[Peace-discuss] About Last Night

[C. G. Estabrook]

     Dissatisfied Mind: Flickers of Hope in a Deadly Political Cycle
     By CHRIS FLOYD

I found myself unexpectedly heartened by American election returns, at least in 
one respect. For they have shown, once again, that the American people feel an 
abiding, angry – if deeply inchoate – dissatisfaction with the nation’s unjust, 
corrupt and dysfunctional political system. They know that something is 
profoundly wrong with the system, and so they keep voting one faction out and 
putting the other faction in, hoping to see some kind of change.

History gives this proof: in almost every national election for the past two 
decades, we have seen a change in control of either one or both houses of 
Congress or the White House. This has happened in 1992, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2002, 
2006, 2008, and now again in 2010. The pattern is very clear. And it is not 
because Americans “prefer divided government,” as the dim chewers of Beltway cud 
like to tell us; it’s because they can’t get anyone in the system to address 
their concerns.

Yet with every turnover in factional control, we see a rush of earnest, serious 
analysis telling us how the results represent a vast sea change in America’s 
politics, culture, society, soul, etc. But somehow, two years later, these 
momentously meaningful tidal waves ripple into nothing on the empty shore. And 
again, that’s because they don’t actually signify anything beyond the by-now 
perennial unease and dissatisfaction.

What is less heartening, of course, is the fact that the American electorate 
never quite grasps the obvious, glaring, brutal fact that neither of these 
factions is ever going to change the system one iota if they can help it; they 
are the system, they are its servants, its enablers, its enactors. Then again, 
we are dealing with, to borrow Gore Vidal’s deathless phrase, the United States 
of Amnesia, where history doesn’t exist (except in the form of feverishly 
distorted self-righteous myths about America’s eternal super-duper specialness), 
and every election is a tabula rasa . The only flickering historical awareness 
that seems to exist in the American electorate is a vague sense that the gang 
they voted in two years ago hasn’t changed anything; better try the other gang 
again … forgetting this is the same gang they threw out the time four years ago, 
for the same reason.

So the cycle goes on and on, and the rot and dysfunction grows deeper, and ever 
more intractable. The people’s concerns are not only not addressed; they are not 
even articulated by anyone in the lucrative, sinister game of King of the Hill 
played by the two factions, both of which are pledged, body and soul, to elite 
rule, corporate rapine and militarist empire. And certainly, neither the 
corporate media nor the educational system will do anything to help inculcate a 
deeper sense of history (“History is bunk,” said that quintessential American, 
Henry Ford; you can’t make no money from it, so what’s the point?), or provide 
any wider, deeper context for articulating – and confronting – the causes of the 
electorate’s dissatisfaction. Instead, these institutions keep replicating and 
refreshing those same myths of specialness (in either “conservative” or 
“progressive” form), adding layer after layer of thought-obliterating noise to 
the Great American Echo Chamber that encloses, and imprisons, the entire society.

Mmm, maybe it’s not so heartening after all. Especially given the fact that both 
factions are – literally, legally, formally, undeniably – packs of war 
criminals, pledged to the continuation of a rapacious empire of military 
domination that is killing innocent people, fomenting hatred and extremism, and 
destabilizing the world. The myth of specialness prevents most people from 
seeing the truth of what their bipartisan political establishment is  doing  to 
the world – or even to themselves, how it has stripped them of their liberties, 
corroded their society, destroyed their communities and degraded their quality 
of life, while diminishing the lives and futures of their own children and 
grandchildren. Most Americans apparently cannot break out of the narrow 
cognitive structure that has been imposed on their understanding of reality: 
i.e., that America is inherently, ineradicably good, that whatever mistakes it 
might make here or there (usually when one’s own preferred faction is out of 
office, of course), this essential goodness remains inviolate, forever untainted 
by any genuine evil.

