petrified Confederate  
Crackers for Jesus who find that hate and violence is a pretty decent  
emollient to mitigate for the moment  their otherwise completely  
debilitating fears.

That stuff always happens, though admittedly not often quite like this.

What’s really wrong is the near total absence of prominent political  
figures willing to sacrifice much of anything to protect their country  
from these depredations.

It’s been so long now that I’ve forgotten for sure, but didn’t they  
used to call that patriotism?

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra  
University in New York.  He is delighted to receive readers' reactions  
to his articles (dmg at regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time  
constraints do not always allow him to respond.  More of his work can  
be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.





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