And so bipartisan perpetrators of enormous evils – mass murder, aggressive war, 
torture, brutality, ruination, atrocity and injustice on a gargantuan scale – 
are not only never held accountable, but are instead celebrated, honored, and 
rewarded with great wealth and privilege. It is no wonder that dissatisfaction 
reigns in the body politic. The people sense that something is badly wrong; but 
no one in the system will tell them that it is the system itself that is wrong. 
Instead, we get these circuses and shams, these diversions and delusions that 
pass for election campaigns, throwing up a blizzard of false issues and partisan 
posturing, sound and fury signifying nothing … then when it’s all over, it’s 
back to business as usual for our bipartisan courtiers, feasting on the bloody 
swill of empire.

Still, the nagging spark of dissatisfaction can often be the beginning of 
wisdom, eventually forcing us to look beyond the confines of our cognitive 
overlays and unchallenged understandings. The merry-go-round of factional 
turnovers, in election after election, shows that this fertile element of 
dissatisfaction is rampant, and chronic, in the American people. They have not 
yet, not quite, accepted the system of rapacious empire and elite domination as 
the natural order, the settled status quo. They want something to change, they 
want things to be different somehow – but, like people everywhere, they don’t 
want to turn the mirror on themselves, and see the reality of the noxious system 
they are perpetuating with their yo-yoing between two utterly corrupt and 
depraved factions of money-grubbers and power-seekers.

But as long as the dissatisfaction remains, there is still some hope that it 
will drive more and more people to see beyond the cloud of myth, to hear truths 
outside the echo chamber, and to begin the long, arduous, quite possibly 
impossible but morally imperative work of breaking the stranglehold of these 
murderous fools and forging a genuine alternative to the system.

Chris Floyd's blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com.


On 11/3/10 5:41 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> [With no apologies to David Mamet, here's the best analysis I've seen of the 
> thoroughly cooked election and What It Means. --CGE]
>
> America the Clueless:
> Gridlock is Good
>
> The American people have spoken, but it’s impossible to decode their 
> incoherent message. Drunk with their capture of the House of Representatives, 
> the Republicans thunder that the verdict of ballot boxes from Maine to Hawai’i 
> is clarion-clear: the ultimate evil in America is government, specifically 
> government as led by President Barack Obama. But when exit pollsters 
> questioned voters on their way to those same ballot boxes, as to who should 
> take the blame for the country’s economic problems, 35 per cent said Wall 
> Street, 30 per cent said Bush and 23 per cent Obama. The American people want 
> a government that mustn't govern, a budget that must simultaneously balance 
> and create jobs, cut spending across the board and leave the Defense budget 
> intact. Collectively, the election makes clear, they haven't a clue which way 
> to march.
>
> Has the Tea Party changed the political map? Scarcely so. In concrete terms, 
> it ensured that a significant portion of the political map didn’t change at 
> all. Unlike the House, the U.S. Senate will stay in Democratic hands, albeit 
> with only a tiny edge. As I wrote last week, purely on the basis of cui bono – 
> who stands to gain – one could make a sound case that the Democrats invented 
> the Tea Party out of whole cloth. If it wasn’t for Tea Party lady, Christine 
> O’Donnell, the Republicans would be counting victory in Delaware. But the 
> sometime-Satanist ensured the surprise victory of a dreary Democratic unknown, 
> Chris Coons.
>
> No single Democrat was targeted more fiercely by Republicans than Harry Reid 
> of Nevada, the Democratic senate majority leader. His was the symbolic scalp 
> they craved. Right-wing millions poured into the state, backing Tea Party 
> Republican Sharron Angle. Tuesday evening one could sense Republicans holding 
> their breaths, ready to blare their joy at the victory for Angle suggested by 
> many polls.
>
> Around midnight east coast time it became clear that Angle had gone down, 
> victim of the political suicide she actually committed several days ago, dint 
> of one of the most racist, anti-Hispanic campaign ads in many years. It had 
> escaped the attention of that supposedly consummate Republican political 
> strategist Karl Rove – born in Sparks, Nevada, -- that the Hispanic vote in 
> Nevada is not insignificant. Hispanics went for Reid by a factor of about 75 
> per cent and he slid through to victory.
>
> It should be added that the powerful corporate and labor interests in the 
> state of Nevada , most notably in the gambling and entertainment and 
> construction sector, were all aghast at the possibility that economically 
> stricken Nevada might cease to have its cause promoted in Washington DC by the 
> most powerful man in the U.S. Senate, and instead have as their tribune a 
> racist dingbat with zero political clout. If ever there was a need for the fix 
> to be in, and seasoned fixers available to face the task, it was surely in 
> Nevada. But that said, Angle and the Tea Party may have engineered defeat all 
> on their own.
>
> Just over half of the 17,000 respondents to a national exit poll said that 
> their votes in House races had nothing to do with the Tea Party, pro or con. 
> The other half was split, pro and con. Over 60 per cent said the all-important 
> issue is jobs; 87 per cent said they are worried about economic conditions. 
> Between government laying out money to create jobs and government slashing 
> expenditures to reduce the deficit there’s also pretty much an even split.
>
> Is there anything new in all this? Of course not. Republicans always campaign 
> on homely pledges – economically illiterate – to balance the government’s 
> books the same way as their household budgets. Pressed, as many triumphant 
> Republicans were last night, as to exactly where they would start cutting the 
> federal budget to achieve this end, they invariably slid into the programmatic 
> shadows, with hoarse ranting about freezes and “across the board” budgetary 
> carnage, except for military spending. As California governor Arnold 
> Schwarzenegger, now even more unpopular than the man he ousted, demonstrated, 
> it’s easier to terminate in a movie script than in a legislature. The incoming 
> California governor, Jerry Brown, demonstrated, that even if you spend more of 
> your money than any other candidate in US political history, around $150 
> million (as did his opponent, Meg Whitman) you still need to treat your maid 
> right if you want to win.
>
> The second craziest victory speech of the evening came from a Tea Party man, 
> Rand Paul, now the Republican senator from Kentucky. “We’re enslaved by debt,” 
> he screamed at his cheering supporters and followed this by savage diatribes 
> about any constructive role for government. Now it’s possible that Paul, 
> inflamed with libertarian principle, could actually try to filibuster the next 
> vote in the US Senate to authorize an increase in the US national debt. As 
> awed commentators swiftly noted, he could plunge the United States into 
> default, bring economic devastation to the world.
>
> On the other hand, the history of the Republican Party is supposed crazies, 
> like Ronald Reagan who campaigned against the deficit in 1980, coming to heel 
> and plunging the United States into a vast new ocean of red ink, courtesy of 
> his tax cuts. It’s what drives the Tea Partiers crazy. They do know one basic 
> truth - that to govern is to betray and they are in line for betrayal. The 
> craziest speech? The visibly psychotic Republican gubernatorial candidate in 
> New York, Carl Paladino, soundly thrashed by Andrew Cuomo, swinging a red 
> baseball bat with the transparent desire to dashing it into Cuomo’s skull.
>
> The landscape has changed. The Republican swing in the House was as dramatic 
> as in 1994, after two years of Bill Clinton. Democrats who entered Congress on 
> Obama’s coattails have now been ousted. What lies ahead is a war of maneuver, 
> between the White House and the Republican leadership. Obama has been weakened 
> -- deservedly so, because a large part of Tuesday’s disaster for his party can 
> be laid at his door. He laid down no convincing political theme, mounted no 
> effective offense, relied on a team of advisors of dubious competence, which 
> had run out of steam. He himself tried to run for and against an effective 
> role for government, made the same childish equations of domestic and federal 
> budgets, sent out mixed messages, lost the confidence of the young and of a 
> vital slice of the independents.
>
> All the same, after two years, the polls show Obama is no more unpopular than 
> was Clinton in 1994. By 1996 Clinton had outmaneuvered the Republican 
> leadership and won reelection in 1996. Today the economic situation is far 
> worse than it was in 1994. No effective political and economic strategy for 
> recovery is on the cards in the current atmosphere. As always, these days in 
> America, our last best friend will be gridlock.
>
> ###
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